Google Maps recently put a Vote widget on their Maps landing page that tells voters where they can vote. It’s simple, it’s useful, it’s relevant to the times.

One thing I appreciate about Google (in addition to their motto, “Don’t be evil.”) is the progressive, steady enhancement and additions they keep on putting into their products. The amount of change, for example, is remarkable each time I open up Google Docs, although one could hardly tell if you were to open it up each day. It might be one button. It might be changing the look of the tabs along the far right (especially the discussion and sharing functionality). But the sum total of this steady change is a constantly evolving product. Bad decisions can be backed out and don’t have such significant impact. And good decisions stay in, and themselves continually improve.

What can we do to incorporate this steady drumbeat of progress into our team chemistry and workflow?

What a cool idea Google has: bucket testing.

The company regularly tests out unannounced new features across a small percentage of its users to see if they are worth implementing on a wider scale (this is called bucket testing).

As a user experience professional, I remember my job isn’t just designing user experiences. I’m not simply an advocate behind company walls, lobbying for our users and their needs, pushing back when requirements or features get “too functional,” in the sense that they’re so functional they alienate and introduce hard-to-use UI.

My job is also to user test our features and designs, to get feedback as part of the design process to make sure our assumptions are validated by real, living and breathing people. So, what Google does is cool… bucket testing. It’s food for thought: kind of a shotgun usability test, automated instead of personal. One drawback I see is I’d be basing design decisions on self-reported claims about their needs instead of observing what they’re actually doing. All sorts of people write about this distinction, notably Jakob Nielsen and another usability guru, Steve Krug.

With Easter Seals as one of our clients, we’re all into accessibility. I even got a coworker who’s visually impaired in one eye and she has strong opinions about some of our designs. Together with Richard (our accessibility compliance guru), that’s great for us because it means our team’s under the scrutiny of some pretty watchful and interested parties. It means we have accountability for this thing called accessibility that all too often gets short shrift in the www.

I recently read a post titled, Are you giving accessibility the consideration it deserves in the user experience? Talk about direct. But this is worth noting:

There are still lots of ways for designers to screw up accessibility, and I think that a lack of exposure to how our work behaves for people using assistive technologies means that we don’t understand the impact of the decisions we make sometimes.

Developing an understanding and awareness of simple ways to avoid common accessibility problems, and ensuring that, as we design, we spend just a little time checking our work to make sure that we’re making life easier and not unnecessarily difficult will provide lots of benefits for very little investment.

I guess that’s why subscribing to blogs like 456 Berea Street is a good thing, as is watching videos of people dealing with computer accessibility.

NorthTemple has an accessibility checklist that’s neat because it’s not 101 things that need to be done to ensure accessibility.  Those 101+ items lists are so difficult to navigate through, sometimes a designer or coder just wants to throw their hands up in frustration at the overwhelming list of to-do’s.  Instead, here’s a shortlist of different things that need to be taken care of, and the subheadings are intelligible and themselves accessible, which makes the probability of doing them much more likely:

• Markup
• Visual Appearance and Content
• Dynamic Content
• Images and Multimedia
• Forms
• Testing

Facebook’s all the rage these days, and for good reason.  When Microsoft hand-waved $10 billion for the online social network application last week, one couldn’t help but notice that $10 billion is quite a significant bump from Yahoo’s $1 billion a mere year ago.  Whether or not one agrees with the $10 billion valuation, it’s hard not to be impressed with Facebook.  It’s far and away the number one site visited by college students, and from the perspective of a web junkie sitting right outside the UC Berkeley campus and its attendant dorms, “Facebooking” isn’t just an urban slang term, but a fact of life, gaining on email as the primary form of communication between friends, and not merely a social media and networking company, but–with the 4000+ third-party applications developed–an increasingly serious technology platform.

Dave McClure recently outlined a Facebook strategy for businesses on Techcrunch, and some statistics he throws up are horribly intriguing:

Over half of Facebook’s 43 million users visit every day, spend an average of 20 minutes on the site, and view over 54 billion total page views per month.

In a few short months Facebook has quickly become one of the most impressive user acquisition channels on the web, rivaling SEO & SEM strategies for priority with new startups. Over 60 Facebook applications have more than 1 million total users, and over 40 have at least 100,000 daily users.

