The Web 2.0 Blog » Usability

Usability Questionnaire

I came across this questionnaire today that covers some common aspects relating to usability. I’d encourage you to fill it out, if only because you get to see the in progress results at the end. Some of the results are eye opening, and I found myself voting against the vast majority in at least one case (although I would put this down to me being a Mac user, and therefore used to the close/expand buttons appearing in the top left, not top right).

Some of the other questions are literally split 50/50, like where to place the submit button, bottom left or bottom right. On that one at least, I would argue that for the vast majority of forms you wouldn’t want the “Reset” button, a view shared by usability Guru Jakob Nielsen.

Take the Survey now. Any results surprise you?

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Design Considerations for the Web 2.0

For a long time, web design was handled by those with the necessary technical skills to build websites. It was often the same person doing both the front, and back end of a website. These are two very different skills and really, one should lead on to the other. The more you look at Web 2.0 services, it becomes obvious which ones have spent time, money and expertise on their interfaces, and those that have not. But of course the Web 2.0 isn’t all about the big sites, this applies as much to those going through Blog designs as anyone else. To emphasize the areas where you can succeed and fail in designing a Web 2.0 site, I’ve picked out a handfull of aspects that you need to consider, and what you should consider for each. So let’s get started.

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5 Usability Problems that Web Apps Need to Overcome

Looking through the hundreds of popular web apps that are out there, it seems as if the same few UI problems keep cropping up. Some have been solved to some extent where some have simply been ignored. So, I think its time to “out” those little problems so they can be beaten back with good interface design.

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Usability Watch - Why can’t I do what I want to do!?!

I’ve been shopping round for a new car recently and that means I inevitably have to get some (outrageous) insurance quotes. In the UK there’s a website called confused.com which is basically a screen scraper service that goes around multiple companies and is meant to get you the cheapest quote. Strangely, the cheapest quote I got from them was about the same as the most expensive quote I got when I went through the process manually, but that’s for another day.

On the the point! I’ve used the site before to get quotes, last time I was looking for a car in fact, so I duly signed in using my details. Upon sign in, I was presented with the following screen you can see to the right. So why is this such a poor screen? Well, put yourself in my shoes, I hadn’t visited the site in a while and was coming back to get a new quote. With that in mind, what’s missing from that screen? Thats right, it seems as though all I can do is visit and view existing quotes. So where do we go from here? I assumed this was just because I was revisiting and I had outstanding quotes, so I hit “Previous” in search of a more usefull opening screen, but no, nothing, nada. Turns out, that if you want to create a new quote, you have to go and visit one of your existing quotes. Why? This is the sort of interface and usability madness that drives me mad, excuse the pun. To put it simply, I’m just as likely to want to create a new quote as revisit an old one, so those options should be on par. The other option that should clearly be available is to update my details. Hell, I want to input my details once and then just reuse them over and over. At the moment, while it pre-populates the fields with your pre-entered details, theres no way to just choose a car and hit submit. With the amount of information some insurers ask for, it would save some serious time, and just seems like common sense.

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Usability Watch - Google Special

Google Google Logo is rightfully hailed as one of the great masters of user interfaces but some of their design and development practices lead to inconsistencies and poorly thought out decisions. Personally I’m a huge fan of many of Google’s interfaces. Gmail is still years ahead of anything else out there and they still have the most usable search interface around (excluding the point mentioned below). Unfortunately you can’t help but wonder what the Google suite would be like if they had someone with overall responsibility for interface design and consistency. There also seems to be an unwritten rule that no bad words may be said against Google. Unfortunately this really benefits no one. Users get lulled into acceptance and Google rests on their laurels. So I’ve taken it on myself, as part of the new “Usability Watch” feature, to point out some of the strange usability issues that you may come across when using Google’s services.

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New Feature - Usability Watch

We’re starting a new feature here on the Web 2.0 Blog, Usability Watch. The basic idea is that whenever I come across a glaring lapse in common sense when it comes to usability, I’ll post it here. I’ve already got a few beauties lined up. Oh, and for the good of us all, I won’t limit this to Web 2.0 applications and sites. Everyone is fair game. And if you’ve got a usability crime, please feel free to let us know!

To get us all warmed up I thought I’d post this victory for stupidity over common sense.

The observant amongst you would have noticed that the style of that message is very Mac Like. And you would be spot on, I am currently using a Mac. So, really, what options does this give me? I can either

Buy a new computer that has Windows on it - or -
Leave the site never to return

Can you guess what I did yet? Its never a good idea to build a service that is bound to an operating system, or browser, especially when people are increasingly accessing the web in new and exciting ways. And, for what its worth, I had never been to, or heard of, zango.com so they have lost a potential customer.

