90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

A while back I blogged about Eben Haber’s FOSS Video Note Taker. Well, if you’re on Mac and you’ve got $40 bucks, you might also want to consider Pear Note for OS X:

Pear Note records audio and/or video while you take your notes, so later you can find what was being said when you typed something. Wouldn’t it be great if this kind of functionality was added to Silveback or Morae?

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg pack a lot of theory about the psychology of persuasion into the concept of a “call-to-action”, but at its simplest, a call-to-action is the area on a page that sums up its main purpose or goal – i.e. the bit that the designer wants the user to read and click on. A good call-to-action is one that’s rapidly noticed and easily comprehended. A bad one… Well, just take a look below. It’s rare to find a site that makes the same fundamental mistake over and over again like this.

Above is a screengrab from theacropolismuseum.gr, the site for the new Acropolis museum in Athens. It opened this year, and it’s turned out to be a very popular tourist attraction. With that in mind, it makes sense to book your tickets in advance. It’s not too hard to find this page (Hours & Ticketing), but the next step is to enter the ticket booking process. So, how do you do that? It’s almost like they’ve hidden the “Buy Tickets” call-to-action on purpose, as a nondescript link right at the bottom of the page. This is the online equivalent of designing a supermarket with the tills hidden in the stockroom – hardly the definition of good business sense.

Having clicked ‘Buy Tickets’, the user ends up here (above), which seems to be the first page of the booking process. The only thing we can see here is a text field. Where’s the rest of the stuff? Where’s the ‘next’ button? Where’s the steps-left indicator? It almost looks broken – as if the page hasn’t loaded properly. In fact, to proceed to the next step the user needs to enter a number into the text field, and then the next chunk of the form will suddenly be revealed. You can almost picture the user muttering to themselves – “Why on earth does this site have to work differently to the rest of the web?”

Having entered the number of tickets, this calendar widget appears (above). Today’s date is currently selected. What are you expected to do now? Once again, there is no clear call-to-action. In fact, you have to click any date in the future and it will reveal which times are available.

Phew! If the user’s got this far, they are probably getting the hang of this unconventional UI. They need to click on their desired timeslot to proceed, then they need to fill in their address, payment details and finally they reach a confirmation page, shown below.

Here’s the confirmation page. The user will expect this to be emailed to them – that’s normal practice, right? Not on this site. If they don’t save or print this page, they are going to have real trouble getting into the museum. This key instruction is written half-way down the page, but once again the designers have made the same mistake of providing a weak, easily missable call-to-action.

To sum up, I’m hoping that this example has given you a reminder about the crucial importance of strong calls-to-action. It’s obvious stuff really, but we all make schoolboy errors from time to time.

The whole point of user research is that you get to observe real members of your target user group interacting with your product. However, the cash incentive that you offer – typically £50 for an hour – is compelling enough to make some people bend the truth, and this is compounded by the chain of people involved in the recruitment. For example, if you outsource a research project to a UX consultancy, they will probably outsource the recruitment to a specialist agency, who in turn will may outsource to a number of independent freelancers. As the client sitting on the receiving end, you have to be confident that it’s being carried out in a rigorous way.

Even if your recruitment agency are trying their best, it’s sad reality that there’s diminishing returns in weeding out end users who fib. They can’t really hire in Columbo to investigate every user. And if, during the sessions, the research facilitator starts to suspect the participant might be a dud, what can they do? It’s an awkward situation, especially if they their client watching from behind the two-way mirror. The researcher can continue the interview without pushing the issue, or they can deviate from the script and start cross-questioning the participant on their honesty, which will ruin the rapport, take time, and probably won’t be effective in any case.

In fact, a lot of liars can be screened out by writing a really good screener questionnaire. For example, here’s a decoy question that the Mozilla metrics team used in their recent Test Pilot survey.

The goal of the question above was to ascertain the experience level of a respondent, so the data could be segmented. To sift out the deluded novices and liars, the Mozilla Metrics team added a made-up acronym – JFW – on the rationale that anyone who ticks “full understanding” for this item and all the others can be flagged as a suspect respondent.

Don’t believe me on the JFW acronym? I asked the Moz Labs team, just to be sure:

It’s also fairly likely you will want to recruit participants who have used your product a certain number of times. If you ask them directly (“Have you used mysite.com at least 3 times in the past month?”), the respondent will easily guess what they are meant to say to “win” the research. So, you should always hide the qualifying answer among a number of decoy questions, or by asking open questions.

