Usability News July-September 2001 | |
| |
| Home Usability News July-September 2001 | Articles About KB |
Usability News Archive
September 25, 2001
Post Denmark damage international ecommerce. National Danish mail company Post Denmark has begun charging a $5 fee (in Danish) for most packages imported to Denmark from countries outside EU. This fee is making it less likely that Danish consumers will buy from ecommerce sites in US and other countries outside the EU.
Contrary to their previous practice Post Denmark also add the fee to B2B packages. The changed practice is not only increasing Post Denmark's turn-over. It is also affecting the entire B2B user experience as it adds an extra task to Danish users' purchase process. In particular, corporate customers in Denmark must now spend money and time to pay the $5 fee in cash to get a package they already paid online.
The fee is easily making non-EU ecommerce stores less competitive in Denmark. Example: When a user buys a $10 book or other commodity from a US ecommerce store, he will be charged the usual transportation fee, Post Denmark's fee, and 25% Danish sales tax plus. $18.75 in total. Buying the same book from, say, a UK bookstore would automatically save the user $5.
I estimate that Post Denmark earn $8 million/year directly from this fee. The estimate assumes that the fee is added to 5% of all packages handled by Post Denmark. Easy way to exploit a governmental monopoly and make a few extra bucks on things you already do.
September 19, 2001
Help lines. Bad help lines and instructions may form user expectations in unnecessary and dissatisfactory ways. For instance, users who download software via the Web usually need to wait for some time till the process ends. Well-written help lines can create a productive user attitude towards the waiting time (as opposed to an annoyed and dissatisfied attitude). Example:
September 18, 2001
Email notifications: Making unsubscription easy. Unsubscribing email newsletters and other email notification services can be an unpleasant and time-consuming experience. Most unsubscribe problems can be avoided by making the subscribers email visible and linking to an unsubscribe page in all emails.
|
September 11, 2001
Can you own a list? Two years ago Amazon.com and New York Times had a legal dispute about Amazon's unauthorized use of the NY Times bestseller list. NY Times required Amazon to license the list since the Amazon bookstore was devoting an entire section for the list.
A few months ago I looked for update information without finding anything. Now it turns out that the case has been resolved: Amazon uses the list and provides NY Times with sales figures in return.
Read more: NY Times bestseller list on Amazon.com.
September 7, 2001
No breakup. Microsoft will not be split up and the company can continue integrating their browser into the Windows operating system as the U.S. Justice Department have dropped most of their charges. I loved to hear that.
Unfortunately, the worst part of the antitrust case remains an issue: Sanctions will be imposed on Microsoft for anticompetitive practice. This will harm any future company who is skilled enough to create industri standards. Stop whining at successful companies if you value free enterprise.
September 3, 2001
Raison d'être. Ecommerce websites exist because of the products they sell. Once the product has been sold, you can forget the website.
August 27, 2001
Impact. IBM follows my advice on making URLs predictable. A recent IBM article recommends that URLs should be predictable.
Take a look at my Haburi.com review. This ecommerce site was originally developed by IBM. Here is how a URL looked on the site:
| www.haburi.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/ExecMacro/haburi/macros/default_2.d2w/report?dept=5020&checkcookie=Y |
See the point?
August 24, 2001
Microsoft's so-called monopoly. Web users prefer Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to competing browsers for one reason: It's a better product.
August 23, 2001
Designing news lists. Jens Hofman Hansen suggested that I change the way stories are separated in this list of stories ("weblogs") you are reading right now.
| Before: | August 23, 2001 - Link |
| Now: | August 23, 2001 |
Dates are important to tell news list / weblog readers how often new stories are posted on the site. Usually users return more often to sites with frequent updates.
The link was added to make it possible for users to email the story to a friend or business associate. This feature is for expert users who know how to copy a URL and include it in an email. Novice users will only see the story and ignore what they can do with the link. As intended.
August 22, 2001
Logo as emergency exit. David Heinemeier Hansson emailed a comment on my link-like logo. His point of view: Users may become confused by the link color since the logo isn't clickable even though it looks like a link.
I agree. Blue text should always be clickable on web pages because users expect it to be a link. That is why the logo is clickable on all pages on this site, except on the homepage.
The logo is often used by users as an emergency exit from, say, an article page to the homepage. The homepage logo should never link to other pages because it would destroy this emergency exit-function by creating a self-referential loop between the logo and the page the logo would be linking to (and back again).
August 16, 2001
Faster is better. Tom Farrell: When user-testing sites for download speeds, try and allow users to give up or look elsewhere for information. Make the test as open as possible rather than forcing users to follow one specific route to information.
