AJK's dashboard

A friend of mine among other things do Usability Testing and he reviewed Balsamiq Mockups from a point of view of someone who wants to use it for Usability Testing. All his comments are too long to put in here, so I will mention a few and if you would like, you can read the rest on his blog. I really think there are some very valid points here for what Balsamiq can be in the future.

Some Points:
There are at least three good reasons to create interface sketches and prototypes:
1. To get new ideas and quickly explore and enhance them in design sessions with colleagues. Balsamiq is right at home here.
2. To usability test ideas with target users. Balsamiq is close to being very useful here.
3. To explain, persuade and demonstrate to other project stakeholders. Balsamiq needs quite a lot of work here.

Balsamiq mockups could be great for cost effective, early-stage usability testing. The interfaces are quick to create, and they look messy enough to allow users to give negative feedback if required. But usability testing a Balsamiq prototype has three problems:
1. Fullscreen mode features a giant blue mouse cursor that turns upside down and a giant hand cursor for hyperlinks. This is weird and distracting for a user to contend with during a usability test.
2. The giant blue cursor disappears when you try to touch a scrollbar, increasing the weirdness further.
3. Highly visible hotspots, that show user exactly where to click, and tooltips that tell you the name of the page you'll get if you do click. These features "give the game away" in ways that are counter-productive in usability tests.

For the rest, please read here: http://fronttoback.org/2009/05/06/bal...

Now this might be a slippery slope so I suggest this with caution.

What would be nice if every item in the UI library had a colour palette. So if I want to make some of my sketches (currently all black) red, green or any other colour (the whole item), I can do that. Sometimes black and white doesn't bring an idea across effectively as it would with colour.

Search is a function. It is not a website. I don't want to hang out on my search page. It is like a todo list. It is great when you have a couple of items in there, but as soon as you start adding millions of little features, you are polluting the function of getting things done. You end up spending time on the detail, tagging things, etc. etc. and not completing the "function".

Tagging, filtering, visuals, etc are important and should be done (in the background), but not blurring my focus by allowing my tweaks, when I didn't ask for it.

Extra features should be kept inside an "advance" section. Not displayed across the page where it directs me off my path of finding search results.

You are using ontology to organise the web, so why don't you use it to fight spam. Websites that posts or publishes outside their niche should be flagged. If my website is primarily about travel, why would I have any posts on celebs, sex, gambling, drugs, SEO, etc.

Sites which stay in their niche should have preference. I said flag because there will be exceptions: "Celebs traveling" and e-commerce sites will cover a lot of categories (but you can check if it is an e-commerce site through other factors, like shopping baskets, etc.).

Identify keywords which will indicate the search's purpose. If I want to buy something online, suggest to users to use "buy+item name". If you are just looking for wallpapers, music videos, etc. which people made, you would use "entertain+item name". The search engine will therefore have more of the idea behind your search purpose and give you appropriate results. This is similar to what you already do by providing vertical searches after the user clicked search, but if you can provide some keywords which people might use with before their press search, it might improve search satisfaction.

Frequently the Top 10 search results lists more than once the same website. Other search engine also does this, but I prefer variety and any site should be limited to one result in the Top 10. For more results related to a site (if there are more), you can add a small icon to click to see more.