Chris Hanrath » User Experience

Windows 7 Tray Progress Bar

Chris — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:46:03 +0000

Windows 7 now visualizes progress right in the system tray even when the window is minimized. I like it!

New ratings to improve Netflix

Chris — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:50:49 +0000

After logging in to Netflix today, i experienced a recently added feature to improve movie recommendations. These ratings are asking users to make statements about their taste for movies based on mood characteristics such as: “romantic, goofy, sentimental, dark, controversial, steamy, mind-bending, violent…”

These taste preference can be categorized into “never, sometimes and often” and are supported by six example movies to understand what netflix considers to be classified under the mood. These can be changed later on.

Fashion your Firefox

Chris — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:48:55 +0000

Mozilla just put up a new website that let’s users discover more add-ons for Firefox. It’s an interesting way of helping users to identify extensions that are of interest to them by relating the suggestions to persona-style categories like these:

Finder and Seeker: “I want to make finding information on the Web simpler and more relevant to me.”
Rock Star: “Music and the Web go together like rock stars and leather — I love to listen while I surf, work, email or research online.”
News Junkie: “I want to know what’s happening in the world as it happens. And the weather helps me plan my week — temperature, please!“

Design Jam featured on Mozilla Labs Blog

Chris — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 02:25:16 +0000

I joined the SoCHI student group for Human-Computer Interaction just before the summer and since i came back from my internship this summer at Yahoo! we have had quite a few events this semester. One of the ideas we had was to facilitate Design Jams that would encourage students to get together to apply their skills to real life problems. We held two Design Jams sponsored by Mozilla to brainstorm and prototype ideas and designs for the browser of the future inspired by their Concept Series. We bloged about the fantastic results on our website and today we were featured on the Mozilla Labs Blog.

More pictures on Flickr

Yahoo! OpenID Usability Study

Chris — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:24:36 +0000

Tom Allen from Yahoo! Membership posted an article on the Yahoo! Developer Blog about the “OpenID: One Key, Many Doors” usability study that was conducted to uncover usability issues associated with enabling OpenID on 3rd party sites and using it for subsequent logins.

[ Found via 25hoursaday.com ]

IDEA 08

Chris — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 23:53:13 +0000

On October 7th Katie and I went to Chicago to attend the IDEA conference for two days. It was a great opportunity to meet and network with professionals from the User Experience domain. Most speakers were very interesting, thought provoking and inspired some great ideas for possible projects. I was very impressed by the talks of Dave Gray from XPLANE and Aradhana Goel from IDEO.

You should check out Katie’s blog where she has two great blog post about the conference (and our browser design jam for the mozilla concept series).

NY TimesPeople

Chris — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:09:00 +0000

The New York Times online, uses a bar at the top of the page that allows people log-in to their social platform to follow friends, co-workers and other readers as well as share content and comment on it.

The bar is very subtle, but offers more details in form of a pop-up once the user clicks on the “What’s this” link.

After signing up for the service, another wizard opens and offers to search for other people, import contacts or check suggested users.

The bar stays visible at the top throughout the user’s visit on nytimes.com and offers access to the timespeople page where the user can access newsfeeds, activity history, recommended content and his social network.

[Found via nytimes.com and timespeople.nytimes.com ]

Expedia Labs

Chris — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:03:57 +0000

Yesterday i attended a presentation of Expedia on the University of Michigan Campus. They came to recruit Software designers and Project Managers. I was positively surprised to see how much they focus on usability and user-centered design to improve the user experience of their website. The presenter showed the audience a very interesting and promising take on booking your next vacation using expedia. Instead of using the traditional “day, time, destination” input, she showed us a very interesting wizard that selects vacation packages using other inputs such as an interactive map and vacation activities.

Unfortunately this is only visible to random users visiting Expedia.com who fall into the right category of the bucket test. But you can get an idea of Expedia’s attempts to improve the user experience at labs.expedia.com

Verizon 411 Improvement

Chris — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 18:28:00 +0000

I was calling Verizon 411 the other day, they connected me to the desired phone number and as it has happened before nobody picked up the phone… So i repeated to call 411 to get the number once again. This time i was positively surprised, because as soon as i dialed, i was asked if i want to be reconnected to the last number. Great! This is what i call user experience.

Wundrbar – a new kind of search bar

Chris — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 01:49:28 +0000

A sweet new user interface for any kind of search request.

Welcome to a new kind of search bar! Wundrbar is a next generation
search bar that lets you control your personal accounts and launch any
kind of web search. For example, you can manage your online calendar,
start a flight search, update your twitter status, and much more. And
you can do it all from the same search bar.

[ wundrbar.com ]