Posts tagged with 'Usability'

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

By Trenton Moss on 12 March 2010

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…

Monthly user experience finds

By Mru Kodali on 26 February 2010

We, the User Experience team at Webcredible, are always stumbling upon interesting sites - UX best practice, bloopers or just plain amusing finds that we share internally. We’ve now decided to share a couple of these on our blog every month. Without further ado, here’s our first installment:

  1. Tag cloud gone wrong - The risks of automatically updating tag clouds with little or no moderation are apparent in this screenshot, where the EggExpert site’s most popular keywords revolve around their poor service
  2. Web 2.0 video - An entertaining explanation of web 2.0 on YouTube

We’ll post some more gems in a month’s time. Future posts will go up on the last Friday of each month.

Photo credit: faith goble via Flickr/Creative Commons

Which industry sector has the most difficult to use websites?

By Jon White on 21 January 2010

Between September and December 2009 we ran a poll on the Webcredible website asking the question of which industry sector has the most difficult to use websites? This may be a pretty generalised survey, which didn’t focus on specific sites, but the results (which we released yesterday) were interesting nonetheless. This is how they turned out:

  • Retail / ecommerce - 133 votes (13%)
  • Financial services - 164 votes (16%)
  • Local authority / government - 342 votes (34%)
  • Travel - 91 votes (9%)
  • Utilities - 116 votes (12%)
  • News / media companies - 69 votes (7%)
  • Other - 91 votes (9%)

Some of the results may not come as a particular surprise to many. The content focused sites of news and media companies do not tend to need to use the complex checkout processes that other sites use, and given the high levels of competition, travel and retail websites need to be pretty easy to use.

However, I would like to focus on the local authority and government sites which caught the brunt of over one third of the vote.

It’s true that local authority and government websites often have to offer a vast amount more information and functionality than their counterparts in other industries, which can make it more difficult to provide a great user experience, but there are some other reasons why they may have faired badly in this survey.

It could be a lack of investment in comparison to say online retail and travel companies, and it also could be put down to the fact that when using local authority and government websites, dropping off and using another site is often not an option (something which is common when poor usability is encountered in ecommerce and travel) so users will have to just grin and bear a poor user experience.

There’s no doubt that the usability of local council websites is improving, as shown by our most recent local council usability report and although there’s still much room for improvement, it’s certainly not the only industry sector where this is the case. So, do you agree with the findings? Let us know which what type of websites you find most difficult to use.

Designing effective map-based browsing

By Abid Warsi on 7 January 2010

Many websites from varying sectors have some kind of geographical-based navigation, whether it’s a travel website, an estate agents’ site or even the store locator function on a retail website. The question is how to offer this functionality. Some sites offer map-based browsing, but often it’s not used heavily as it’s not easy-to-use. I’ve come across a few sites like this recently and it reminded of some previous tips I wrote for our newsletter on how to design effective map-based browsing.

Start from a high level and allow customers to drill-down

It’s important with map-based browsing to start from a high-level map view (e.g. the whole world or the whole of the UK). Users should then be given large, labelled areas to click on, such as countries, then regions, then cities, etc. During this process you must make each area a single hotspot with a mouse over effect to make it appear clickable.

Add further detail for customers who want specific places

It’s very common for travel customers to already know the specific city or region that they want to visit, or even the specific resort. To best cater for these customers you must provide an alternative way to find a destination, such as a dropdown list of the most popular destinations. In addition, you should consider adding landmarks at the most detailed map level e.g. town names or major roads to allow users to pinpoint their destination.

Remember to offer a way back

Chances are that customers will want to look at a number of destinations within a particular region. It’s no good making users start a new search every time they want to look at another destination. Instead you should give them a way to zoom out to the previous page.

Make it like a game

By Alistair Gray on 6 November 2009

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?