90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

How many people are being sent .docx files every minute of every day only to find themselves unable to open them?

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.  

Dear Microsoft,

Sorry to not write directly but you don’t seem to have any address to send bug reports to.

I’ve been using Vista on my telly as a Media Center for a few weeks now and there are some really obvious bugs you might like to fix. I’d love you to let me know whether you already know about these but you don’t seem to want to share that information so I’ll have to assume you don’t.

1. The music library is still really slow if you’ve got a large music collection and really really slow if you have a large music collection shared over a LAN. Like - so slow you’d think your machine had locked up.

2. Seeing as Vista Media Center is meant to run on a TV at TV resolutions do you think you could get rid of that annoying ‘there is not enough room to display your start menu’ when I am running it on a TV?

3. There is no way to list browse videos by name. So I just get a screen full of black squares as my videos all start with a fade in from black.

(By the way what are videos doing in the same category is pictures rather than with TV or movies?)

4. Shuffled playlists seems to contain big chunks of repeated items.

(Oh please let me browse my music by folder! Please! My tags are a mess.)

5. Skipping tracks too fast keeps throwing up ‘an unknown audio error has occurred’

I’ll let you know what else I find. Thanks for being so interested!

regards,

Andy

PS I’ve found a horrific data loss bug in Windows Mobile but seeing as it’s been there for three versions now I think you probably know about it. Shame it killed a bunch of my files

I’ve always been a bit of a fan of Web 2.0 darlings 37signals. I used to read their ‘design not found‘ articles fairly avidly and even bought their excellent book ‘Defensive Design for the Web‘. Their sense of aesthetics is faultless and they put a lot of thought into making simple details of usability perfect.

So I finally tried out Basecamp - the project management web app.

And I must say I feel a little under-impressed. All the parts seem a bit separate. You can’t link messages to to-do list items or milestones or anything else. The only place where everything intertwingles is on the overview page and this appears as nothing much more fancy than a chronological list of changes.

I know the whole philosophy behind their apps is a about simplicity and avoiding featuritus but this harks back to the debate about simplicity that went on a few months back. Simplicity of use doesn’t imply absence of features and some well chosen additions to Basecamp could make it massively more useful.

It also implements one of my pet hate - plain text boxes that allows formatting via simple markup. I hate this in Wiki’s, I hate Textile and Markdown and all the others. Mainly because there *are* several and I can never remember the formatting rules.

Although web-based rich text editing is far from perfect I feel like I’m flung back to the stone age everytime I have to use markup on a site.

After all the beta testing - how did this one slip through the net?

When you browse videos in Vista Media Center it only shows you thumbnails with no text label whatsoever. (you do get a filename displayed when you hover over a particular item).

All my videos fade in from black. So I’m stuck browsing 30 black rectangles!

Microsoft. Reinventing Mystery Meat for the modern living room.

I just paid my tax online (how fascinating) and was asked to take a quick survey. One of the questions was a ‘If so, then…’ type question. Of course I’d answered ‘no’ to the previous question so I skipped it. And of course I couldn’t submit the form without answering it.

I did another survey a few weeks back (I was procrastinating that day as well) and it assumed a few things about my job that weren’t true. As a result half the questions - which were again compulsory - were unanswerable. After a page or two of entering junk just to be allowed to go on to the next page I gave up.

The problem with the tax question was just silly but this is a much more subtle issue.

If you’re designing an online survey you’re obviously assuming respondants are fitting a certain profile and this will be reflected in the design of your questions.
If you get this wrong you’ll either be getting a high drop-out rate or people will fill in junk answers.

I’m apparently the CEO of a company called ‘N/A’. I’m sure there’s a few of us on the board…