Usability is like cooking: everybody needs the results, anybody can do it reasonably well with a bit of training, and yet it takes a master to produce a gourmet outcome.
One of the discount usability movement’s basic tenets is that we need a drastic expansion in the amount of usability work done in the world, and to make this happen we need more people to take on usability assignments.
via Anybody Can Do Usability (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).
If you don’t really want people communicating on your site … you don’t really want feedback on your articles … you do really want to spam people … you do really want to “monetize eyeballs” … and you don’t really care that your brand is in the toilet …
Then you act very web 1.0 and have a comment registration form like ZDNet’s:
I wanted to comment on Michael Krigsman’s latest pay-attention-to-me-I’m-relevant flamebait article, only to be met by that monstrosity of a sign in form. And it’s only part one!
Note that all fields are required. Odd, for some reason they’re not asking for your credit card too! Perhaps a copy of your fingerprints or DNA would be appreciated.
Nothing says “we don’t care about our users” like a sign-in form that is so completely, so obviously, and so unashamedely commercial and self-serving.
How very web 1.0.
This is a great quote on usability from Whitney Hess’s recent article on Mashable. She’s actually defining usability in reverse … by saying what it is is not:
David Malouf, professor of interaction design at Savannah College of Art & Design, explains that “while usability is important, its focus on efficiency and effectiveness seems to blur the other important factors in UX, which include learnability and visceral and behavioral emotional responses to the products and services we use.”
I like that:
- usability (including efficiency and effectiveness)
- learnability
- visceral and behavioral emotional responses
It includes a lot of overlap from my recent post, User-friendly: how to know your software is usable. Satisfaction however, which is the work I used in that post, is a pale reflection of “visceral and behavioral emotional response.”
The one thing I’d add: there are a lot of visceral emotional responses that Are Not Positive. (Using some features in Windows come to mind here, unpleasantly.)
Creating a user experience that people love and want to share … now that’s money.
Sometimes when doing business online, you want to know where your users are coming from. If you don’t do it the right way, they’ll waste little time telling you where you can go.
Zinio, a digital publications company, wants to know where you live:
But they don’t geo-locate IP addresses, which would accomplish the goal without any user intervention. Instead, they provide this “handy” layer over their webpage.
Problems:
- Extra action
They force users to do something instead of geo-locating.
- Map not clickable
The map is not clickable. So, most users who assume when seeing a map and a query about where they are, they can just click on their country are going to be sadly disappointed. They’ll click a couple of times. Some may leave. Some will see the drop-down menu and, swearing under their breath, use that.
- Map loads last
The layer with the map loads after the rest of the entire page. Even over broadband, this means there are several seconds of inability to do anything – not fun.
How many chances to do you get to make a first impression? Yeah, I thought so too.
When you fail on your first impression, you’ve got an uphill climb for your second and subsequent interactions with potential clients. Now they already think you’re a difficult-to-work-with company.
Save the trouble and make it right from the beginning!
Usability is the new motherhood and apple pie: unquestionably good … and almost as hard to find.
Everyone agrees that software should be user-friendly. But what does that actually mean? I’ve been architecting a LOT of desktop software in the past few months, and I’ve been revisiting some of my ideas about usability.
While it’s true that there are a million different factors involved in creating software that people love to use, the five key measures that Nielsen and Schneiderman created stand out in my mind:
- Efficiency
- Learnability
- Errors
- Memorability
- Satisfaction
Efficiency
Can users do what they want to do quickly, simply, and without a lot of fuss? Or do they need to fight your software and perform circus contortionist acts to do what they want to do?
Learnability
Have you designed your software, menus, buttons, and tabs so they are easily understandable, even for a first-time user? Or is a first-time user completely lost and unable to proceed without a manual or a training session?
Errors
This is strongly related to learnability – how many errors do new users make? Do they continually make the same or same kind of errors? If they make an error, how easy is it to reverse, correct, or undo the error?
Satisfaction
How do users feel while they are using your application? After? Is it frustrating? Do their stress levels rise? Does the software give them a feeling of competence and power, or ignorance and failure?
. . .
As mentioned previously, there are a million other factors that influence software usability. And it can be hard to measure – there’s usually not a binary yes/no answer.
