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Usability News Archive

July-December 2000

By Kristoffer Bohmann

December 2, 2000
Newspapers out of control. World Radar recently launched a news service that provides overview of most news stories published in all larger Danish newspapers. So far, the response from the established news industry has been very negative. Editors-in-chief from leading newspapers even accused the new service of being a parasite and thief (in Danish) because they take content without giving anything back.

I agree on this viewpoint but find it less relevant to the news industry. The thing to worry (or get excited) about is that news distribution sites such as World Radar are making it possible for news readers to go to one source to find the stories they want, while ignoring other stories. This is the way to manage your attention in an information-abundant world (without violating copyrights!). The likely result is a deep change in the way news is produced and consumed. Newspapers can no longer control the way (links to) their stories are distributed.

I predict that todays leading newspapers will be reduced to insignificant players in the Danish news industry by 2003 if they fail to respond effectively to this disruptive technological change. The time horizon may even be shorter due to the fast performance improvements in online search and personalization technologies. Impatient online news readers don't want to read 20 stories to get the three stories they want -- when they can get the three stories in a few clicks.

My advice to the established news industry is to read The Innovator's Dilemma by Harvard-professor Clayton M. Christensen (online review). Christensen reports how leading companies in the disk drive industry were wiped out by attacking firms because they failed to understand and respond to radically new technologies and (therefore!) competitive circumstances.

November 14, 2000
Why Primary Navigation Must Die. Users mainly ignore primary navigation bars because the information featured is less relevant to their tasks. Further, navbars' 1-3 word descriptions of content are hard to understand and suffer from lack of context.

November 2, 2000
Homepage goals. NY Times: The home page has to do three things:

• Tell the user whose site they're on,
• tell them what they can do on the site, and
• where to go to get what they want.

• URLs are now visible and remarkable simple. You can actually bookmark and email URLs. Very nice!
• The homepage is more usable than before. Content is presented directly on the homepage (once it has downloaded :-) without opening any new browser windows. The old site opened several new windows and required country selection before entering the site.
• Browser window size has been optimized to a 800x600 display making usage more comfortable. Still, users need to browse a lot of pages to find the products they are looking for -- only six products are shown on product overview pages.
• Text sizes have become slightly larger. However, text sizes remain non-changeable making reading hard for users with reading disabilities.

Navigation support is shown as an attempt to help users understand where they are (e.g., shop:men:walk) - unfortunately it is neither obvious enough nor used consistently. Back-button does not work from homepage to the previous website.

Bottom-line: Boo.com no longer has the provocative/innovative Web design that helped make it famous (and contributed to its financial death).

October 22, 2000
Usability Problems to Fix Today. List of common usability problems that are easy to fix on most well-organized small- and mid-sized websites. Including optimal window sizes, good text sizes, no pop-up windows, and no reset/cancel buttons.

October 11, 2000
Boxman.com suspends payments. Music reseller Boxman.com has suspended its payments and is close to bankruptcy. The company is among the largest online music sellers in Europe. In my usability review of Boxman.com two weeks ago, I pointed out that the site suffered from several usability problems, including:

• Site search is the only way to find products, yet search results are of poor quality.
• Product page URLs are hard to bookmark and email to a friend due to frames.
• Content is not visible enough on product pages.

See also: Usability review of Boxman.com and screenshots (Warning: 141 KB)

October 10, 2000
Effective search results. Search result pages are often hard to use because users are unable to find the needed information and search results are presented in ways that are tough to comprehend. Business suffers if poor search features prevent users from finding and ordering the products they want.

September 28, 2000
Against Non-Standard Link Colors. User tasks are carried out faster and better with sites that use standard link colors as opposed to non-standard. The main reason: Users are more aware of where they have been and can go next.

September 27, 2000
Usability Review: Boxman.com. Product pages use buy buttons that are too small to be noticed and moving graphics that steal attention. Navigating the product pages is difficult due to problems with site search results and complete lack of a browsable link structure.

September 20, 2000
Apple adds 1-click ordering. Apple license patented 1-Click ordering technology to optimize their ordering process. Apple now claims to be The easiest computer to use is now the easiest computer to buy.