Another trick I’ve recently started using is placing a stern warning on the screener about honesty. For example, if you’re testing an ecommerce site, you can state that a substantial part of the interview will involve being signed in to the site and referring to their purchase history page. If they don’t have a history spanning over 3 months, tell them they will be turned away without payment. This does sound a bit harsh, but it works.

To sum up, you face a real risk if you rely on your recruitment agency to take care of the screener behind the scenes. When engaging with a new agency, ask them what they do to screen out liars, and always be certain to review the final questionnaire before it gets deployed.

Do you have any other screener tips? Add them in the comments!

Did you know, your Windows 7 launch party can be totally informal? you’re allowed to do the mandated party “Activities” (note ominous capitalisation) in any order you choose! If it were a joke, it’d be funny. This bizarrely clumsy attempt to control and influence consumers reminds me of the issue of The Onion when it was ’sold’ to a Chinese salvage fisheries company: “‘Fish Time has quickly become a staple in my home,’ said mother of five hungry children Jane Roberts, who lives in Iowa, a United State. ‘My babies love Fish Time as much as my older filial relations do. Fish Time is family fun time for all generations of the Roberts lineage.’ And, reports have confirmed, there is more! Many are making Fish Time a must-have meal option in their homes, their workplaces, and their favorite centers of recreation.”

Swap out Yu Wan Mei mandated “Fish Time” with Windows 7 and you’ve pretty much captured the spirit of Microsoft’s marketing strategy. Check out the screen grabs from their screener survey below. It’s nuts!

Gee, I wonder which of these boxes I’m meant to tick in order to get my free copy of Windows 7?

Question 6: would you like to receive junk mail? Er, what are my options?

This is by far the best bit – check out what they want to do to your children. To quote from the second paragraph: “I, on behalf of myself and my children [...] hereby grant [...] an unrestricted, absolute, universal, perpetual, irrevocable, non-royalty bearing, and transferable right and license [...] to use, copy, transmit, distribute, display, modify, perform, present, publish, transform, create works and derivative works, and otherwise promote or utilize my name, image, likeness, voice, words and [...] personal information, and those of my children [...] captured, photographed or otherwise recorded or memorialized in any manner [...] (including, without limitation, print, direct mail, online, mobile or wireless communications, radio or television broadcast, telecast or photograph), for any purpose whatsoever (including, without limitation [...] advertising [...]), and without any consideration or notice to or consent by me or any third party.”

So, how badly do you want a free copy of Windows 7? Badly enough to give Microsoft complete, unrestricted rights to photos and videos of your children so they can use them in their advertising without even notifying you? Seriously?

I cannot imagine why they thought it was a good idea to hide this critical information in the small print. Whatever happened to good, old fashioned up-front honesty?

Back in the 1990s, when wireframing was a niche activity, you were pretty much limited to Visio or Illustrator. Nowadays there are a huge number of alternatives. If you want an online app, you can choose from Balsamiq, Just in Mind, Jumpchart, iPlots, iZotz, HotGloo, Connect-A-Sketch, ForeUI, Pidoco, Simulify, Mockup screens, Mocklinr, Wireframe sketcher, Gliffy, Lovely Charts, Project Draw, Creately, Napkee among zillions of others. Offline the situation is equally messy, we’ve got Axure, Omnigraffle, Visio, Sketchflow, iRise, Inkscape, Illustrator, Fireworks, Indesign, Pencil, Denim, Serena, Qmockup, Flairbuilder, Photopro, Caretta Studio, and there’s also reams of GUI builder apps if you’re designing desktop apps. The list just goes on and on. How do you know which ones to use and which to avoid?

Has anyone actually tried them all and created an über comparison table? Not as far as I can tell. Instead I’m sort of hoping for some kind of K-T event to kill of all of the weaker ones. Not sure how that would work, though. Any ideas?

Amendment: post has been repeatedly edited to include additional tools.

Dreamworks films are quite clever the way they have jokes for children and adults occur simultaneously, so everyone laughs out loud together.

Sorry did I say children and adults? I meant children, adults and UI designers…

Using a feedreader and can’t see the video?

This was one of the clips shown in Nathan Shedroff & Chris Noessel’s talk on SciFi and UI design at Dconstruct’09. They’ve published the talk notes here [18MB PDF].

If you haven’t already seen it, you may also want to check out this Pixar short film on alien abductions and bad UI design.