Uxability

A view on the world of web design, UX and usability

Archive for category Usability

Anti-virus/Security Suite Usability

Jan 4

Posted by Sam K in Usability | No Comments

OK, so it has been much too long since my last contribution to this blog… must do better in 2010. And this is a slight aside from my usual topics, but I think it’s related.

For a number of years, I have been helping many different friends set-up/manage/secure/use their home computers. These are not (generally) technical people. They’re people who do some emailing, some word-processing and a lot of surfing. Our interaction usually starts with “Can you recommend what sort of computer I should get?” and I do, and it usually involves going to a local retail store and picking something off the shelf and paying for it. Nice and easy.

These machines – regardless of vendor – will come secured to the hilt with “Trial” or “Time Limited” versions of Symantec, McAfee or some other security suite. And I have never had anything but bad experiences with these products. I’ll be honest and admit that I haven’t used any paid-for security suite in depth (outside of work) for many years, but my memories are of intrusive, resource-munching, confusing applications that prompt with nonsensical messages about what may or may not be a security threat. These memories haven’t been challenged by anything I’ve seen in the trial versions since.

Invariably, these suites are the first thing I remove from a new PC, installing the likes of AVG Free or Microsoft Security Essentials to provide an adequate level of security for the types of users I’m dealing with.

I appreciate that improvements have probably been made on the behaviour of some of the more popular solutions, but I still wouldn’t have them on my computer. An application that prompts users with heavily technical messages every so often and has such a drastic effect on the performance of a machine is a bad one. And the number of configuration options that are available confuse me most of the time – and I know what most of them mean!

I feel that the vendors of these products are failing to make their products usable or friendly. And many users are left asking “What does this mean?” or saying “No” to action prompts when they don’t understand the message, ultimately hindering their experience on the computer itself! Is it getting any better? Are these vendors learning anything about their users and adapting their software? Or am I just being too harsh?

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Button placement on Forms

Nov 16

Posted by Sam K in Design, Forms, Usability, User Interface | 4 Comments

I’ve been reading a number of great articles on forms recently – covering things like general layout and inline validation (Luke Wroblewski seems to be the world authority on forms – most of his advice seems well worth paying attention to). But I’ve been looking at something recently and I’m wondering how best to implement it, namely the positioning of the buttons for submitting a form.

I have a simple, linear search form with "Search" and "Clear" buttons. Automatically, I would have considered laying it out like this:

Simple Form - default layoutLet’s set aside the accessibility argument of whether form labels should appear above fields – I’d like to consider the buttons here. There’s no requirement for multi-language support, either.

I can think of a few reasons why this is unfriendly. Firstly, all the form labels are right aligned and if a user is tabbing down through each of the fields their focus will suddenly jump to the left when they get to the buttons. Secondly, is there enough of a distinction between the "Search" and the "Clear"? And whilst from the text it’s clear which is the call to action, is it as obvious visually? Well, no, not really. Thirdly, how necessary or common are clear/reset buttons these days? Because it’s a separate topic, really, let’s assume we’re going to persist with the "Clear" button.

My first thought was "What about moving them to the right?" Like this…

form-opt2

So I’ve flipped the buttons around and shifted them over to be inline with the right-side of the fields. I think it’s a little more intuitive but it doesn’t deal with the spacing issue nor the intended call-to-action.

Colours are a potential way of differentiating but it will a) set a precedent in terms of styling throughout the application and b) I have an accessibility requirement so colour to convey meaning is a no-no.

I think it’s a little bit of an improvement, but should I go with it or can I do anything else with it?

How about…

form-opt3

The "Search" and the "Clear" buttons are totally separated and (to me) it’s clear that the search is the main call-to-action – and that’s probably what we want. If a user is tabbing down through the fields the tab out to the button will be naturally followed.

The clear button is there and can be used, but I hope it comes across that it’s not something we really want users to be getting too involved with.

Now I appreciate that the all of my reasoning is pretty subjective. I don’t have any research I’d be keen on to get some thoughts and opinions about this particular question – are any of my three options go-ers, or have I missed the best-practice approach completely? Any other suggestions?

