User experience blog

Shaking up the online property market

By Mru Kodali on 16 March 2010

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Recent news that Tesco and Google may be gearing up to launch property websites could be a wakeup call for letting and estate agents across the UK and can only be good news for the user experience in this sector.

Sites like Rightmove.co.uk are already pretty well established in this space so building market share won’t be a breeze. However, both Tesco and Google are trusted names in the UK and Google already offers property search in the US and Australia, so it should be reasonably easy to port this offering across. Tesco has tried to do this in the past, but had to pull out due to legal challenges from estate agents, but now the Office of Fair Trading has recommended reforms to this industry which will allow the entry of players like Google and Tesco.

Tesco seems to be taking advantage of this by launching a website called iSold which lets people sell their home for a flat £999 fee. Moves like this have the potential to revolutionise the way property is sold in the UK and estate agent take-up may not be a crucial factor, as it could pave the way for increasing numbers of private sales.

Concerns about hidden problems and the plain unfamiliarity with the process tend to be the barriers to private sales at the moment. But the credibility and trust that may come with big names of Tesco and Google, along with detailed guidance for sellers, could alleviate these issues. Either way, user experience will be key and Google will likely focus on this. As a result, others may eventually have to focus on this as well to continue to compete.

If these developments take place, house buyers/sellers and renters could benefit from not only greater choice at lower costs but hopefully a higher bar set for user experience.  Making selling and buying homes easier is not just a great thing for consumers but may well act as an instrument for a quicker economic recovery.

Photo credit: I See Modern Britain via Flickr / Creative commons

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Facebook considered easiest to use social network - I’m dubious

By Trenton Moss on 12 March 2010

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Is it? Really? Personally I’m doubtful, but that’s the conclusion of our recent social network usability poll in which half of the respondents felt that Facebook was the easiest to use social network. We asked people ‘which social networking site do you think is the easiest to use?’ The full results were:

  • Myspace – 4%
  • Facebook – 50%
  • Twitter – 19%
  • Bebo – 1%
  • Friends Reunited – 1%
  • LinkedIn – 5%
  • Other – 7%
  • None of them are easy to use – 12%

Looking at those results, there’s clearly a correlation between the voting and the popularity of the social networks in question - no surprise really because the more you use a website the easier you will find it to use.

The difference between social networks and other websites is that the sites themselves are a pass-time, so users can (and are often happy to) learn how to use them properly. On other sites they usually wouldn’t be prepared to take the time.

I think the results might be very different if you were to have a sample of people that had never used any of these sites before, and you carried out usability testing on all the sites. Given the simplicity of Twitter’s proposition, I would expect that it’s the easiest to use for a beginner as there’s far less to learn compared to say Facebook or  any other social network.

I’d be interested to hear what you make of these results…

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Guest blog - Computers find male voices harder to recognise - Oh dear

By Rhodri Buttrick on 9 March 2010

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On 4 March, I came across an article on the BBC News web site reporting that some researchers at Stamford University and at Edinburgh University found, Computers find male voices ‘harder to recognise’. Now I am male and as I cannot hand write, I have been using voice recognition technology (VRT) since I was 10 years old. So, I “screen read” the article to see what insights it had for me.

When I started using VRT, I could barely read but had to read “training text” for the computer to learn my voice. My mother had to sit behind me, whispering the text into my ear in short phrases, which I repeated into the microphone. I was using Dragon Naturally Speaking version 5. It was hard work, but I persevered as this was the last chance saloon for me as I was unable to write and typing was painfully (literally!) slow. I adopted the “good practices” recommended by the software supplier, such as correcting any recognition errors as I went along using the “Correct That” function, rather than overtyping. The result was I achieved a recognition level of over 98%, talking in a natural way, at normal talking speed.

So, what about the Edinburgh and Stamford Universities’ research?  The BBC report says:

Computers failed to understand men’s speech because they make “umm” and “err” sounds more frequently.

Comment: I could have told them this ten years ago! Of course sloppy speech makes recognition levels bad and perhaps men umm and err more than women! People with speech ticks such as saying “y’know” in every sentence also have problems. Isn’t there and old computing saying of “trash in, trash out”?

Computers made mistakes with words which sound similar and can occur in similar contexts, such as “I saw him” or “I saw them”.

Comment: This is a good point. They ought to try “I scream” and “ice cream”. In one of my Religious Studies essays I had “cheeses of Nazareth” leading his disciples. I have however got round this now and I’ll tell you how in a later blog.

Variations in pitch, tone and speed can also cause the system to misunderstand voices.

Comment: Not for me; even though my voice broke, my good practices carried me through and I can talk as fast I want to.

It then said the research was to “improve the accuracy of automated ticket booking lines.” Ah!!! This research was not for people like me after all. It was all about replacing call centre staff with machines; this software would have to deal with any voice without the benefit of any training! Perhaps, if they crack this problem, it will eventually benefit people who cannot hand write or maybe it will be so expensive, it will remain the preserve of the major corporates.

Only the future will tell; until then, I’ll keep using my Dragon Naturally Speaking software coupled with some common sense good practices.

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Are your PDFs accessible?

By Brigitte Simard on 3 March 2010

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We often get asked about by clients, so I thought I’d also share some thoughts on this matter in this blog post.

Accessible PDFs

PDF files have always been embedded in web pages and that’s not likely to change in the near future. The real challenge here is making sure that the information in the PDF can be accessed by all users, as screen reader and screen magnifier users have traditionally had problems with PDFs. However, screen readers can now read aloud PDF files and they can be magnified by screen magnifiers.

Creating a new PDF

Firstly, you’ll need to make your Word document accessible through the following steps:

To create the PDF you then need to select the toolbar icon:

The alternative way of creating PDFs, that is, printing to Adobe PDF should not be used. This latter method does not tag the PDF document, meaning that all heading information is lost.

After the PDF has been created, you must then check that the document is properly tagged and bookmarked.

Converting existing PDFs

With Acrobat Writer, it’s possible to modify an existing PDF through the following steps:

  • Add new tag
  • View, Re-order, Rename, Modify, Delete or Create tags
  • Update the reading order
  • Add alternative  text to images
  • Convert a scanned PDF with Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

We will follow this post up with a more substantial article in the next couple of months, but let us know in the meantime what your thoughts are on the accessibility of PDFs.

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Guest blog - Student loans, another online form!

By Rhodri Buttrick on 2 March 2010

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An email came into my inbox and I stared at it with trepidation. It was a reminder to apply for my student loan for my second year at university. I remembered last year: it took ages; I couldn’t find the information and then it timed out as I was too slow.  Next I thought, where did I put the record of last year’s application? What did I say? What if I am not consistent? Is any of the information here (at Uni) or is it at home?  I put it off applying as long as I could but felt that if I didn’t tackle it soon, I wouldn’t get a loan. So, I set aside a whole afternoon and logged in. But, what was this I saw? All last year’s data was already entered! All I had to do was go through each page confirming that is was correct: place of study, course, course code, address (term time) and so on. The only additional data I needed had been sent to me by the university in plenty of time – that was the annual course fee.

After half an hour, the whole application was done. The only tricky part was when the form had an ambiguous question on “Did I want to apply for disability allowance?”  Contrary to my instincts, the right answer was “No” as I had already applied the previous year and disability allowance is for the full 3 years and doesn’t have to be reapplied for.  So, 9 out 10 for the people who designed that form, making it easier for people like me and, as a wider benefit, easier for everyone else as well.

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