As a new graduate, I’ve had to step up my wardrobe a bit to accommodate looking like a professional damn good on a more regular basis. To do so, I’ve made many trips to many different clothing shops in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. Though each shop I visited had it’s ups and downs, the one thing that consistently affected my perception of the establishment was it’s change rooms.

In my opinion, the change room is the most important part because that’s where I ultimately decide if I am going to spend money at the shop or not. Shops whose change rooms made this process easier got more of my money – unless their products were complete crap of course.

What struck me as interesting is that without knowing it, I’d been conducting a usability study on the user experience of shoppers – where in this case the user was the customer at a particular shop. As a result of this impromptu study I put together a list of qualities a good change room should have based on my own experiences hopping around from shop to shop.

The list is as follows:

Have mirrors in each change room.

This is such an easy one. Your want to see how they look, but they might not want everyone else in the store or change room area to see.

Have an change room area separate from the rest of the store.

Lots of people come to clothes stores with a friend, or in groups. When a shopper does decide to come out of the change room to get opinions, they probably only want them from their entourage – not the rest of the store.

Have mirrors in the change room area.

Sometimes what you’re trying on looks great in the change room, but once you see it out in the open or a member of your entourage points out a problem, it’s nice to have a mirror to double check. Additionally, it provides a clear point of congregation for shoppers and their entourage. Placed carefully, change room area mirrors can direct traffic so people aren’t standing around in awkward spots in the area looking at each other.

Have seating in your change room area.

It can be a pain when you’re waiting around for your fellow shopper to come out and show you the items they’re trying on. Especially when they have a bunch to try on. Providing seating for the members of a shopper’s entourage is a courtesy that I thoroughly enjoy when I get dragged out to shop with other people.

Have a place to hang clothes.

When you come into a change room with multiple items, it’s nice to have a hook to hang all the  items so you can look at them one by one. Having multiple hooks helps the shopper keep track of the items they like and don’t like as well.

Have a place to set the clothes down.

I’ve been in far too many change rooms where they do provide a spot to hang clothes, but what’s all you get. A bench provides a nice place to set things  because lets face it, putting clothes on the ground in these rooms feels a bit bad. Also, it can be pain to re-hang everything, especially those items you’re not even going to buy. Don’t want them? Toss ‘em on the bench.

This list is not at all exhaustive,  but the best change rooms – and by extension the best stores – I’ve been in have implemented most or all of these ideas, and are the ones I continue to shop at. Just remember, even the best change room can’t make up for crappy products!

About two weeks ago I was looking around the blog for IxDA Waterloo – a local group which holds monthly meetings to talk about various topics in user experience/interaction design – and I discovered something. I have developed a new mental model for red links.

It happened when I was looking at an older post on the site, one with links I had already visited, but forgot that I had seen. For whatever reason, the theme used at the blog styles visited links a red colour. Not really a big deal right? Red’s a nice enough colour.

When I considered hitting the link, I noticed it was red. Immediately I changed my mind and kept browsing. Moments later, I found another red link, and was a little irritated. It took me a few seconds to realize why, but thanks to Wikipedia‘s styling, I have apparently started associating red links with missing content.

For those readers who aren’t familiar with Wikipedia, it hosts a bunch of information on basically everything. Each page on the site is full of links to other pages within the site, but sometimes those pages get removed, or links to pages that don’t exist are added to remind someone to make that page later. To help out their users, Wikipedia has styled these links in a red colour, so that readers know that there’s no page at the other end of that link.

Realizing this, I went ahead and clicked the links to find that I’d already seen the content. So what does this mean? For starters, the blog’s operators should probably fix this problem, being as it is a blog for a user experience group and shouldn’t go around messing with people’s mental models. It also means that the next time I design a web-based system I’ll have a new mental model in mind to optimize how my users will interact with it.

I’d like to point out that IxDA Waterloo is an awesome group. If you’re in the Waterloo region and interested in user experience or interaction design, I’d highly recommend joining the User Experience Peer Group at Communitech’s website, joining the local IxDA group, and coming out to their monthly meetings. March’s meeting was on table-top computing, and in April we did a UX Show and Tell where I recently gave a short presentation on Project MORIS. Its definitely worth your time.

Has anyone else noticed they’ve started to treat red links in the same manner? Questions/remarks about mental models or something else I mentioned in this post? Let me know in the comments.

Earlier today was IxDA Waterloo’s monthly meeting, and this month we did a UX Show and Tell. Apparently this is something that’s pretty popular at other local IxDA meetings, where the attendees share tidbits on projects they’ve worked on, things they’re working on now, etc. Jon and I decided we should share something and decided on giving our fellow UXers a feature highlight or Project MORIS.

Project MORIS was the final project to a directed study on User Interface Design that Tyler Burton, Jon Fritz and I completed in the Fall of 2009 at Wilfrid Laurier University under the supervision of Dr. Angele Hamel.  We decided to analyze the current registration system used at WLU called LORIS. After our analysis, we created a prototype of a new interface for LORIS using Visual Studio with Windows Forms and C#.

For the presentation we spent a few minutes whipping up a slideshow that gives a quick overview of what features of LORIS that Project MORIS was designed to fix. We intended to show a live demo of the application, however we ran out of time (presentations were limited to 6 minutes) so I decided to post both the slideshow and the application on the web. This way anyone who wants can check out the application or see a quick highlight of what we aimed to fix.

You can read a bit more about it on my About page, or just download the files here:

Presentation: Redesigning LORIS [.ppt]

Presentation: Redesigning LORIS [.pdf]

Application: Project MORIS [Requires the .NET Framework 3.0]

Leave your thoughts or questions in the comments and I’ll get back to you!