Whether you’re a business, a 2-man startup, or a non-profit, “the most impressive user acquisition channel on the web” is going to be interesting stuff.  After all, we’re into our users.  How do we get connected to them?  How can we get an influx of new users and adopters?  How can we engage them so they’re spending an average of 20 minutes on the site everyday?  McClure outlines 7 things to consider when graphing your Facebook strategy.  It’s a great introduction to Facebook for those who aren’t yet savvy, and it’s great advice for those of us trying to get our heads around the potential value Facebook might hold for our organization.  One thing to note: it’s not enough to simply “get on” Facebook.  How you do it and what you do once you jump onboard are absolutely important.  Hence, the need for a strategy.

Stay with me for just a moment before running off to read McClure’s essential primer.  For college students, Facebooking’s their way of connecting not only with their own social network, but a means of making new ones.  More importantly, and more applicably, it’s one of their ways of tapping into their friends’ interests that they would never have tapped into otherwise.  So the question facing application developers and non-profits is: how can I make sure my interest/application/presence stays on a user’s Facebook profile long enough (and prominently enough) to experience some of that viral distribution?

That’s the hard one.

With over 4000 applications swirling in the Facebook maelstrom, and more being added everyday, what hope do we have of finding traction?  I’ve heard college students say, “It was cool in the beginning, but I turned it off after a while,” meaning all those applications soon turned into mere inundation.  Watching college students pick up applications, it’s sometimes surprising to see them drop the applications just as easily, often within the same day, or even the same hour.  How to make an application or presence on Facebook sticky?  I’d refer a reader to McClure’s last point: using virtual currency to move a new user from bystander to citizen.  It’s the same problem non-profits face: how do I move someone from signed-up member to activist and eventually, donor?

X me and Superpoke! are two of the top ten applications on Facebook.  What they have going for them is a virtual interaction that is immediately accessible after the application is added: hug, poke, kiss, love, punch.  It’s a low threshold actionable item for a user to immediately engage the application and–more importantly–to engage others. Virtual gifts also provide the same social interaction.

What I’m trying to say with all this is that getting onto Facebook is a first step.  But it needs to be accompanied immediately by a bunch of other steps: actionable items coupled with opportunities to find more information, and a virtual interaction of some sort that engages or stimulates interest and catalyzes Facebook’s viral potential.  And thinking of these steps all together at the same time constitutes the sort of strategy we’re going to need to be successful.

When you’re knee deep in web technology as I am, you sometimes can’t help but think about how to bring innovation to the work you do. A lot of what the UD team does revolves around donation forms, giving forms, the “ask” string, membership renewals – and a few variations of the same thing. It’s age old problem: connecting with people and encouraging them to take the big step and pull out their wallet for your cause.

So what does the 2.0 of this look like? A lot of client/partners have leveraged things like social networking, widgets, Flash, and even a refrigerator metaphor! Aside from those innovative approaches, I think the basic donation form still has a few more miles on it. I think the best treatment of form design is Luke Wroblewski’s article on Web Application Form Design. Keeping the primary action clear can be quite a challenge on a form as things like premiums, sustained giving options, and other widgets require a user’s interaction. On top of that, throw in the wealth of personal information (and the corresponding labels) you need in order to process the donation, the challenges are numerous.

And these days, there’s a whole array of mobile platforms to design for. Treos, Blackberry, and iPhones, oh my! How can we balance function and minimalism?

Okay, that’s the problem, what are some best practices? Here are some factors I think can contribute to a great donation form:

• Left-aligned field labels - donation forms are more than just name and credit card number. We have a lot of non-standard labels like installment plans, payment levels, opt-in interests, etc. So, the goal here is to maximize scanning between label and widget. Left-aligned labels do that the best.
• You can always scroll – with everybody comfortable with the scroll wheel, having a design go past the fold a bit is ok now. Traditional web design dictated that everything important be above the fold. But with a continuous form, it’s now okay to bend the rule a little.
• Two-column design – this is the best way to get a donor to know the kind of information they need to provide. We like to put the basic information like name, address on the left, and things like the “ask” string and credit card information on the right.
• AJAX submission – I think submitting a form via AJAX makes more sense than doing inline AJAX validation. Often inline validation doesn’t work well for things like credit card numbers. It’s also easier to notice/fix things at a confirm step, such as a mistyped honoree name. Having to repost from the confirm page to make changes is painful. Instead, show the confirm page via AJAX, and give the user the ability to go back easily without having to fill out their form again.
• Dynamic display of elements – this came up on the discussion forums recently. You can display things like sustained giving, honor/memorials, gift membership, and such dynamically on a single form, rather than have separate forms. We really like that idea and are interested to hear what folks things about this approach.

Those are our thoughts. Chime in with your thoughts…we’re eager to hear what you think.