You are not your users

You were asked to design a website for a new client. As always, you prepared 5 samples for the customer to choose from. Come decisions time, the customer chose a design you think was not the best. It is the design you didn’t spend as much time as the others. You only spent 10 minutes on it because the presentation is 15 minutes away and you have no choice because your company promised 5 designs.

You say to yourself, “Gosh, this guy has no taste!” But it’s OK. He’s the one paying the bills.

How many times have you been in this situation?

Many designers and software developers think users are like them. Whenever they get a customer inquiry on how to do this in their webapp or software, they can’t resist saying “What?! It’s so obvious!”

As designers and developers, we should accept the truth the users are our exact opposite. We can read a stack dump, they can’t. We know what a proxy error is, they don’t. We know how to hold Ctrl-key and drag using the mouse, they would crinch at the thought of doing it. Yes, even that dude with a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology can become stupid when holding a mouse.

99.99% of all companies will say they are customer-oriented; that they design their products with usability and experience a top priority. Is it really true or is it just one of the many marketing lies?

Gather your team and ask them to find ways to improve the navigation in your webapp or lessen the time to complete a task. Chances are your team won’t get excited. After all, these are not cool stuffs.

What if you ask them to use Ajax, tags, RSS, or make your application “Web 2.0″ enabled. That would get them excited and pumped-up.

Top 10 signs your team has usability issues

Many of your users have complained about the complexity of your software product. As a very customer-oriented CEO (who isn’t?), you gather your team and ask them how to make the software more user friendly. Here are their suggestions.

10. We need a splash screen.
9. Shrink the fonts MORE so that we can put more contents at the top.
8. We’ll just put an “Under construction” sign.
7. Usability testing is not needed. I am a user, and I find it easy to use.
6. Well, they should read the F*CKING manual.
5. How can our customers be so stupid! It’s so obvious.
4. If you stop and think about how the interface works for a second, it makes complete sense.
3. We can use Ajax to fix that.
2. We need to start doing some usability tests before our launch next week.
1. Our software is intuitive and user-friendly.

— slightly modified version from Design of Sites

User-Friendly: The Seminar Series

Date
Nov 14, 2006

Time
12:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Location
The Mob
4th Floor
Market! Market!
Philippines

Mouse? Keyboard? Both!!!

Is it user-friendly or not? I wish someone would send me one so I could try.

Check out more about this keyboard (or mouse) at the Combimouse website.

Thanks Sacha for the link.

Web usability tip: 5 questions your homepage must answer

1. What is this?
2. What do you have here?
3. What can I do here?
4. Why should I be here – and not somewhere else?
5. Where do I start?

— Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug

Unfortunately, some websites would rather annoy their visitors by:

1. Showing a very large image of their logo and name in an unreadable font.
2. Instructing the visitors what the “website requirements” are.
3. Including the most annoying website text of all time, “Enter Here“.

Web usability tip: Degrade your website gracefully

How many times have you assumed that visitors to your website will use the same browser and technology as you have in your computer? You have spent countless hours perfecting the design, tweaking the CSS so it will appear flawless in IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, and testing the website in various screen resolutions. Yet when it is time for the boss to comment, all you get is that “why is there a big box in the homepage?” Damn!, your boss forgot to install “Flash”.

There is nothing wrong with using Flash as long as it is done properly . The key thing is not all visitors have Flash installed in their browsers and that you should allow your website to degrade gracefully in this situation. A perfect example of a website degrading gracefully is the Nick.com.

On the other hand, Chikka.com assumes all visitors have “the plugin” installed.

Help us promote usability in the Philippines

A month from now, the usability folks around the world will celebrate the 2nd World Usability Day. Here in the Philippines, my buddy Regnard has organized the User Friendly seminar series. In a single day, there will be seminars in various campuses with topics on web, mobile applications, and consumer devices. Ain’t that cool!?

We have a cool lineup of speakers this year. Dr. Espiritu of De La Salle University will talk about usability engineering. As far as I know, De La Salle University has the only usability lab in the Philippines. Dr. Matias, chairman of the UP Diliman Industrial Engineering Department will share her research on ergonomics and will delight us with analysis of popular electronic gadgets like the iPod. This year, we’ll also have April Cabello, a Certified Usability Analyst, present on the usability of mobile applications. Ms. Cabello is a Usability Manager at Globe Telecoms which is the leading and most innovative telecom company in the Philippines.

Aside from these hotshots, my buddies Rey Mendoza (also a speaker last year) and Alvin Tan will also give presentations. Hans Koch and Luis Buenaventura will talk about Web 2.0 and Liza Flores will cover creativity and usability. I almost forgot, Regnard and I will also share what we know and care about

Please help us spread the word on the usability seminars. I know it is not as funny as the recent PLDT customer service swearing incident but I’m sure this message won’t take up much time and space in your friends mailbox.

