December 2009 posts

The !important CSS declaration

By Brigitte Simard on 22 December 2009

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We’ve been a bit light on web development tips on the blog of late, but I had some thoughts on the !important CSS declaration that I thought I’d share.

The declaration’s been valid since CSS1 but it seems to have acquired a bad reputation over the years. But, it can be a useful and powerful command if used properly. The declaration is a keyword that can be added at the end of any CSS pair of property/value. For example:

p {margin-left: 5px !important}

It assigns a weight to each rule depending on the specificity of its selector and its position in the source. This determines which style is applied to an HTML element. When the !important declaration is used on a pair of property/value, that value becomes the most important for that property and overrides any others.

The !important declaration can be used for other things such as overriding inline styles and print stylesheets. It has its downsides but, if used carefully, it can save time and effort.

If this is of interest then look out for a much more in-depth article on this command, with examples, which will be published on our website in January 2010.

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Retrospective BA miles claims hinder online experience

By Jon White on 15 December 2009

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British Airways might have enough problems at the moment what with making big financial losses and reports that its cabin crew have voted nine to one in favour of striking over the Christmas period. Nevertheless, I’d like to talk about a shortcoming I encountered deep within its website, specifically in the Executive Club section.British Airways plane

Firstly I feel I must insert a caveat here that I’m not knocking BA’s website as a whole, as it provides a very good user experience and actually topped Webcredible’s 2009 Flights Online Report. However, the problem I encountered came when looking to attribute BA miles to a previous flight.

When it comes to joining BA’s Executive Club and collecting miles, I’m guessing many people do it in the way I did – booked a flight, realised you could claim the miles, and signed up to collect them retrospectively – and it’s the retrospective element that I feel is slightly flawed!

Obviously if you’re a member when you book a flight, you use your frequent flyer number upon booking and the miles are added automatically when you’ve flown. When looking to add miles for previously taken flights however, I expected to see a clear link in the ‘Manage my account’ section, but that unfortunately wasn’t the case. The left-hand navigation is actually very well laid out, but it’s really not immediately clear where the required section would be.

After a good few minutes of searching I did find it in the ‘Collecting BA miles’ section, under the ‘Flights’ sub-menu, right at the bottom of the main content on the page, with the link text ‘More about claiming missing BA miles’. Now in hindsight, this does seem like a logical location, but for new users it can be very hard to find and surely should be promoted much more actively (as they are the users likely to need this facility).

I admit this is a minor point when it comes to the overall user experience of a very good website. But, when it comes to recruiting new members to its Executive Club, this point could be important for BA.

Given the partnerships between airlines to gain rewards for one airline from flights on another (I’ve accumulated most of my BA miles on Cathay Pacific flights for example), customers don’t have to join BA’s Executive Club to gain rewards on BA flights, and herein lies the point. If users have trouble claiming the miles on retrospective flights on BA’s website then they may simply head to another airline’s site and use its reward scheme instead.

Photo credit:  lrargerich via Flickr / Creative commons

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Guest blog - Gizmos galore

By Rhodri Buttrick on 14 December 2009

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In my last post, I wrote about some of the equipment and software I had received through my Disabled Students Allowance.  Now I thought I’d explain how I use it during a normal day at university.

After breakfast, I rush off to lectures with my PDA and Dictaphone in my pocket. I also have my laptop with me. Once in the lecture, I wake my laptop from hibernation and some mornings it’s worse at waking up than I am! I open a Word document and open ClaroRead, which is the software primarily designed for reading text, whether it be from a Word document or on the web browser. It also has a very handy predictive tracking tool, very much like predictive text on a mobile phone.

My normal method of working is speech recognition but as this would be an annoyance to everyone in a lecture, using predictive typing is a good way to help me keep up with what the lecturer is saying. Although, I do have to be careful to make sure the sound is off on the laptop to prevent the text reader from yelling out various words during the lecture. In some lectures, I use my Dictaphone to record the lecturer. I then use software called Audio Note Taker to organise and listen to my recorded lectures.

After a lecture, I might go to the library to get some books for my essays. The library is a bewildering  maze of books, I will tell you about this in another post, but let’s assume for now I was able to find  the book I needed. I take it back to my room and find the relevant chapter. I then plug my scanner into my laptop and scan the chapter into my computer, using a utility in ClaroRead. It converts the image from the scanner into text in a Word document. I can then use ClaroRead to read it back to me.

Without this there is no way I would be able to keep up with the reading I need to do. If the books are in high demand, you can usually only borrow them from the library for six hours and I would not be able to do the reading in that time. With the scanner, I can simply scan the parts I need and return the book in less than an hour.

