90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

I’m surprised to see the way ISPs and telcos still describe their products so misleadingly, even after the trouble that Talk-talk got into with the ASA about offering free broadband “Forever”. Orange are currently running a campaign that uses the word unlimited broadband in the same breath as “talk” and “texts”. If you go to the website you’ll find that talk is in fact very limited - either limited to just landline calls or just off-peak, on-network mobile calls.

It’s not a good idea to draw people in with false promises. Why do it? It upsets your potential customers just as they are coming in the door for the first time, and makes you look untrustworthy. A few months ago I signed up to a Three mobile contract with their “mobileWeb” add-on. It turns out, they actually meant “mobileWalledGarden”, i.e. you could only access a small set of specially selected sites. I took the handset back and axed the contract. No more Three for me, for now.

Death of the Desktop by Aza Raskin

Even reading the bullet points was pretty illuminating. Imagine what the talk was like! (on second thoughts - give me the bullet points every time. It’s like reading the Cliff Notes instead of the book which reminds me of the last time I was pretending I’d read Milton).

Aza Raskin is the son of Jef Raskin so if stuff like that runs in the family, probably should be listened to.

I was in the middle of a remarkly erudite post on the art of filenaming (honest) when Firefox decided my cursor wasn’t in the text edit box. My continued typing involved a backspace which of course took me off the page. Bang. Post gone.

Makes you realise that running apps in browsers sometimes takes away the safety nets you’ve got used to. I used to be rather careful on this front and would always type stuff into notepad before instead of straight into a browser. Much safer.

Do you know what made me become careless?

Damn GMail and it’s auto-save. It’s never lost an email and therefore I’ve started getting cosy about typing into text fields again. And thus I get shafted by Wordpress. I’m off to see if there is a plug-in for it that does auto-save

In Productivity and Screen Size,  Jacob Nielson trashes a recent Apple survey on how fabulous large monitors are for productivity. (He doesn’t actually say he disagree’s with Apple’s results, just that their methodology was suspect).

I’m not quite sure whether the rest of the article has much to do with monitor sizes but he does say some interesting things about designing interfaces for casual users as as opposed to skilled users. He argues that very different constraints apply when you design for one group other another and furthermore there are fewer situations when you can assume your users will have time to become skilled in your interface than you would assume.

So even when you think you are designing a tool for people that will have the time and incentive to become familiar with your innovative, optimised design then there are many times when the user will be starting from scratch.

An example for me is Photoshop. Now Photoshop is such a huge program that there are many areas I rarely need to use. When I do use them, quite often that part of the interface has been revised since the version of Photoshop I was using when I last went there. So despite using Photoshop pretty much every day for something or the other, there are times when I am a newbie. I like to hone my skills so I will try and learn something new in these situations but in many cases the clock is ticking and I just have to get results quickly.

Everyone is both a power-user and a newbie at different times. The cases where a tool or a piece of software can guarantee it will only be used by power-users or people learning to become power-users is fairly uncommon.

So ideally software should have lead you gently in but get the hell out of the way for people who already know what they are doing. Context senstive help, wizards, tooltips and interfaces that have ways of hiding advanced features*  all help in this.

* howver hiding/changing parts of the interface to simplify things for new users can also hinder the ability to discover new features by exploring the screen as well as negating the benefits of motor memory. (i would describe motor memory in this context as the process where you learn to quickly move to the correct button/icon/control by habit much quicker than you would be able to locate it by conscious action)

ITworld.com - The inevitability of cruft

So you learn from that experience and decide that the next thing you design will be cruft-proof. So instead you slam right into the Second-system Syndome

It’s tricky making stuff. That’s why 90 percent of everything is crud.

IScrybe.

Looks even more impressive than DabbleDB (which in my opinion turned out to be a little less intuitive than it’s fairly groovy screencast led me to hope).

Bet it won’t sync with my phone though.

Twice in the last few days I’ve spent some time choosing some online purchases and then got distracted or had real life intervene.

I’ve left that browser window open and when I come back to it the next day I have attempted to complete the purchases only to find that the shopping cart has expired. Is there a security risk here that I can’t see that makes it necessary to have a time-out on shopping carts? I can’t think of one. I haven’t entered any personal details at this point and if someone else used my computer and discovers that I was about to purchase 400g of Jack Links’s Peppered Beef Jerky and some inkjet cartridges then I can withstand the shame and embarrassment.

So I may or may not get around to making those purchases now. I may go to a different supplier or I may decide that I don’t need that much beef jerky. That’s a lost purchase that is down to a programming decision that may not have even been made consciously. The coder may have used used a default without really thinking about it. I bet it wasn’t discussed by management at any point…

I just tried to fill in an online form and I typed in my details (actually I pressed a little button on the Google toolbar that filled most of it in for me. Marvellous…) then submit.

The form popped up a warning dialog telling me to fix my postcode. It then highlighted the postcode field and in red letters next to it was the phrase ‘Spaces are not allowed’.

I did wonder whether it would have been less effort for the programmer to simply remove the spaces for me then to go to all that trouble… I can’t think of any technical reason why it wouldn’t be easier to strip the spaces from the postcode field than it is to go through all that validation and error message business.

Andy Budd (the other slightly better known AndyB - he scolded me once on a mailing list for signing myself AndyB. Cheek!) demolishes thetrainline.com rather nicely.

I wonder if companies get to read this kind of stuff and whether they take it seriously? Andy has provided free gold-dust here and they should be sitting around a laptop in their boardroom frowning and holding their collective chins.

Not every critique is of this calibre and not every criticism is valid. Casual users often don’t understand the constraints that force you to implement things a certain way. But in it is amazing how many products get out the door containing howlers. If you were too cheap to do a usability study in the first place then google for yourself occasionally and you might get some valuable free advice!

Read every email that contains complaints and suggestions and repond humbly to them all - even if you disagree. And check your server logs to see if lots of people end up departing your site at the same place.

(Almost forgot. He just wrote an update to the original post which is what reminded me about it in the first place)

As web savvy, technology oriented people we often forget what it’s like to be normal. This is probably why Google have an elementary usability mistake slap-bang in the middle of their home page. The mistake I’m referring to? The tab label “Froogle”.

In a recent user study I gave 12 users a selection of tasks, one of which involved using the shopping facilities on 3 different search engines.

During this shopping task, I was amazed to find that when shown Google, many of them just didn’t realise what Froogle was. Even those who were frequent Google users. On all the other search engines, they all easily found the ‘shopping’ tab.

For some users I really pushed the issue, specifically asking what they thought Froogle was without clicking on the link. They just couldn’t guess from the label. One of them even thought it offered games.

The name Froogle is an in-joke, and it’s a complex one too. Comparison shopping > saving money > being frugal > frugal sounds like Google, so Froogle it is. A clever brand name – but too clever to present on a blank page like that. It would work well in other scenarios – like in a press advertisement with plenty of space for a tag line explaining that it’s Google’s comparison shopping service. But here, with just the label itself to do the explaining, its just not enough.

You might be wondering, what’s the big deal? If they don’t click on the tab label then the “Product search” inclusion in the search results page will reel them in instead. Well, that’s only partly true. In my study, some users did notice the inclusion, but some didn’t – they scanned right past and went direct to a supplier in the results below.

So what should Google do? By all means keep the brand name within the Froogle site, but they should ditch the label “Froogle” from the front page and go for something transparent, like “Shopping”. It’s dull and obvious for people like us who are in the know, but for normal people it’s comprehensible, and that is all that matters. More people will start using the Froogle service, and surely that is the aim of the game…