Well, I guess 1-click ordering is just not good enough. Apple Store makes several usability mistakes, including:

• Apple Store homepage: It is not obvious to the user that he is in the Apple Store. The store logo should be more visible and located in the left side, not right side.
• Response times are slow due to heavy use of graphics.
• Headers are graphical elements. Styled text is better because it is scalable and downloads faster.
• Links are replaced with fancy buttons making it difficult to see exactly where to click.
• Configuring computers is made extremely complex. Choosing computer functionalities from long forms is a usability nightmare. Fewer options and radio buttons and check boxes would have been better in most cases. The entire configuration process is further disturbed by lots of irrelevant pictures of monitors and other deliverables.
• Back button doesn't always work. I was unable to move from Apple Store and back to Apple.com. Pretty nasty mistake!
• General navigation is used despite the fact that users rarely take time to learn about site structures. General navigation options should be available from the homepage only to focus user attention on sub-pages.

September 19, 2000
Micropayment: Stephen King self-publishes novel. Horror-writer Stephen King has partnered with Amazon.com to self-publish his newest novel, The Plant. Users are asked to pay one dollar per chapter downloaded but can also get the content first and come back to pay later. According to King users have paid for 75 percent of the 152,132 chapters downloaded after 7 days.

September 12, 2000
Web usability reviews (update: link no longer active) are offered by Kristoffer Bohmann.

1. The client and Kristoffer agree on critical user tasks for the website via phone and email.
2. Kristoffer writes a report (5-10 pages) listing identified usability problems and redesign suggestions. Problems are rated by their relevance to users' performance.

August 9, 2000
Usability Review: Ordering Process at Bokus.com. Ordering books at Bokus.com is made difficult because buttons are not visible enough, non-standard links and terms are used, and ordering information cannot be edited before submitting. Consequently, users make more errors in the ordering process and ordering takes more time than necessary.

August 7, 2000
Competing against patents. I was left rather confused by a recent column by Jakob Nielsen about usability differences between two fulfillment providers - Amazon.com versus Wordsworth. First, Nielsen states that usability matters. Usability at Amazon.com is better than Wordsworth.com. Result: Users buy from Amazon, not Wordsworth.

Wordsworth could, however, change the situation by improving their ordering process. (1) Use the standard term shopping "cart", not "bag". (2) Add confirmation screen that shows the shopping cart and its contents. (3) Make the checkout button more visible.

Second, branding matters more than usability (at present). Amazon wins in the short run because users trust Amazon more. So, any usability improvement made by Wordsworth will have little or no effect on sales. Why bother... ;-)

Third, technological changes are likely to make Amazon's current branding advantage obsolete. In particular, reputation management sites will rank less-known sites (e.g., Wordsworth) and make users more likely to buy from them if they receive acceptable rankings.

Conclusion: Usability work has no effect (!) if you are competing with Amazon. Instead, sites should sit down and wait (or die), while their affiliates should link to Amazon or become reputation managers.

Implication: Patents are the number one factor that inhibits online capitalism on a large scale (many sellers, many buyers, etc.). The solution is to create open source technologies that destroys the value of ecommerce patents and makes less-known sites more trustworthy.

August 3, 2000
Content Integration Example III. Syndicated news stream: Easy to install and fast response time.

August 1, 2000
News list and weblog usability. News lists need to be highly usable to catch users' attention. Usability of news lists is determined by several factors, including visual page length and quality of headlines and story descriptions.

July 28, 2000
Haburi.com honored but will they stay alive. To my surprise Haburi.com was recently honored as the most important Danish IT personalities and corporate bodies (in Danish). My point of view is quite different. I wonder how the Haburi site manages to stay alive due to it's hard to use design. Being honored at conferences and in the news is often quite different from creating usable technology. I predict that Haburi will be in deep financial trouble or even bankrupt in one year (when they have spent $13 million recently received from investors).

Other sites have used designs that in important ways are similar to the Haburi design - all are either bankrupt or have financial problems. I recently posted two brief reviews of such sites: Boo.com and Toycity.com.

July 26, 2000
Update: Favorite books and articles. Descriptions added to several recommended books and articles:

• Usability Evaluation Methods and Web/Interaction Design
• Technological innovation and modular design
• Capitalism: Austrian economics and intellectual roots of capitalism
• Online reading, including comprehension of online texts and writing for the Web
• Experimental design about advanced statistical methods

• Users can view content on multiple platforms, including the Tomalak homepage, in their email, as syndicated content, or on their Palm or Windows CE device (despite the small screens and low screen resolution of those devises).
• Searchable archives are provided making it possible to go deeper into a subject.
• Several stories are accompanied with related stories from the archives.

Described links on the homepage are presented in a fixed table that is rather small (around 400 pixels). This makes reading of daily links comfortable, while it becomes rather annoying when scrolling 224 described news links in one page.

Table width: 400 pixels

This suggest a trade-off in the design of lists: Users either get more readable lists (400 pixels) suited for few stories or browser-wide lists enabling better overview (and possibly improved by scannable text).

