Posts Tagged ‘usability’


Eliminate Jargon?, or Use Jargon to Eliminate?

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

Read almost any list of “top 10″ usability mistakes and you will most likely find a warning about using jargon. This is one of the first usability issues I learned about in college when I was studying (jargon warning) Human-Computer Interaction. But like most usability rules, this one does not apply in all cases.

Enter Rockstar Group, a management consultant firm that goes out of their way to use marketing jargon — many terms coined by industry leader Seth Godin. Their website includes terms such as “The Dip”, “Magic Quadrant”, and “Tribes”, with no noted definition or explanation. What’s interesting about these terms/phrases is that Rockstar uses them to their advantage, weeding out users who most likely don’t fit the audience they are targeting. If you don’t understand what “The Dip” is, you would likely be wasting both your time and their’s by contacting them. They don’t want to educate their clients on these terms and ideas, they instead focus on simply providing results. Rockstar Group’s ideal clients already know these terms, and are therefore more likely to be in line with their business philosophy. Users who don’t know these terms will likely be confused enough to not contact them, disqualifying themselves from the targeted group.

The lesson? You know those times when are contacted about your product or services by people who are simply not a good fit? That’s most likely your fault. Use your website to help those people eliminate themselves as a potential client before they bother to contact you. Rockstar Group found a way to speak to their real target audience in a meaningful way, while making it clear to other site visitors that they would not likely be a good fit for the services they provide.


UX Health Check: Hacks

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

So…your product’s been on the market for a few months now, and it’s just come to your attention that someone had the nerve to build a hack for it. You may be thinking to yourself: hacks are just “cheats”, work-arounds developed by rogue, fringe users — but if someone went out of their way to create an add-on, shortcut, or alternative use of your product, what’s really going on here?

If people are building hacks, your product most likely has a UX problem in one (or more) of the following ways:

  • Usability – Your product is too hard to use, so someone took on the task of making it easier to use.
  • Usefulness – Your product is not actually useful to your audience without the addition of certain features, rearrangement of the work-flow, etc.
  • Overlooked Target Audience – You may have set out to build a product for group x, but someone from group y discovered that (with a little tweaking) the product works very well, maybe even better, for their purposes.

If you’re in this situation already, consider it a learning experience: a chance to improve your product and/or an opportunity to capitalize on a new market segment. So someone went out and found a better way to use your product, make it more useful, or reinvent it for an undiscovered audience? Hopefully, next time this someone will be you.


Dear Google: please fix your login box

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

The Google account login has been a thorn in my side for quite some time. It is a usability nightmare and here’s why:

  • It breaks the browser password saver – Rather than a simple login form, Google uses Ajax to authenticate your login credentials before moving on to the next page, making it so most browsers are unable to store your password. Note: This is also a completely unnecessary use of Ajax.
  • If you have multiple accounts, you have to re-login each time – Like many users, I have a few different Google account logins — a few business accounts and one personal. The thing is, I use one account for Google Voice and Google Wave, and the another one for Google Analytics. This means that each time I switch services, I have to log out of one account and log into another. And again. And again. And again. Oh and don’t forget your passwords are not saved in the browser for each switch. Major fail.
  • It forces you to login to all services for an account, but doesn’t make it easy to get from one to the other – If you are going to treat it like an integrated system, treat it like an integrated system!

Google Login Box SmallMy suggestions are simple: kill the Ajax and allow for easy switching between accounts (like this GreaseMonkey hack already does).

These are the types of user experience issues you expect from a newbie playing around with Ajax, not Google. Observing just a few users while they try logging into their accounts would make it clear that the current login system is an issue.


Your job: make your customers feel smart

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

As Donald Norman stated in his book, Things That Make Us Smart, “The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, memory, thought, and reasoning are all constrained…The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities.”

Why is usability such a major aspect of the user experience of a product? Because an easy-to-use product makes a user feel smart.

When someone can sit down to a new software application and just use it, without reading any documentation, without watching an intro video, either consciously or subconsciously, they will feel smart. This “smart” feeling creates a positive emotional attachment to your product, creating a better user experience, and helping keep that user as a customer.

Now, does your product or service make your customers feel smart?


Categorization is what the mind does

Monday, October 5th, 2009

In an article about how infants think before they learn words, Lisa Oakes, a developmental researcher at UC Davis Center for the Mind and Brain, stated, “Categorization is what the mind does. To learn categories is the fundamental way that the mind deals with too much information.”

That said, how much time did you spend thinking about and planning for the information architecture (i.e. categorization) of your website or application?

Good categorization (based on your specific target audience and how they think), lessens the “mental energy” needed to navigate your site, making it easier to use and creating a more enjoyable experience.


Can you repeat that…again?

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

Don’t you just relish the thought of going through automated phone support systems? You punch the keys to enter your account information, and then hold for 10 minutes just to have the customer service rep ask you for the same information all over again.

These types of scenarios repeat themselves during personal interactions with the service industry all too often. And don’t forget the websites that make you enter the same information more than once.

Think about it for a moment… how much time do you spend providing unnecessary information, or repeating some information to businesses you frequent?

During an interaction with a client – whether in person, on the phone, or through your website interface – show them you value their time. If they invest their time in telling you their name, email address, or contact number – write it down; save it in your phone or computer later; heck, write it on a napkin, but above all else, don’t make them repeat themselves later.

Take this scenario a step further – seek out and streamline steps within your business processes which cause clients to unnecessarily invest their time. Your clients will notice you took the time to prevent wasting theirs.


Using CrazyEgg? Don’t forget to track inactive elements.

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

CrazyEgg is an easy to use tool for visualizing web analytics. It’s a great took and if you are not using it yet, you should be. By creating graphical overlays it enables you to better track and understand the data such as the location of clicks on the page.

One feature product users often overlook however is CrazyEgg’s ability to track clicks on non-active elements (i.e. those that are not click-able links).

CrazyEgg
During usability testing we often see users attempting to click on static site content which they believe to be active. This is great data to collect and analyze to improve design.

By using CrazyEgg’s “track other clicks” feature you can identify these inactive elements that users think are links — and therefore, should be, or need to be redesigned — and improve the overall usability of your website.


Feature idea for Google Analytics: Change-Point Markers

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

We love Google Analytics – it’s a great, free service and we use it on all of our websites.

Google Analytics
However, one must-have feature we would add is the ability to add change-point markers to the time line. A change-point would be any time you make a change to the content or design that you think will improve performance. A major change-point would be a full site redesign, but it could be something a small as a change in your call-to-action wording.

Allowing users to mark when these changes were made would allow them to better analyze the effect of the change they made, improving the usefulness and usability of the tool.