But if your software scores high on these five attributes with users, chances are you have strong usability. And, chances are people will like the software well enough to use it, talk about it, and maybe even purchase upgrades for it.
I’m working on a usability project for desktop software right now, focusing on “UI strings.”
UI strings are the messages that you see in an application … what it tells you. Obviously, the better these are written, structured, and presented, the easier the application, and the better your experience with it.
Four things are really coming to my mind as I’m going through this. Three of them are directly related to UI strings. They enhance usability when …
- You know what the software will do before you ask it to do it
- The software does exactly what you asked it to do: not more, not less, not different
- If something goes wrong, the software tells you in simple terms what happened, why, and how to fix it (this can be hard!)
The fourth thing is not really about UI strings, but an aspect of the application itself: revocability. Revocability, of course is the opposite of irrevocable (as in: can’t be undone).
The connection to UI strings is that if you know something is revocable … you’re less hesitant to try it and see. And that makes you a more confident and therefore happier user.
The overall goal of UI strings is giving the user the right amount of information at the right time. And the only way to know if you’ve got it right is to do usability testing during and after launch.
Complaints are too easy – I like to blog raves as well as rants.
I’ve just received excellent, above-and-beyond, unexpected great services from two class organizations: Blurb, and the Nielsen Norman Group.
Blurb recently printed the book I did for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. A number of books arrived with scratches. I emailed them, they asked for a photo, I emailed a photo back, and they immediately shipped out new copies.
Nielsen Norman Group publishes usability studies, among other things. I ordered a downloadable product from them, not realizing it was only part of a study and not terribly useful on its own. Upon getting and reading through the study – and realizing that it was not what I needed – I emailed customer service. They immediately refunded my money, and asked me to delete the PDF from my computer, which I did.
Simple, fast, helpful.
In both cases: wow and thanks. You exceeded my expectations.
Every time I see something like this in the mainstream press I think: clueless.
There’s little question the iPhone pulls a lot of great wireless functions and applications into a very cool package. But most of those features aren’t exactly new. Google Maps for mobile? Practically any smartphone user can download the application to his or her device.
It’s not about: is it possible. It’s about: is it elegant, simple, natural, obvious, easy, beautiful, friendly. Most importantly: is it normal. Does it just feel normal to surf the web on your phone, locate and listen to music on your phone, to make make phone calls even.
(In case you’re wondering why Linux isn’t mainstream, that’s why. The answers are no.)
That’s Apple’s primary genius. Not always to be first – but almost always to make wizardry easy, even commonplace … while still being elegant and sexy.
I would bet a lot more money than is in my pocket right now that 50-75% of electronics returned are not, in fact, defective by damage or second law of thermodynamics.
Rather, I suspect they are defective by design.
Today my wife and I fought with our cordless phone system (tip: if it’s a system, it automatically sucks). It’s been phantom-ringing, not connecting, connecting only if you waited three rings, connecting if it felt like it, connecting if the moon was in the right phase and you had thrown a skunk over your left shoulder the previous night.
In other words, haunted.
Does anything suck more than phone usability? I’m talking about cell phones, about home cordless phones … anything but the old-fashioned rotary brick that never died.
We have three phones hooked up on one network, which we futzed with for about half an hour. In the end, we de-registered all the phones (i.e., told the main base station to forget about their existence) and then re-registered all the phones (i.e., told the main base station that they existed).
And now there is domestic bliss in the Koetsier household again, our fifth-grade daughter can phone her friends with impunity, and my wife’s sister can tie up the phone all night. (I, of course, regard phones as instruments of the devil and never use them unless poked with almost-molten cattle prods. After all, mothers might be calling. Or people who – ugh – might want me to do something. Cell phones, on the other hand, I will relunctantly answer, if no other alternatives exist. But that’s business, and I get usually paid for it, so I have no choice.)
But the point – and yes, there is a point – is that a couple times throughout the whole process we felt like chucking it all in, boxing up all the phones, and returning them. Obviously, they were broken. Obviously, they were not working. Obviously, we should be given a full refund.
I wonder how often that happens. How often does perfectly fine gadgetry (read: functioning with specs as designed) get returned simply because people can’t figure out how to make it work?
I would not be shocked if the answer is more than half.
And that’s got to cost somebody a whole lot of money. In comparison to which designing in usability starts to look cheap.
Agree?
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
