gDoc

Today is World Paper Free Day, supported by AIIM, and encourages us to “think before we print” for one day in an effort to reduce paper usage.   But it doesn’t need to be a chore. 

Aiim has recommended that you take 3 simple steps:

1. .Conscientiously make a point to not PRINT
2.Investigate a business process or technology that can cut the paper waste in your office
3.Participate or Produce a local Paper Free Day event

Of course, there are many software tools out there that that claim to reduce our ever increasing dependency on printing documents, whether it’s emails, reports, office documents in fact almost everything.  

A simple flick view to literally flick through all of those documents on the screen, could stop you from printing that page.  I wonder where you could find that…..?

Just take one moment today and think before you print!  Or you could share it with us in our comment section below.

Recently we ran a usability lab on a set of prototypes. We had a set of quite diverse users with different backgrounds, experiences and working environments. As always the people participating in the labs produced great feedback. I have been observing users for many years and I’m still amazed that no matter how much thought you put into personas, users scenarios and user stories while designing, during usability tests users will always come back with something unexpected or reinforce and validate the design principle you applied in a way you can’t put into words like they do; by simply ‘using it’.

The prototype designs we were testing were based on real objects. The metaphors were therefore known to all users. During the test sessions they were consistently using terminology such as ‘intuitive’, ‘familiar’, ‘natural’, ‘instinctive’… to use.

These are terms you hope users might use when testing prototypes but you are grateful when they’re being validated by perfect strangers that have never seen the prototypes before.

However, there was one user who declared within the first minute of a one hour test that the prototype was, “Obviously an analogue real-world model – I hate tools like this”.

At this point I thought should I come up with an excuse to ask them to leave the lab, come back another time since I was feeling ill, any excuse… Then you remind yourself about the HCI principle all users are users, regardless of their preconceptions, so I needed to follow through the test and record all their comments, even if they might all be negative given their opening statement…

Aside from writing observation notes and filming the session, at the end I leave users to fill in a questionnaire following the same steps of the tasks we just went through, to express in their own words without me being in the room what they really think. To my surprise by the end of the session given their original statement, this is what they concluded: “I initially thought that the use of a real-world model would limit the interface, but it actually proved to be very intuitive.”

So what started with a user session that could have been entirely negative, turned out to be the best experience of that usability lab.

Priceless.

Has anyone else noticed how much of a buzz there is around the use of consumer IT in the workplace?  Intrigued about our own situation I asked our head of IT recently what colleagues are using. I thought there may be a surprise or two hiding somewhere, or even something magic to transform my working day! His reply probably reflects what is being used in your own companies: iPhone; Skype; Google Docs; Facebook; Twitter (Tweetdeck & Hootsuite); SMS (for sending VPN authentication codes).

I then asked him about his support strategy for these consumer tools.  “Very simple”, he said, “self help unless it’s core network/ hardware/ infrastructure related – very little support is required because the products are intuitive and easy to use. There’s also a vast amount of assistance available online through knowledge bases and forums.  And, our users generally know their products better than IT.”

All of which got me thinking about software user interfaces again, and why it is that business software isn’t easier to use.  It was where we started with the development of the gDoc Fusion user interface.

If consumer stuff is so easy and fun to use, then why isn’t our day to day business software too?