I don't think usability professionals need to test response times in every test session. Still, the issue needs to be on the checklist when conducting user tests to make sure this doesn't make users less willing to use the site.
August 10, 2001
Messy pop-up on Novo Nordisk homepages. Novo Nordisk, a global top 500 leader headquartered in Denmark, is providing an extreme example on why pop-up sucks.
As Danish users enter www.novo.dk to find the Novo Nordisk site, they get one pop-up displaying the intended site. Upon click, two additional windows opens! The top window require users to select language, while the other displays the intended site.
Will designers ever get the message? Pop-ups disturb the user experience. Annoy the user. Remove user attention from content on the actual site. Destroy the back-button. Limit users' ability and incentive to perform. In short, pop-up sucks.
August 7, 2001
Don't listen, watch. According to Jakob Nielsen, usability professionals should never rely on what users say, only what they do. Too often, user opinions and self-reported data don't match reality:
I say this knowing that I could be saying things I think Nielsen and other readers want to hear. And, I may be forgetting other important factors within the usability discipline. ;-)
Bohmann's second rule of usability: Focus on goal-oriented user behavior. Identifying actual user needs, goals, and behavior is the way to develop usable products and services. But first you need to know how to generate those insights: Don't listen, watch.
August 6, 2001
Beautiful site design: Fridgedoor.com. Fridgedoor.com is a highly focused ecommerce site designed in a very competent way:
August 3, 2001
Poor search results on W3.org. Searching on the World Wide Web Consortium website is painful since search results lack relevance. Try this. Search for "HTML" (or anything else) using the official search on W3.org and you will get an irrelevant document as top search result.
Better solution: Use Google to search the site and you get the correct document. W3.org's usability mistake probably happen due to incorrect configuration of the site search.
By the way, users can/should make two choices before doing a "simple public search" on W3.org. I am worried if this is W3's idea of simplicity... I would call it performance overkill.
| |
| Hrm... where is the content? | Ahh, now it works. |
Perceived download time. Users' perceived download time is high when web pages load in several small steps. This is frequently seen on database-generated websites - first top navigation is loaded and a few seconds later content is added. The above screenshots show how the national Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's homepage renders in two steps. Users of slow Internet connections perceives this situation as awkward and annoying (e.g., "what's wrong with this site?").
This does not necessarily make users leave. But the most impatient users will leave to more usable sites if they experience more noice from other design elements such as banner ads and cluttered design. Accordingly, response time remain a priority.
The mistake can be fixed by publishing each web page as plain HTML-documents hourly or daily. This ensures that error-free webpages are loaded in a more fluent way.
Usability engineers often overlook such basic mistakes as they are using high-speed Internet connections as opposed to the slower 56k and ISDN modems used by actual users. Also, evaluators may not browse the site when it has most readers during morning hours, when news breaks, or during lunch break.
August 1, 2001
Jared M. Spool on category design. Jared M. Spool of User Interface Engineering states a number of interesting insights in a recent interview, including these observations on categories vs. search:
July 31, 2001
Frontend Usability InfoCentre has built up a good deal of usability resources. Recommended:
July 29, 2001
Where to put your links. A new study from the Psychology Department at Wichita State University recommends that links are embedded in the text on Web pages. The second-best solution is to put links outside the text.
Embedded links have several advantages:
July 28, 2001
Web writing. Advice on how to write for the Web. The article recommends a brief and vivid writing style, including the following advice:
July 26, 2001
Organizing the Web. New search engine Teoma is using weblogs and link pages to organize the web. In fact, the company is able to build portals without human editors. The technology is useful for buildinging corporate portals, personalized portals, portals/related links about today's news, and other areas where you need to organize and update large collections of links. The technology may not make human edited portals like Dmoz and Yahoo obsolete but it certainly will be complementary to them.
Teoma outperforms other search engines in one critical dimension: They don't use cookies (at present) thereby providing better privacy for heavy users. The company is currently indexing 100 million webpages as opposed to market leading Google's 1,3 billion webpages.
July 25, 2001
Logo mania. Who runs this site? Nielsen Norman Group, AskTog, or Google. ;-)
July 24, 2001
3M.com homepage. The 3M.com homepage has miserable usability. For instance, the homepage doesn't say a (visible) word about products and services offered by the company. So, users must know in advance exactly which offerings they are looking for. Hey, does 3M not want to do business with customers who don't know their products yet? It doesn't look that way.
Now, pretend you are looking for a specific product: 3M Post-it notes. This simple task is almost impossible to carry out successfully. Here is how I did it: 1. Click Printscape on the 3M homepage (visible when mouse is held over one of the colorful pictures...), 2. product catalog, 3. find the category Notes and Signs. You are almost there. Only the main page for Post-it Notes, www.3m.com/Post-it isn't visible. Argh!
