One of the great attractions in Edinburgh is the Zoo, my kids love it. We have been members for five years and spend many days of the summer holidays wandering around. Over the last few years I’ve seen the Zoo marketing develop and on my last visit was particularly impressed by their recent flyers. They have successfully combined maps, plans for the future, members information and all manner of other info into one neat, slick and usable handout.

The flyer is a standard DL sized concertina folded affair but what nicely sets it apart is that it has a built in information architecture and is really easy to use.

The concertina has an offset fold that exposes a small border. The borders show the title of that section and make it easy to find and fold to that section. The borders act in the same way as tabs do within a webpage. They conceal a large amount of information in a small space and provide the user with a quick introduction to the contents.

Having these tabs makes it easy to find the section you are interested in and avoids the problem of either having to open up the entire concertina or folding it up in some weird way to expose the bit that you are interested in.

If the zoo were not a fantastic trip in and of itself, I would heartily recommend popping along just to pick up one of these flyers.

If you’re aware of any similar excellent examples we’d love to hear about them.

Well, we asked for some snow donations on Twitter and they came in in abundance! One day there was not even a hint of frost and the next, we were ankle deep in snow, working from home, but still managing to inject some Bunnyfoot fun into the day with a “usability snowman” competition across our UK offices (I hope Hong Kong don’t feel too left out!).

2 hours, some snow and a little imagination produced an outright winner from Oxford’s Usability Consultant, Nick Antram. Here’s his entry…

Here is an attempt at a usable snowman. We talked to local snowmen users and asked them what they really wanted out of their snowmen and the overwhelming response of the 2 people we spoke to was that snowmen needed to be not only big fat piles of snow that were funny to look at, but useful too!

Popular suggestions were:

So we sketched some ideas:

Well ok, just one

Initial sketches of a usable snowman

Did some anthropometric analysis and fitting trials:

Scientific sketches to make sure the snowman chair is viable

Which gave us the 95^th percentile of users

Then we user tested it thoroughly in blizzard like conditions **

And this is the result…

The snowmatic ergsnowchair!

Snowman Chair in its completed form

With some final user testing, we just knew it was perfect.

Nicks quest for to build an ergonomic chair

* Ergonomic principles may not have been used

** May not have been user tested thoroughly

In 2005, here at Bunnyfoot, we carried out an eye tracking usability study; it showed that 79% of people were able to find the 2003 UK gross domestic product using Google.
We carried out a similar eyetracking study in May 2009 using Bunnyfoot’s Mass User Testing approach and found that this had dropped to 37%.
We also compared the performance of Google to the new WolframAlpha search engine where 100% of people got the correct answer. This result is worrying for Google for two reasons:

• Google’s algorithms have got better in the intervening years; despite there being significantly more pages indexed on Google in 2009 compared to 2005 Google returns fewer results for the same search string; “gross domestic product UK 2003”. Given more pages to return results from and better algorithms it ‘should’ be easier to find information, not harder.
• The general level of people’s Internet experience and expertise has increased since the original study – people ‘should’ be more successful, not less.

WolframAlpha also outperforms Google on three key measures of usability; effectiveness and efficiency and satisfaction. However, the strength of the Google brand dominated WolframAlpha with 100% of users saying that they would recommend using Google to a friend with only 77% saying they would recommend WolframAlpha.
The study is by no means comprehensive; it is based on a single search query and one that favours WolframAlpha’s approach to knowledge management/search, but is does pose an interesting question:
Can Google’s search dominance be beaten by better results and usability or is the brand so strong that people will stay loyal no matter how good the competition gets?

The BBC news item below shows a report on the UK’s first Internet enabled car - produced and invented by Bunnyfoot in 1999. The car was intended as a demonstration of the essential importance of usability and accessibility … our message got somehow lost in translation in the newspapers and TV shows that ran the story, but it taught us a lot about different communication methods and to always look to the future.

Since then (is it really 10 years ago?) we have produced hundreds of video demonstrations showing usability testing, eyetracking and accessibility in action, our customer experience presentations at seminars and conferences etc, and many will be appearing here in the next few months - but this BBC one was one of our first … and is still a firm favourite.

What is perhaps surprising is that this type of technology and other ‘alternative interfaces’ haven’t really come on that far in the last 10 years- it seemed then (in 1999) that things like sophisticated voice interfaces for all sorts of devices and uses were bubbling just under the surface. In 2009 though you are likely to be annoyed at best, but most probably bemused, by the majority of telephone interfaces (has anyone tried Egg’s?), never mind anything more ambitious. It seems like it should be simple but this type of interface requires just as much research and careful design (perhaps more) than seemingly more complex visual interfaces. I’ll return to discuss this in more detail in a future post.

The point of the Bunnymobile video?

It was meant to demonstrate that usability and accessibility are vital for the interfaces of the future:

• the car used software that blind people use to translate web sites into voice = accessibility
• and needed to be simple enough so distraction didn’t cause you to crash (amongst other things) = usability

It seems we were right, and they still are important … lots more challenging and interesting work to do though.

I am often asked how the eyetrackers work (second only to why the name Bunnyfoot?) - so here it is - in essence it is really simple - a digital camera videos your pupils (the holes that let light into your eye) and a computer works out where you are looking based on the video images.

Well there is a little bit more to it than that (not much though):

The infrared diodes shine light on the person in front of the eyetracker (it’s 14 times less strong than that emitted from a TV remote - so doesn’t burn their eyes out).

Read the rest of this entry »

How do you measure the effectiveness of your in-game ad investment?
Do you need to know accurate performance and brand engagement metrics?

It is not just about brand awareness or brand recall anymore, the new era of digital innovation provides us with an array of rich media to communicate with the increasingly cynical consumer. Games offer a huge untapped market with a broader profile than typically assumed. 59% of the UK population (26.5million) are gamers and 45% of those are women! Playing games is not just a nerdy boy thing anymore. Read the rest of this entry »

During 2005 one of the many interesting projects undertaken by Bunnyfoot included a large scale usability test of a new Microsoft website. Read the rest of this entry »

How do you choose between different creatives? It helps greatly if you can get answers to the following:

• Is the creative going to make consumers look at the brand and the product?
• Which creative will have better brand recall?
• Which creative has the clearest marketing message?
• Under realistic circumstances will the key messaging get through at all? Do they get the message from the limited time exposure? Read the rest of this entry »
  Tags: Eyetracking, Usability, Usability testing

Article written by former Bunnyfoot Director Stewart Pleace
- appeared in New Media Age November 2006.

There are a whole host of agencies out there who now seem to offer an all-encompassing package of services, from graphic design through to customer research, usability and accessibility. It’s quite a challenge to sift through them all and get a proper understanding of what they offer, and whether or not the fact that they offer an all-in-one package is of benefit to the business. Read the rest of this entry »