90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

I’m looking for a flight at the moment. I know the following:

• Where I’m going from (well I’d actually like to see results for all London airports listed in an order of my choosing)
• When I want to go (give or take a few days)

What I don’t want to specify:

• Destination - I want to scan the list of results and see what catches my eye
• Price - let me sort by price or set a ceiling though

If someone gave me to access to the underlying data I could figure this out in Excel or by writing a few lines of code but of course I have to access the data through various web interfaces. None of which give me the flexibility to search the way I want.

The main sticking point is destination. All the sites I try want this specified upfront. Am I the only person using the internet who knows they want a flight before they’ve picked a destination?

Dear laptopsdirect.co.uk,

 If you send out computers with the keyboard set to United States layout then my dad will never be able to type the @ symbol. Neither will my sister and she’s a librarian.

Dear shoppingtelly.com,

Please don’t take the blue color and underlining away from text links as my dad won’t realise he can click on them.

Dear tvguide.co.uk,

 Don’t hide the place the actual tv guide on your home page so it’s not visible without scrolling. My dad never thinks to scroll and clicked ‘back’ instead…

Jakob Nielsen has written about how most of the benefit of user testing is gained in the first few subjects. I can beat that.

 I suggest teaching your 65 year old father how to use the internet.

I’m coming up with enough material for a book here… To be continued.  

I was in Finland a few weeks ago, and this was the control panel of the lift in my hotel.

Imagine this scenario: you get in the hotel on the ground floor, you press a button, nothing happens. You try pressing all the buttons. Nothing happens. What are you meant to do to make the lift work?

In a way I kind of respect the designers who steadfastly stood by their beliefs in minimalist brushed metal aesthetics.

During my stay I watched a funny scene where a loud pair of American tourists completely floundered with it, while the reception staff pretended to ignore them.

Has anyone else noticed how great Facebook image tagging is?

Granted, it is only for putting names to faces, but it’s incredibly quick to use (say 5 seconds per photo), and it’s really satisfying. Your friends see you’ve tagged them (the images appear in their news feed on their facebook homepage), and usually respond with a comment or by tagging some of your photos in return.

Compare this to Flickr where image tagging feels heavyweight, tiring and you get no quick payback for your effort.

Come on Flickr - you’ve dropped the ball on tagging. It should be a rapid, social and fun activity!

Douglas Karr pointed out that I should put my money where my mouth is and explain how it should be redesigned. Having given it some thought, I’ve realised this is a particularly tricky dialog box - the problem does not exist just at the level of the dialog box but more widely, for example:

• The keychain: what the hell is it? To a naive user this is a hairy concept.
• The security of your computer: What caused the application to update? Was the source trustworthy?
• The repercussions: what does the decision actually mean? What’s the worst that can happen? How can I recover from making the wrong decision?

I’ve also just realised that this has been blogged about elsewhere, with some great comment discussions. Read more here, here and here.

My working “solution” is shown here. It’s still fairly wrong but at least it’s more clearly worded and the button labels actually correspond to the question.

I welcome critical comments so feel free to get your knives out

A great example of bad dialog box design from Jungledisk:

• Long convoluted question - check!
• Frightening subheading - check!
• Options that don’t map onto the question - check!