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UX when using a product

Nov 4

Posted by Sam K in Design, Usability, User Experience, User Interface | No Comments

The world of web-based user experience design is a fascinating one. And some of the places you can go creatively to ensure that users of your site get the most of it can be amazing. But, what about those situations where you deliver a solution based on one or more products e.g. WCM/ECM, shopping carts, wikis, etc.?

I suppose this post is most inspired by my own experience of the WCM world. Invariably, you will be building your site (intranet, extranet, website, whatever…) on some platform or product which immediately introduces a level of restriction in terms of what you can do with the user experience. CMS applications tend to be filled with tools and components to make it easy to present common types of content e.g. static content, blogs, polls, forums, document libraries, membership management, etc.

By using these in-built components, you’re automatically tying yourself to the user experience as governed by the CMS vendor. And, having seen numerous CMS frameworks – from open-source to enterprise scale £10,000s-per-licence – sometimes that’s not a good thing at all. Some of even the more expensive tools of the market give such a poor, unfriendly user experience.

Yes, you can do a certain amount with styling, and on occasions (depending on a customer’s requirements) bespok-ing a certain piece of functionality may make more sense than using whatever comes out of the box. But what is the best way to handle those situations where the CMS product provides all that is needed but with a user experience that, for want of a better word, sucks?

Very, very few customers would be pleased at having to pay an expensive licence for a set of tools only to be told that you’d recommend re-writing some of them in a better way (at additional cost). There’s always the possibility of feeding back to the product vendor to suggest UX improvements or changes, but that rarely gets you too far as most vendors will have their own roadmaps and priorities.

There are a number of factors that will impact the best course of action here.

  • Your relationship with your customer;
  • Your relationship with the product vendor;
  • Your knowledge of the product;
  • Your ability to apply changes/improvements in a cost-effective way.

There will obviously come a time when a compromise of some description has to be made. If you can persuade your customer to trust you in terms of your advice and to pay for the work you suggest needs done (by promising – with confidence – a return on that investment), that would be a good result.

But, I feel it’s more likely you’ll have to accept that the customer will make a decision on behalf of their users and take the user experience/usability limitations as they come.

If you haven’t got the wealth of persuasion skills necessary, what’s the best way to make the most of the UX elements when delivering a product-based solution where the out-of-the-box user experience is not what you’d like it to be?

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Prioritising User Experience

Oct 27

Posted by Sam K in Design, Usability, User Experience | No Comments

I’m currently in the middle of an attempt to formalise how my company should go about the process of defining the user experience/user interface for a given website or web application. It’s very interesting to read all of the diverse range of views that are out there in terms of the best way to go about this. Inherently, whilst looking at UX/UIs, you’ve got to consider the Information Architecture of a site. So, which comes first? Which one do you focus on to make sure you reach the end goal of having something that the customer is completely happy with, completely educated about and which the developers can implement without the needs for multiple follow-up questions?

Pat Kennedy has a strong view that, overall, UX is the most important facet of the design process. But, interestingly, Jan Jursa (in a comment on the post) suggests it should be the other way round. Both people make very good, well-thought-out, based-on-experience, convincing arguments for their point of view.

I guess that, as someone who is coming to this whole subject with a great deal of passion for it but a not-insignificant amount of naivety, I can find myself a little overwhelmed by the whole thing. I really feel that I have an opportunity to come up with a strong offering for my company to pitch to potential (and indeed, existing) clients around our UX experience and practices. And I suppose that it’s not the sort of thing that can be rushed – it will take time, and it will need to be honed (based on experiences and based on how clients in our target markets accept us). It will obviously start at a very high-level – minor improvements and more formality and structure around what we do at the minute – and then progress and evolve into something more complete, based on experiences and research.

There’s a lot of work to it, but I’m enjoying it. I’ve been looking to gather some people’s views on their own experiences and what has worked well for them. I fully appreciate they may not translate to my own circumstances, but I’m trying to absorb as much as I can to make sure I at least start on the right foot! Any comments or advice would be appreciated.

