90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Even if you don’t do a lot of UK rail travel, take a look at this walkthough I’ve put together for thetrainline.com. It’s amazing how hard they’ve managed to make finding cheap tickets. You have to ignore the search results, click on a textual link, and then select your fare from a page containing - wait for it - up to 150 radio buttons in a huge table - with the tickets differentiated by weird codes like 1ST ADVANCE2 and STD ADVANCE4…

The mind boggles!

Note: the walkthrough may load slowly. It’s best watched in full-screen mode. Thanks to Peter Otto for showing me this tip.

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.

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!

These days when you see someone wondering down the street looking lost, chances are they don’t have a shop-bought map in their hands – it’s much more likely they have a scrappy looking print-out from a web-based route planner service. And chances are they are looking very lost.

Take Google Maps for example - the directions they give you are completely linear. If you mess up on one step, you are completely lost as none of the steps are relevant to you anymore. And the maps it gives you are equally hopeless, only showing you the happy route, with little detail of the areas you so desperately need if you get lost.

What I want when I ask for directions on Google Maps is a series of high quality A4 maps that show me the route AND the surrounding area.

It’s like that film American Werewolf in London - “Don’t stray from the path, lads. Whatever you do, don’t stray from the path!

I was in Blockbuster yesterday, and started chatting to the staff. I asked them why Pan’s Labyrinth (good film) only has 2 copies shown, while Shadowboxer (worst film of all time) has 2 entire shelves worth of boxes on display.

They explained to me that they are not entitled to make choices. Head office sends them a certain number of display boxes. They have to put them up on the shelves.

Because of the location of the store, their customers tend to ask for a lot more niche and arty films than the national average. And the staff get really frustrated, because they want to do something about it - to please the customers. But they aren’t allowed.

Online video services go to such efforts to build and leverage contextual information. And they’d dream of having an untapped local community ‘ready to go’.

But what do Blockbuster do? They ignore it, and plod on.

Think back to your first ever home inkjet printer. Mine was an Apple stylewriter in 1993.

Look at home printers today. They still look pretty much the same - they haven’t moved on much. Why not? We’ve been having the same gripes for more than 14 years now:

1. The feed area is not big enough for a ream of paper. Yet you always buy paper in a ream. You end up having to put that paper somewhere, why not IN the printer?
2. Paper in the feed area isn’t properly supported. After a week or two it starts to curl.
3. Some of the main parts are designed to slide-in and out. Implicit in this is the idea that you “put away” your printer when you are not using it. Who actually does this? It’s not worth the effort if you use your printer more than once a week. Plus the slidey bits often break.
4. You can’t place anything on top of the printer. Office printers may be chunky but at least you have a large output tray where you can leave a pile of print-outs without them getting in the way of anything.
5. And they are never shipped with a USB cable. It must have taken a special kind of evil genius to think of this and somehow manage to get almost every manufacturer in the world to comply.

It seems to me that home technology is usually considered the cheaper, flimsier sibling of office technology. This really shouldn’t be the case. Look at home furniture vs office furniture. Aesthetically, a lot more care goes into choosing it. Space-wise, the consumer is a lot more contrained, but this doesnt mean they want to always be putting things away and taking them out again. And in terms of durability, it may not have as much throughput but the usage it does get is likely to be intense (kids, teenagers, usage-while-eating, etc).

Home technology should be better looking, more compact and more foolproof than office technology. Will this ever happen for printers or will consumers always be motivated by the cheapest deal?

We’ve all had hardware like this in our home: designed to be an ornament yet attractive to nobody, and a waster of good surface space.

You can imagine how the designers pictured it - the user placing the device on a large, minimalist glask desk adorned by nothing but an Apple Mac, an executive pad and a single Cross fountain pen. The user sighs and says, “Wow, that really is a wonderful addition to my home office. Now it has a certain panache, I love it!”

The real world just isn’t like that.

In most homes, the situation is one of managed messiness. There is lots of solid research that indicates that some degree of untidyiness is actually very productive (See “The Social Life of Paper”, a lit review by Malcom Gladwell). When you leave things in an apparent mess, you are often leaving yourself signs and contextual cues of where you were in a particular task and its priority. You also tend to put things in places to remind yourself to do something in a timely and appropriate way. Like leaving letters to post by the front door, or an unpaid bill next to the telephone.

What enables us to do this is the surfaces of our homes. We’ve paid good money for them, and we deserve to pile as much mess on them as we want.

When will technology start getting designed to genuinely fit into our homes and our home lives?

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

Word of mouth happens when customers become really passionate about your product or brand. The thing about passion is that is has two ends: very happy, and very angry. Here’s the story of my last two points of contact with Virgin Media customer services.

Story 1:

My landline telephone service was being very dodgy, about once or twice a week I’d find the line was completely dead, and then suddenly it would fix itself. Eventually it started annoying me so much that I called customer services. The conversation went something like this:

“My telephone service keeps breaking intermittently. Right now its broken, can you send someone out to take a look at it?”

“Yes sir. […] We can send an engineer between 9-12, 12-3 or 3-6”

“3 hour slots? So I have to take half a day off work? I guess I don’t have any choice so…”

(we arrange the appointment)

“The service is free, but I have to warn you, if the engineer finds nothing wrong, you will be charged” (the amount was something like £20-£30)

“What? But the problem is intermittent, one day it’s broken, the next day, it’s fixed! Surely you can waive the charge in this situation?”

“I’m sorry sir. Do you want the engineer or not?”

“What do you suggest I do?”

“That is up to you sir?”

“Argh!”

Story 2:

Recently Virgin media TV lost their Sky Channels - Sky One, Sky Two, Sky three, and Sky news. Sky One is a pretty damn good channel - they show new episodes of Simpsons, 24, Lost, and all of that kind of thing. This channel was the main reason I signed up to Virgin media, so I’m stuck with a TV service that now isn’t the one I signed up to.

So I called Virgin, asking to have a discount on my package. I wasn’t expecting much, just a few pounds off a month. The conversation went something like this.

“I’m really upset about the loss of Sky One and the other Sky channels. I am now paying £40 a month for a service that I didn’t sign up to. Can you reduce the cost of my bill?”

“No. We can give you a good deal on a bigger package if you extend your contract by another 12 months though”

“But I live in a rented flat that I might move out of in 7 months. What happens if I move to an area not serviced by Virgin? Will you allow me to end the contract without charging me?” (Virgin is a cable TV service)

“No. You can pay it off early, but you will have to pay the full amount for the remaining months of your contract”

“Hmm, that’s not fair. This leaves me in a difficult position. Since Virgin aren’t giving me the channels I signed up for, it seems I have to terminate my contract now.”

“Yes, I can do that for you today sir.”

“Great!”

“But, you will need to pay upfront for all the remaining months of your contract.”

“No, I don’t think you understand, I am going to stop paying because Virgin have violated the contract. You aren’t giving me the channels I am paying you for.”

“I can offer you a good deal if you extend your contract by another 12 months sir”

“argh!”

So at the expense of a few pounds a month, Virgin Media have engineered a situation where some of their customers start to seriously dislike them, and start trying to spread the word as widely as they can. There’s a lot of talk these days about creating passionate customers, who spread the message via “word of mouth”. This is exactly what they’ve managed to do here. In exactly the wrong way.

Virgin don’t have an easy task, since they offer such a huge range of services (TV, Broadband, landline telephones, mobile telephones, Gyms, air travel, and so on). Upset a customer at one of their touch points, and risk damaging their reputation for all of them.

> Read various rants from upset Virgin Media customers