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Cleaning with AJAX

As someone who has a real ‘thing’ for usability I’m cosntantly astonished that AJAX is used to complicate and baffle users. As if the non-standard navigation on websites wasn’t enough we’ve now got these new behaviours that don’t follow HTML rules to consider as well. What we really need is to clean up the use of AJAX and make sure that when the word is mentioned as part of site development, its the designers and user interface specialists that suggest it, not the developers.

In fact, AJAX should only be used to solve a problem that can’t be solved with regular static pages. I would add a very loud caveat to that though, and that is a problem doesn’t necessary have to be a bad thing, but, more likely, is an internal design problem. We can apply this fairly simply to some popular Web 2 applications. How about gmail, what ‘problem’ did they solve by using AJAX? See after the jump…

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Standardising the unstanderdisable

As some of you may have read in a previous post, I’m a recent convert to Mac OSX. One of the problems I’m having is that my tried and tested ways of working in Windows are now being challenged for the first time in ten plus years. I had these pre-conceived notions of how an OS should work, and they just don’t hold true for OSX. Take downloads for example, in windows I download a program, probably zipped. I then unzip it and run the installation executable file, done and done. Compare this to the OSX process. Typically it will be a dmg file I download (sometimes compressed), I have to “mount” this file and then do whats required, which is usually just dropping the .app file into my applications folder.

Am I getting to the point yet? Well, yes. If you consider the fairly common process of downloading and installing a program in the two operating systems you get a feel for how differently they perform. And bare in mind this is just one very small aspect of what they do, imagine how different things like system administration could be. The other thing to bare in mind is the fact that these are both locally residing operating systems, imagine the extra confusion that could potentially be introduced when we consider remotely hosted operating systems and working environments (is that the point I see on the horizon?).

I may have picked operating systems, and I accept (and am gratefull of the fact) that we are a long way away from having stable, reliable, usable and standard hosted operating systems but the same principals apply to applications. The point is we already have this added third dimension of confusion (trade mark pending) with the proliferation of web apps. The one thing we don’t have currently is any consistency, and this causes huge usability headaches. This is something I’ve harped on about before, within an OS you have accepted standards for interacting with you applications. In OSX, hitting control and , brings up preferences, in Windows Alt and F4 closes the active Window etc. This truly fundamental level of predictable design is sadly lacking in Web apps. In fact, there only seems to be one standard. If text is editible in line, then highlight it in Yellow when the user mouses over it, and that seems like a forced standard.

What I would like to see are some evolved standards for web applications, its not too much to ask. My concern is that one of the big companies that offers web applications (Google, MS, Yahoo, I’m looking at you) will accidently create standards. All it takes is a suite of applications to take off and the others will follow.

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Flash Vs AJAX

AJAX is very much the new kid on the block, he’s smart, he’s popular and damn, all the ladies love him. A bit like the Fonz in some respects. One flash of that jacket (read: no refresh forms with fancy effects) and everyone is swooning. The problem with AJAX, much like the Fonz, is that its all too easy to overlook the flaws.

So what exactly are the problems with the Fonz? Well for starters, he was awfully promiscuous, so inevitibly, for the time, was a carrier of multiple STDs, then theres the hair, surely a fire hazard if ever I saw one. Wait, I’ve expanded on the wrong point there (eyyyyyy etc.). So what are the problems with Ajax, and just whats going on in the world of Flash (would Flash be Tom Bosley possibly?). Read on…

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Object Focused Design Versus Function Focused Design

This is the first in a series of posts on usability, attacking the basics of Web applications, and covers breaking down your menus based on the approach your site is taking.

I’m going to use two terms in this article and discuss the merits and drawbacks to both approaches. The first term is Object Focused Design. This is a way of navigating a sites functionality based on objects. To the user, this means that they select the object and then select the action they want to perform on that object. A Function Focused Design is where the user selects the function they want to perform and then chooses the object they want to perform the action on. Two examples are below:

A user selects a contact from their address book and then hits Delete, the contact is deleted. This is Object Focused Design.
A user selects to delete a contact from their address book, the address book displays a list of contact, the user selects one which is then deleted

I’m sure you can all come up with examples of both approaches and probably situations where one was used but it should have been the other. So in what situations should each approach be used, and should there be overlap?

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