Posts written by Alistair Gray

Content is King, but needs to be categorised properly

By Alistair Gray on 19 November 2009

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Having recently come across a couple of websites where it has been difficult to find the requiredeBay screenshot content through browsing, it made me think about how some website owners prioritise search over browsing. This despite the fact that around half of website users, prefer to browse rather than search.

Site visitors will browse as well as search and because of this you must make sure you’re categorising your content so people are able to browse their way there. You need to think about how users would approach your site content. You then need to group your content accordingly, rather than splitting it as per your internal company structure. Site visitors will not know this structure, and will not care to learn it in order to find what they need.

You could also consider splitting your content according to different user groups (e.g. splitting content on a university website by staff, current students and potential students). Finally, you must ensure you don’t give users too many choices at once, offer clear sub-categories if necessary and allow people to ‘drill’ their way down to the content they want. eBay is a great example of this.

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Make it like a game

By Alistair Gray on 6 November 2009

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Whenever I’m testing systems I find this quote cropping up. It usually follows a groan from the observation room. After all it’s a phone/spreadsheet system/application form/etc, it’s NOT a game, but this doesn’t mean the comment should be ignored. There are lots of things games do well that can be carried across into different areas.

So when someone says “make it like a game”, what do they mean? It could be many things. As a gamer here are some of the things games offer that could be seen as useful for people, and therefore things that system designs could consider:

  • Microsoft Office menuOffer a tutorial - Games almost always offer an initial introduction for players. Who would want to sit down after getting a new phone and read through the manual? As the saying goes - learn by doing. People often jump in head first and systems should support this.
  • Provide real scenarios - Games let players try out the actions introduced, be it picking up an item, ordering people around a field or passing a ball. Systems should do the same and offer real data to manipulate. Don’t force users to read how to do things, or even watch a video, let them get hands on.
  • Progressively add complexity - Games gradually up the difficulty as you play, and often the complexity increases correspondingly. Moves, controls and more complex systems are introduced through play. Systems could do something similar by restricting access (or at least hiding) some of the more advanced controls. This is done by Microsoft Office, with more advanced options often harder to access than the basic controls.

I’m not calling for speadsheets to announce “You have reached level four in pie charts, you have now unlocked pivot tables”. But some of the tricks games use to introduce themselves and add to their complexity shouldn’t be ignored.

Have you got any ideas about other things games can teach us?

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Yahoo’s new homepage

By Alistair Gray on 22 July 2009

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The new Yahoo homepage

Yahoo! is rolling out its new homepage and it’s been produced with great fanfare - Yahoo’s consumer experiences head Tapan Bhat said:

“It marks the beginning of a renaissance of Yahoo, a renaissance where every pixel matters”

So - is it any good?

The biggest change is the ability to customise/personalise the left hand bar, putting in your favourite sites. This then allows you to hover over each and a pop-up appears showing you the most recent updates on the site without going to the page. This is both a great and annoying feature. The pop-ups are useful and saves time, yet they appear too easily and it’s too hard to get them to GO AWAY! They appear with a mouse over, but to get rid of them you must select a ‘close’ icon in the far corner. Whilst they’re up they completely cover the rest of the page contents meaning you can’t see anything else until you close it.

There’s also a minor delay between the pop up’s appearance and the content populating in it, so for half a second or so you’re staring at an empty box. Why not only display once the pop-up contents are loaded?

New Yahoo pop-upThe audience this is aimed at will already be aware of iGoogle (where you are able to personalise the whole page to a much greater extent). iGoogle also has the killer advantage - Google. No matter how good the homepage of Yahoo is, it will still force you to search using Yahoo. Google is by far the most popular search engine, and many people will be reluctant to switch. There must be a pretty compelling reason for someone to switch search engines. I don’t think this is it.

Yahoo will get stick for this update, the changes made may not be massive or groundbreaking, but they are significant. They do add to the experience of the site. It also ensures Yahoo’s less tech-savvy audience segment aren’t alienated.

It’s an improvement, just not a big enough one to change the declining fortunes of one of the Internet giants.

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User experience “papercuts”

By Alistair Gray on 17 June 2009

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ubuntu-papercut

Canonical is looking to fix 100 minor user experience issues in Ubuntu with it’s One Hundred Paper Cuts initiative. This is particularly heartening to see as a user experience consultant. In testing we find small usability problems all the time, but the larger usability issues will always (and should) take priority. The major issues are solved, the minor issues fall off the ‘to do’ list, there’s just not enough time to solve everything.

But all usability issues (no matter how minor) undermine the user experience. Not sure where that file you downloaded is saved? Can’t seem to be able to get the text to change to that colour you’re asking it to? All these seemingly small problems could be the straw breaking the users back - they’ll think twice before using your application again.

Getting a large chunk of these minor issues out of the way in one go seems to be the most economical method to solve these issues, and the possibility that the process “might be reiterated during future development cycles” implies that those behind it are aware that they are just taking the tip off the iceberg. Minor issues crop up as a matter of course. It’s how you deal with them that shows your attitude to user experience, usability and your users.

For all our previous clients, go and look for an “additional issues” section near the back of your user testing reports - you may find usability papercuts there!

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Filters and sorts on a web search?

By Alistair Gray on 15 May 2009

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Google has been showcasing some of their future developments that it will be looking to trial in the next few months and 1 tool that caught my eye is a series of filters/sorts down the left of the search results. _45768063_search-google-bod-opt

In all my time in this field there’s been very few sites that haven’t been improved by such functionality.

However my gut instinct is that Google is so powerful that if there’s a relevant result it will be near the top anyway. Adding filters means you’ve got to spend more time adjusting the filter options before deciding if the search term you entered is suitable, or if you need to re-search.

Using relevant filters will reduce this effect, but this tool should only be introduced if many people find it useful. I don’t want to see Google - the minimalist design icon - suffer from “function creep” (where more and more functions are added to an interface, until it is unrecognisable).

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