Follow-up comment: Tomalak's Realm has changed the page width to 600 pixels on all archive pages.

July 19, 2000
Aggregated news from multiple sources. My Userland is a so-called weblog, blog, webfeed, or syndication network publishing news from hundreds of online sources in one page. The site extreme in several ways:

• No editorial process, so nearly all submitted content is published. Therefore, quality of content varies from layman comments to more credible news services, including Wired News.
• Anybody can contribute by uploading XML files or use their browser.
• Update frequency: Content is updated hourly and impossible to keep up with for users.
• Users (who have registered) can select among current contributors, while they are unable to avoid irrelevant future contributors and their stories. Contributors are not rated or prioritized by any criteria. For instance, content could be prioritized by asking users How useful did you find this story? The resulting ratings can be used to emphasize high-quality contributors. Contributes should not be equal but based on their relevance in different contexts.

The technology has large potential in commercial settings. For instance, a product review site may offer it's services to online stores. The product review site reaches more readers, while the stores competing stores add new information to their product pages making it easier for customers to buy.

One final comment: My Userland does a poor job when presenting information. At least 50 percent of the available page width is wasted on white space without improving readability. A redesign may improve readability by using the full screen width online and on print.

July 18, 2000
Usability Review: Toycity.com. Toycity.com is hard to use for users who don't know exactly what they want. The lacking ease of use has three main sources: Content is close to useless, navigation is tough, and response times are long.

July 14, 2000
Valuing Usability Programs. Perhaps the most effective way to communicate the economic value of usability programs is to make cost-benefit calculations. Practical tools for usability cost-benefit analysis at the task-level are presented.

July 13, 2000
Remote usability testing. Vividence offers remote usability testing using a modified browser:

• Task bar displays the test user's current task (1-2 sentences) to help him stay focused. All user steps and possibly task performance times are recorded for research purposes. A log analysis can then be used to analyze user actions in the light of their tasks.
• Written comments can be made about user opinions and ideas when the test is running. As URLs are recorded for each user step, usability researchers can compare the performance of users depending on which path they follow to find the needed information.
• Once test users believe they have solved the current task they can submit their answer using a special button.
• Finally, users can simply choose to give up the current task and proceed to the next.

The browser makes remote usability studies more realistic and make it possible for researchers to collect detailed information about user behavior. Also, test users can be selected on a global scale making test users more representative.

Usability problems are revealed as users submit wrong or insufficient answers or give up. Also long answer times will indicate design problems that need further examination.

July 12, 2000
Content Integration Example II. A stream of daily updated news is presented as an example of easy content integration. News is delivered and updated by an external site.

July 9, 2000
Making URLs Predictable. URLs that are easy to predict make it easier for users to type in a URL or link to pages. It is shown how proven usability heuristics can be used to evaluate a design component: URLs.

July 6, 2000
Calculating Usability Effects. Time to complete a task and number of errors per task are suggested as key metrics when evaluating usability effects of redesigns. The metrics are based on actual user behavior, not user opinions or attitudes.

July 5, 2000
Future living. The 26-year DotComGuy, formerly named Mitch Maddox, is showing the world what the Internet can do. For a year he has restricted himself from leaving his Dallas townhouse and its back yard, while buying all necessities and luxuries exclusively online. These include groceries, workout room, postmodern furniture, pets and gourmet food. In DotComGuy's view, food is the easiest item to order online, while shoes are the most difficult since every manufacturer makes different sizes.

July 4, 2000
User Performance Metrics. 30 user performance metrics for informal usability evaluations. Including first-time user time to complete task.

July 4, 2000
Amazon use fewer store tabs. Amazon has now reduced their store tabs from 15 to 5. While this is an improvement, Amazon should still remove all store tabs because user performance is slowed down when they have too many choices.
July 8: The 15 store tabs are back. The site is probably doing some experimenting.

July 3, 2000
Useful Features are Not Always Usable. Differences between useful and usable features are discussed and a brief usability framework is presented.

July 2, 2000
Fewer store tabs, faster user interaction. Amazon.com plans to reduce its use of store tabs from 15 to two or three permanent and five temporary tabs. Store tabs are used for general site navigation and has so far been presented on top of all pages. The design improvement creates a simpler site most likely with improved usability. Why? Impatient Web users do not take the time to learn about 15 stores, so Amazon's practice has wasted valuable pixels.

• January-June 2000 (20) - Google claims market leadership - Are hyperlinks patented? - Modelling user tasks - Eye Tracking Study