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Mandatory and Optional Fields

Oct 20

Posted by Sam K in Forms, Usability | No Comments

formulate It seems that regardless of how many different sites I work on, the way we implement forms and validation is always just a tiny bit different. I’m not sure why that is, and it’s obviously not great practice. One of the questions that always comes up is how to indicate which fields are mandatory.

This Formulate article gives a really good overview of some common ways this is done and provides some really good advice (backed up by research evidence) to suggest the best way to indicate mandatory fields and what sort of user help text you should be including.

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Best Practice Call To Action Buttons

Oct 14

Posted by Sam K in Design, Usability, User Experience | No Comments

Slightly inspired by this Smashing Magazine article, I wanted to take a look at Call To Action buttons. How do we, as designers, best distinguish the actions that we want our users to take? How do we make such calls obvious enough that users understand instinctively what the action is and understand exactly what will happen when they click it?

I think planning calls to action is of special importance on a home page or a landing page. You want these pages to present (almost instantly) what your site is about and the next action you’d like your users to take. For example, any e-commerce site will load their home page with product links to ensure that users are enticed to purchase things immediately. News sites highlight main articles or features. Software sites generally have a “Download Now” link prominently placed on their home page.

I’ve recently been working on a site that has two very distinct purposes for two very different user types. I’ve been proposing that we make these two streams immediately clear on the home page and entice the user to follow the most appropriate stream with a relevant call to action. We could then filter the content and materials to be most appropriate to that particular type of user. OK, there may be a few users who have a foot in both camps, but all content will be public and available by following links to “cross the streams” (!), as it were.

Valuable, well-considered, well-implemented calls to action can make or break a site, but as the first comment on the Smashing Mag article goes to show, not everyone gets this. Some just don’t get it at all – but as is borne out by many of the other comments, a large measure of the success or failure of a site can be placed on the design and implementation of the calls to action.

“What are the calls to action for this page?” should be one of the first questions asked when you first think of a particular page or section of a site or application. Once those are identified, they can feed into the layout and structure decisions later.

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Common Mistakes in E-Commerce Sites

Oct 9

Posted by Sam K in Ecommerce, Usability | No Comments

I touched upon the idea conventions in my post about Play.com’s searching, but conventions are a big part of pretty much any site. If your design can help visitors quickly identify what it’s about, they’ll immediately make sub-conscious assumptions about what they’ll see.

  • A blog will have a list of categories/tags; a series of posts; a search and maybe a calendar, etc.
  • A shop will have basket functionality; product searching and categorisation; promotions, etc.
  • And so on…

Looking at the second of those – shops – Smashing Magazine have listed 15 common errors shop designers and implementers make. A lot of these are linked to the user expectation. Some are framework issues (i.e. the base cart application), some are issues of content (i.e. the fault of the people who are actually populating the shop) and some boil down to a lack of appreciation for what the user expects when they visit an e-commerce site. (My post on Play.com certainly relates to point 6).

There’s certainly an amount of good advice here if you’re trying to deliver an e-commerce solution.

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How unusable is "below the fold"?

Oct 8

Posted by Sam K in Usability, User Experience | No Comments

It has often struck me how there is not an insignificant number of web site designers who try to place (i.e. squeeze) everything on their page into a single browser-sized panel. Even disregarding the multiple resolution aspect of that particular approach, do users really mind vertically scrolling on a page? Do you ever find yourself missing something meaningful on a web page because you haven’t spun your mousewheel a time or two?

Admittedly, there was a time when I considered this important. However I’ve been shifting my view over the past year or so, and this article seems to re-enforce that I’d be right to do so. Eye tracker testing seems like a really neat tool and yields some very useful information in terms of how we should be designing our UIs e.g. how “First Choice”’s horizontal bar is an issue for visitors. It’s subtle, but clearly makes a huge difference to the user experience.

I’ve been working on the design for a new site over the past couple of weeks and I’ve been making the point that main elements should be clear as soon as the user scans (note: not ‘reads’) a page – especially a home page. If further information or additional functionality is available, I have no problem pushing it down the page a little.

I think this is something to be more conscious of than perhaps I have been in the past, particularly if dealing with a third-party design agency who may have a limited amount of experience in the web space.

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