As part of my preparation, I have started outlining my presentation and here’s what I have so far:

• Words are part of the interface. How menu, button names, instructions, error messages affect usability.
• Who gives a shit on what you like. We all have feelings and personal convictions what makes an interface user friendly.
• Dumbing us down. Usability is not about treating people as stupid. Or is it?
• Choice Paradox. Consumers want more and more features yet are always overwhelmed with what we give them.
• Blank state design. As they say in the movies, first impression lasts.
• Designers are benevolent dictators. We don’t need to follow the user to become user friendly.

If you have ideas, screenshot, essays, and blog posts that you think I can use, please please give it to me. In return, I will display your name for 30 minutes

YOSSN Website Usability Testing Report

(This report was submitted to YOSSN last February 2006. Since we’re too busy (and lazy) to check the website for updates, some of our comments may have already been addressed by YOSSN. I hope.)

(PDF, 1.1 MB, 28 pages)

Objectives

The objective of this report is to improve the Your One Stop Shopping Network (YOSSN) website, particularly in areas of usability. Web usability and contingency tests are conducted to identify areas for improvements.

The Tests

The tests conducted here are for web usability and contingency design. Essentially, when we perform tests for usabiltiy, we just try look for possible points of confusion where a customer may stop and hesitate. Making customers stop and think is already a bad sign that your website isn’t very forthcoming with them, and it is at this point that most customers decide to leave.

Contingency Tests

The contingency design tests, on the other hand, are specific tasks to measure how well a website handles errors and failures. The tests and procedure were based on the book, “Defensive Design for the Web” by 37Signals.

The following tests are divided into these potential error or error recovery points:

1. Forms
2. URL’s
3. Help
4. Login
5. Search

For each test, a website is given a score from 0 to 2. A score of 2 means that the website properly handles the task specified for the given contingency guideline. A 1 means the error handling is adequate but can be improved, and a 0 means the website fails the test. N/A is given for tasks not applicable to the website.
At the end of the tests, the sum of all the test scores is divided by the highest possible score (number of applicable tests, times 2). This is then multiplied by 100 to get a percentage score.

80% or higher	You are treating your customers well (but there’s always room for improvement, of course)
40% to 79%	Satisfactory – you may be losing some frustrated customers.
below 40%	Your website urgently needs to improve its contingency design.

After conduting 32 tasks, YOSSN got a rating of 39%.

Tasks x 2	62
YOSSN Score	24
Rating	39% (Poor)

Usability tip: Left is best?

According to usability.gov website, “Left is Best” for navigation. Then why is the link on the right?

Why your website does more harm than good

A very useful website brings a lot of good things to the organization or person behind it. A company website can serve as its sales and marketing department that works 24×7. A personal website can showcase a person’s capabilities that could land him a high-paying contract work or job.

Tools already exist to develop websites without much hassle. With a lot of technical details already been taken care of, we should expect organizations to build websites that are useful. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We still encounter websites that do more harm than good.

Self-congratulatory messages

This is the classic “us/our” syndrome. How many times have you seen a company website that proclaims they are the leading supplier of this, and the No. 1 producer of that. Look at the links in a company website and what do you see? “About Us”, “Our qualifications”, “Our clients”, “Our services”, “Our achievements”, etc.

If you want your website to serve your visitors, remember this: visitors care more about their issues and less about how great you think you are.

No valuable content

A website is the perfect repository of intellectual assets like articles, papers, proposals, studies, surveys, and reports. Potentials customers don’t need to ask your sales team for these materials. Customers can download them through your website, examine it, and judge for themselves whether to consider you or not.

Splash pages

Technical people always love to be at the forefront of technology, which is understandable. After all, who wants to be left behind? We use this to justify the use of explosive graphics, streaming videos, and presentation technology that rivals even the best commercial on TV.

Oftentimes, organizations take religiously the phrase “first impression lasts”. These flashy technologies are fun and to some extent, impressive to watch the first time. But they quickly grow old. Just like an award winning TV commercial, we may like it the first time but it becomes annoying when we see it every 10 minutes.

Another problem with flashy introductions is that they are linear. Visitors have to wait for the website to do its “thing” before the user can do “anything”. Fine, why not put an “Skip this” button? If you provide that, how many visitors do you think would actually click the skip button right away? If the number of visitors that skip the introduction far exceed the number of visitors who would watch the introduction, then what is the point of creating it?

Asks too many information

If you want to establish a relationship with a potential customer or at least get permission to send an email, all you need is their email address. You don’t even need to know their name yet, or how many employees they have or when they plan to go to Boracay. Even if you ask them, 99.99% of the time, they would lie. There’s no point in asking other information. Just get their email.

“We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.” – Robert Wilensky

Does it look like your website was built by a monkey?