My final, and possibly the most useful gizmo of all, is my PDA. On this I have useful things such as my timetable. I hate carrying around these sorts of things in paper as they just get crumpled up in my pocket and then put in the washing machine. Before my PDA arrived, I actually had to get my laptop out to look at my timetable. As I am unable to handwrite, the PDA has been very liberating.

There are so many instances in the past where it would have been very useful to be able to make a quick note of something, for example, if someone tells you the room of your seminar has changed or you need to remember the title of a book to find in a library. Overall the PDA has helped me to stay organised. It also means I do not waste quite so much time being lost while trying to remember where my seminar is.

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Eye tracking - A short-sighted future?

By Trenton Moss on 8 December 2009

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A trend that we’ve noticed this year in the user experience sector is a dramatic decrease in demand for eye tracking. When the recession first kicked-in at the start of this year we were warned that usability was going to be thrown out in view of reduced budgets. We’ve seen no evidence of this whatsoever - budgets have been cut and the amount set aside for usability and user research has decreased slightly, but no longer is an excellent user experience just a nice-to-have. Usability and user research are still at the core of good web design and development and companies are still investing heavily in these.

So what of eye tracking? Why does it seem to have fallen by the wayside? I have a few theories:

The novelty has worn off
There’s no doubt about it - marketing managers love eye tracking. They love being able to see where people are looking and they love getting back nice looking heatmaps. The thing is, eye tracking’s not that new anymore and there are far cheaper ways of getting images of where (lots of) people clicked on the page at far lower prices (think ClickTale and Crazy Egg).
It’s a nice-to-have
The recession has seen a lot of losers as nice-to-haves products struggle to maintain demand. Eye tracking is fantastic at evaluating the effectiveness of the creative design & execution, and for noticing whether users see those key messages and calls-to-action quickly. But this can anecdotally be picked up in regular usability testing, which will also provide a wealth of additional findings (which can be used to significantly increase conversion rates).
It’s too expensive
Eye trackers are very expensive to lease - with a virtual monopoly, the main worldwide supplier has had little incentive to economise. I suspect that many companies are perhaps not bothering to hold on to the kit anymore in light of the cost cutting that’s hit us all. This in turn means that less people talk about eye tracking studies and reduced word-of-mouth means less people are thinking about doing eye tracking.

By the way, I still think eye tracking can be really useful when used  for the right reasons and in the right context (see our article on the advantages and disadvantages of eye tracking). I’m not putting down eye tracking here, I’m just reporting back on something I’ve noticed this year.

I’d be really interested to hear anyone’s thoughts on this - have you seen any noticeable drop in demand like we have? My reasons are purely speculative - do you agree or disagree?

Finally, I’ll leave you with an eye tracking video featuring our PR & Marketing Manager, Jon using Amazon.

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Guest blog - Christmas came early

By Rhodri Buttrick on 4 December 2009

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Christmas came early for me this year as the equipment from my disabled students allowance arrived. I was sitting in my room in my hall when I heard jingle bells and the sound of hooves on my roof. Well, by that, I mean a delivery van turned up! I was really relieved when the new equipment arrived as it was already three weeks into term. However, I was much luckier than many people who had to wait much longer than me due to high demand on the DSA this year. Here is a list of the goodies I received:

  • Dictaphone
  • Laptop
  • Printer
  • Scanner
  • PDA
  • Claro Read software
  • Audio note taker software

Unfortunately, the person delivering the equipment was not dressed as Father Christmas but he was incredibly helpful, set up all the equipment and even installed the software I needed. The scanner is going to be especially useful. With this I will be able to scan pages from books I get from the library, converted it to text and then get Claro Read to read it back to me. This should help with the difficulties I have with large amounts of reading.

The Dictaphone, I’m going to use to record lectures. The Audio note taker software is really clever. It visually represents the audio file in coloured lines and I can then type annotations next to particular parts of the recording. This means after the lecture I can add my own notes to what the lecturer said.

Due to the fact that I can’t handwrite, I was most excited about the PDA, which typically arrived after all the other equipment! With this it means I will actually be able to write things down whilst on the go. As my handwriting is totally illegible this will be incredibly liberating. If I need to write down a number or e-mail address it’s not always practical to boot up a laptop to type it.

I will also be able to put my timetable on it and note down my various usernames and passwords for computers and the library in the university. This will be so much easier than walking around with pockets stuffed with various tatty bits of paper which are all too easily lost or binned by mistake.

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