My recommendation: Redesign the homepage so it looks more like national 3M homepages. This solution would improve usability on 3M.com with several hundred percent.
July 12, 2001
Response time still matters. Slow response time remain an issue on the Web even for users with high-speed Internet connections.
July 11, 2001
Arbitrary technology taxes. Los Angeles officials believe they have a right to impose property taxes on several satellites. The absurd initiative was rejected by a state board earlier this week. When governments start their creative taxation circus, they usually find lots of other absurd taxation objects. Imagine how similar ideas could be used on the Web:
July 10, 2001
Presenting prices. 10 ways to present a product price.
July 8, 2001
Setting momentum. Frequent introductions of new content and interface elements often help business thrive online. The reason is quite simple. Users are more willing to use and pay for streams of content and fast developing services compared to single content items and low-performing services. Once users return to a provider on a regular basis, they get to know the service and learn what can be expected. It may not be the best performing provider in the world but the performance satisfies the users' purposes. And equally important. Users don't have to spend time checking out new providers at the risk of wasting time and money.
My favorite example is Google who have introduced new interface elements at high pace. They have focused on strengthening their core business while avoiding unrelated business opportunities. Examples:
July 7, 2001
Content by phone. MyYahoo has made a wide range of their personalized content available by phone, including email, voicemail, stock quotes, and more. Several things are interesting about this service:
July 6, 2001
Usability Review: Yellow Page Search on Krak.dk. Too many required choices, too much mouse moving, too weak words, and less obvious options make address search hard on Krak.dk.
July 5, 2001
Design destruction. How incompetence and lack of responsibility clutter up designs. Teamwork works when each member in the team has well-defined responsibilities and competencies. Otherwise not. The latter is actually what often happens when websites and physical products are designed. A vicious cycle is created through lack of respect, lack of responsibility, and plain incompetence.
How the vicious cycle happens: A concept aimed at one core idea is developed by an architect (or a group of architects with well-defined responsibilities and individual expertise). Don't be confused by the word one. One idea can be broad and deep. Like a beautiful song. The gifted architect layouts the design from A to Z. All design elements and ideas are evaluated towards the core idea. Ideas that don't make the test are killed. Removed. At any cost.
Developers and programmers add their ideas at random. Not all ideas fit into the core idea and nobody cares to notice. Managers and marketers demand that extra buttons, links, and pages are added. Only rarely is the core idea taken into consideration as demands are expressed. The site is launched. A few users send their feedback, collected in an unsystematic way. It is user feedback a la "I like this", "I don't like that". This kind of feedback is unfortunate as it lack context : the core idea. Actually, user feedback should only be taken into consideration if it actually inhibits key goals for the site.
Bottom-line: The design becomes cluttered and hard to use. Users don't adopt the site and it becomes a commercial failure, or a mediocre design at best. Another potential dot com crash. Why? Because nobody took full responsibility for the overall design. And those who tried to take responsibility didn't have what it took.
July 4, 2001
Get things done. Well-designed websites make it easy to get answers for questions and types of questions. As pointed out by Steve Krug, you don't always have to provide rich content. Supporting main user tasks is often enough:
When was the last time you heard someone say that they spent a few hours surfing the Web? Most of the time, we just want to get things done: buy airplane tickets, read movie reviews, or learn how to fix the leak in the shower.
July 3, 2001
Compatibility with old browsers. Making sure ecommerce sites work as intended in older browsers is often critical to business. Why? Users can only buy when they are able to use the site. I came across a useful tool for browser compatibility checks.
I tried the tool on a major manufacturing site. The result was an error message: No cookie. To access this site your browser must be accepting cookies. Market leading sites such as Amazon and Yahoo did not make this usability mistake.
Hotwired has a good browser chart that spells how different browser versions comply with main Web technologies. The newest Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator browsers support main Web technologies, while older/other browsers have problems with dHTML, XML, and I-frames. The problems are worse for on Linux and Unix compared to Windows.
The chart is slightly misleading since it only asks if certain features are supported but not included. For instance, Flash often cause problems because users don't have the required plug-ins. See also About.com on compatibility.
July 1, 2001
Newness bias. A large number of web services are highly biased toward the newest content and put insufficient attention to other relevant content.
My advice is to keep as much old content as possible by building up good archives. Keep the old press releases on corporate sites; existing and potential investors will find it useful. Keep the old product pages (remember to add the line No longer available if the product is no longer offered). Supplement lists of new stuff with other relevant list types (e.g., bestseller lists, most popular lists, and related stories/products).
