90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

For those of you who don’t know the US cultural reference, the Roach Motel is a cockroach trap. Essentially just a small cardboard box with sticky paper inside, Roach Motels were made famous by Muhammad Ali, who at the tail end of his career was hired in as the product spokesman. Interesting choice.

“Roaches check in, but they don’t check out”, as the saying goes. While this might be a passable way of getting rid of cockroaches, it’s a terrible way to treat your website visitors, yet it’s very common to see this pattern in email service subscription UIs.

Lets look at the steps required to sign up to an email service on a typical site:

1. User clicks on the ’subscribe’ link
2. They then register, entering their email address
3. Then enter a new password
4. Then enter it a second time in the ‘repeat password’ field
5. And finally, they submit the form and subscribe to the service

So, that’s 5 or so steps, and each of those are pretty low effort. While it is annoying to be forced to create an account, there’s no serious brainstrain going on yet. Now, lets imagine a couple of weeks have passed and the user is getting fed up with the emails they are receiving. What steps are involved in unsubscribing from the same service?

1. User clicks on the ‘unsubscribe’ link
2. They then have to log-in. They enter their email address
3. Then they hesitate at the password field, wondering “Which of my passwords was it?”
4. So, they try at a password, and hit submit
5. Error feedback comes back showing that they got the password wrong
6. They click on the forgotten password link
7. The form asks them to enter their email address again
8. They fill in the form, and hit submit
9. They switch to their email account, and wait a minute or two for the email to arrive
10. Some users at this point also have to check their junk mail folder, while others will be sidetracked by important new emails in their inbox
11. Finally, the email arrives, they open it and click on the “reset password” link
12. They choose a new password, repeat it and submit the form
13. And finally, they are able to unsubscribe from the email service

On the unsubscribe journey, we’ve got 13 or so time-consuming steps, and some of them are deeply frustrating. When you look at it like this, it’s obvious that it’s a catastrophically awful user experience.

What’s a user to do?

To avoid jumping through all those hoops, the Report Spam button must feel pretty alluring. And if users start clicking it en mass, you’re in big trouble. Google doesn’t discourage this, to quote from the Official Gmail blog: “…if you didn’t ask for it and you don’t want it, it’s spam to you, and it should be reported. We’ll sort it out on our side.”

When a customer wants to leave, it’s crucial that you allow them to do so in a pleasant way. When frustrated customers leave, they don’t come back.

One of the main limitations of Morae 1 & 2 was that it could only do PC based user research. The new version offers dual camera support, which is a big deal. This means you can now use Morae to do mobile device testing (shown below), paper prototype testing, paper card sorts, participatory design studies, group activities… you name it. Obviously the resolution and picture quality you get from a webcam isn’t going to be fantastic, but it’s passable for research purposes.

Amendment: Shane Lovellette of Techsmith informs me that Morae 3 supports recording from DV Cameras as well as webcams – which means you now get pretty good quality video footage. IMHO, that’s another pretty big selling point.

Well done Techsmith for responding to their customers’ needs. More info on the Techsmith site.

Mozilla’s blog of metrics has released the results of a small A/B test they ran recently. Which of the following buttons got the best clickthrough rate on the “customise firefox” page, and by how much? One of them was significantly less effective to a 99.85% confidence level.

Recipe A

Recipe B

You can find the answer and more information over at the blog of metrics.

Chances are, you’ve seen a few change blindness videos before. The clip below is slightly different because it demonstrates how the effect works.

The grey flicker gives just enough time for your visual short term memory buffer to empty. Take it out and it’s easy to notice the difference between the before and after shots. (Read more here, or here)

What’s the implication for UX design? It provides an understanding of the cognitive basis of the yellow fade technique (aka one second spotlight). When you use the web in a natural setting, your eyes are constantly on the move, taking in your environment, blinking, and so on. In doing so, you introduce your own “grey flicker” effect. If something changes in the split second that you glance away, you are going to find it surprisingly hard to notice, just as you found it surprisingly hard to notice the missing engine of the aeroplane in the test above. The animation used in the yellow fade technique helps minimise this problem.

User research is a funny thing. When you see users rushing through your user interface without stopping to think, or skipping through huge swathes of your lovingly prepared copy, it’s tempting to think of them as lazy sods.

It’s true. Don’t feel guilty about it. That’s exactly what they are. The only thing you are wrong about is the way you are framing it – you are looking at it as a negative thing.

It’s not negative. Laziness is a manifestation of the fundamental nature of human intelligence. When users engage in lazy behaviour online, they are being very smart. It is exactly this type of smartness that has always eluded Artificial Intelligence researchers in their quest to give their creations human-like insight. Be proud!

To quote Philip Johnson Laird (one of my favourite cognitive scientists):

A calculator blindly follows the rules for multiplication or addition. It cannot notice short cuts. If you tell it to work out 200 factorial minus 200 factorial, it will do a lot of unnecessary computation, and perhaps produce an overflow error. The intelligent solution is a far more lazy one.

This is the ‘combinatorial explosion’. Any construction involving many choices from a set of options has a potentially huge array of possible constructs to choose from. If you have four choices each with two options the total set of options is sixteen. If you have twenty choices each with six options, the total shoots up to 3,656,158,440,062,976. Clearly exhaustive enumeration is not a general solution. The tree of possible moves in chess is larger than the number of electrons in the Universe (if we are to believe the physicists). So lazy short cuts have to be found.

The concept of productive laziness forms a valuable underpinning for our understanding of theories like information foraging, information scent, scan reading, and generally of user behaviour online. This in turn has a big impact on how we define ‘good’ design.

To put it simply: we are in the business of enabling users to be productively lazy in new and useful ways. When you frame it in this positive light, you are already on the road to success.

Jacob Burghardt has recently published a free interaction design ebook called ‘Working through screens‘. It contains some rather nice diagrams that you can re-use (with certain conditions) as he’s released it on an Attribution NonCommercial Share Alike creative commons licence.

Some ‘flash card’ excerpts from the book are shown below: