Category Archives: Usability

My bed…

Posted by Tommy on June 2, 2008 Comments Off

I’ve just discovered this site: User centered, which “studies the design of every day things”, and it got me thinking:

Is it possible for a bed to suffer from poor usability? I ask, because I think mine does. Not in the truest sense, in that it is perfectly comfortable and I don’t particularly suffer from poor sleep, however, I do seem to be stubbing my toe on its out-turned legs with worryingly regularity.  My wife said that if I was a monkey I would have learnt by now! Maybe its just my big feet.

Photo to follow.

For FAQs sake.

Posted by Tommy on May 27, 2008 Comments Off

I haven’t written in a while, mainly because of a new house, painting and a patio!

Frequently Asked Questions, they seem to be the bain of my life. There seems to be a continued obsession with creating site content purely based around (usually un)frequently asked questions. Interestingly user interviews do quite often throw up FAQs as a requirement of a site:

“A list of FAQs with the answer to my question should be on a site about…”

Realistically though, who would enjoy or even tolerate having to trawl through a list of 35 unstructured FAQs? Certainly not me and certainly not any users I have observed within usability tests. The key with the user interview as that the user wants to find the answer to their question, not necessarily how this answer should be presented.

So, exactly what purpose do they serve and is there a place for them? If they were truly frequently asked then surely the sites (non-FAQ) content should be answering these questions as standard. Sites should be ensuring that their site structure makes finding the answers to questions which are asked frequently by real users usable and intuitive, it is no-longer enough to simply compile a long list of FAQs and use your web site as a dumping ground for them.

CAPTCHA if you can

Posted by Tommy on January 10, 2008 Comments Off

Internet security is always top of the agenda and new security technology is continually being released. Although first coined in 2000 CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) technology has only really become more prominent over the last couple of years. CAPTCHA attempts to distinguish between a computer and human by asking you to type in some hard to decipher random characters represented by an image, the idea being that any automatic spamming bots can’t figure out what the characters are (through image recognition) so therefore can’t register/log in to spam the website in question. It’s more of a reverse turin test because the Computer is testing the human rather than vice versa.

An example of a CAPTCHA image, courtesy of Wikipedia.
A CAPTCHA Image - Thanks Wikipedia

Certainly this is a clever solution to the problem of spamming and mass automated marketing but does it work? Well, no solution can be 100% secure and as some research at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada) suggests CAPTCHA is certainly not.

There are of course both usability and accessibility issues with CAPTCHA. Audio versions of CAPTCHA try to allow users who are visually impaired to pass the “test”. Though there is some debate as to how effective these are due to the background noise required to prevent audio recognition.

My personal experiences of CAPTCHA aren’t all that great; sometimes I have found the characters completely undecipherable and have had to refresh the image (where this is available) until something I can understand is displayed.

I sympathize with the websites as I can see why they are using CAPTCHA, after all who would visit a forum which had been completely overrun with marketing spam? However, is it worth potentially alienating or frustrating users of your site? After all, it is the website (a potential business) which should be convincing the user (a potential customer) to register and potentially spend their money there. Not the user which should be convincing the website that they are suitable to use the website. If a website annoys someone and isn’t usable then they’ll simply go somewhere else. With more and more advanced spam detection available websites should be employing a system which combines automatic detection with pre-post moderation to prevent mass-marketing/spamming.

Click where?

Posted by Tommy on November 20, 2007 1 comments

I have always been a proponent of the don’t use “Click Here’s” for links rule. The idea that links which don’t clearly tell the user where they are going are confusing to users and should be replaced with more descriptive links; ideally identical to the title of the page or document being linked to. A user shouldn’t have to click on a link to find what it is linking to.

<edit>
Of course I failed to mention that anyone using a screen reader with a link roster is going to be presented with a series of ‘Click Heres’.
</edit>

However I have recently heard murmurings of research which suggests to the contrary. Because of the instructional call to action nature of a click here link it has been suggested that this actually encourages users to click on something. The user sees the words click here so does!

I’m yet to be convinced and would suggest that maybe it is because the user is left with little else to click (i.e. there are no other more descriptive links) or the other links are not necessary clearly identifiable as links.

Maybe a compromise would work: “Click to see our latest menu”.

This is definitely something I’m going to keep my eye on during my next round of user tests.

Do what they do not what they say

Posted by Tommy on October 28, 2007 Comments Off

Comments and feedback from users are good but it is often more valuable to watch what a user does.

Recently I observed a user test in which a user had been given a specific user goal to complete; after clicking into an area of the site and successfully completing the goal (and proclaiming so) they promptly said:

“I wouldn’t have clicked into this area to find this information.”

Shock horror, do we now dismiss the successful completion of the user goal as invalid? No, the fact is on this specific occasion the user did click into the area and even was satisfied they had found the content, this obviously counts for something. I would even go as far as saying what a user does counts for more than what they say.