Usability – designing for people

The OneOneMap flood data layer I mentioned just a few weeks ago has now been withdrawn, thanks to the Environment Agency.

Incredibly, and at a time when the UK is suffering some of the worst flooding in recent memory, the Environment Agency has seen fit to insist on the removal of OnOneMap’s excellent flood risk layer.

Despite the fact that the data used has been collected at the tax-payers’ expense, its seems the public will be denied easy access to this information in a form which has never been so accessible.

The Environment Agency still makes this information freely available on its own web site, but in a far less accessible form. This does not excuse the fact that they have made an incredibly bad decision, at a time when people need easy access to exactly this kind of information.

Finally, there is an electric car which is really desirable. The Tesla Roadster is fast (0-60mph in 4 seconds), has a good range of over 200 miles, looks great and drives like a real sports car.

It seems that battery technology is just about good enough to make this happen. Together with a number of other maturing technologies and some good engineering, we now have electric vehicles which can be taken seriously, and in the case of the blisteringly quick Lotus Elise derived Tesla Roadster, we have a car you really want, not just because of its environmental benefits.

As a leading edge new product it is still a bit expensive, but not excessively so. As battery technology improves and production volumes bring economies of scale, cost will come down and performance and range should go up. What a tempting prospect!

Environmental credentials

The Tesla makes so much more sense than the ludicrous hybrids – like Toyota’s Prius – which still need an internal combustion engine and offer economy little better than a modern diesel.

You might be thinking that CO2 and other pollution is released in the production of electricity, so doesn’t this just shift the problem from the car to the power station? As someone at Tesla pointed out, it is easier to clean up at the power generation stage than it is to clean up what comes out of the tailpipes of millions of cars.

More significant is the thought that electricity can be generated from zero emissions sources like hydro, wind, solar, etc. In fact some Tesla owners have already installed solar panels (at home) to charge their Roadsters.

Up until now, previous attempts at designing electric cars had shown little progress in almost 100 years. Tesla – and to be fair, a few other manufacturers – are now taking a big leap forward.

This is seriously good. It shows there is hope for personal transport after the fossil fuels run out, and if a lot more green electricity comes on stream, cars like this could become zero emission heroes.

After assessing many web sites, reporting on their faults and advising on what to fix, I have arrived at a list of the most common problems I encounter.

My web site assessments are effectively mini Heuristic Evaluations where a site is tested for usability problems against a list of known issues. The bottom line is that many web sites are fundamentally flawed, alienating or turning away countless users. Many of the problems I see can be easily fixed and some, well, some of the faults we find simply beggar belief.

To cut to the chase, here are ten of the most common faults I find:

1. Poor text readability: font size too small, poor contrast with background, bad use of colour
   For most web sites, textual content is the main reason why people visit a site. If the text isn’t readable, the site is almost hiding it’s main reason for existing.
2. Poor sense of orientation or little indication of where you are within the site
   As users navigate through a site, particularly if there is a lot of content organised in a hierarchy, they need to know approximately where they are within the site, have some indication of how they got there and where they can go next. A good sense of orientation is vital to the overall user experience.
3. Main logo not linked to home page
   Having a main site or company logo link back to the home page is an important and universally understood navigation device which users often resort to if they get lost and want to go back to the start. Even if there is a button labelled ‘home’, users will often click on the main site logo almost as an instinctive reaction.
4. Bad use of hyperlinks: link text, colour, duplicate links
   Many users jump from link to link when scanning a page or looking for information. When they do this, typically the link text is read, not the surrounding text. Therefore, it is important that link text makes sense when not contextualized by the words around it. ‘Click here’ is particularly bad. Unvisited/visited link colours should be appropriate and different.
5. No product comparison
   One very common goal for users who are researching products on the Internet is to compare key features of similar products side by side, without having to juggle multiple windows or print out pages. Comparison tables showing key characteristics are extremely useful for helping users achieve product selection goals.
6. Form problems, a wide assortment of
   Select from a menu of problems, including: no use of label tags, email field too short, bad tab order, overly strict validation, ambiguous checkbox/radio button layout, javascript dependency, presence of a reset button. Most bad forms combine an interesting selection of different problems.
7. Small ‘click zones’
   Usability improves significantly as clickable ‘hotzones’ increase in size. Make it easy for users to click on something without having to position the mouse pointer carefully and accurately over a small active zone.
8. No site map
   Even with the best navigation and content structure, users will sometimes need to resort to a site map to help them find what they are looking for. Sitemaps can also help users to visualise the structure of the entire site, at a glance.
9. Ineffective or non-existent site search
   Users can quickly give up navigating to find the information they are looking for. Providing a search facility gives people a catch all method of locating that difficult to find content. Search problems ranged from simple searches not returning results for pages which did exist, right through to getting too many non-relevant results.
10. Poor SEO: weak page titles, bad META data, no deep linking, etc.
    If people can’t find your site, you’re wasting your time!

That was my top ten most frequently encountered usability problems and there are many more which nearly made the list.

Bruce Tognazzini’s article, First Principles of Interaction Design, gives you some idea of the issues we need to consider when testing a web site.

The excellent OnOneMap property search site has added a UK flood data layer.

Just click on the flood risk checkbox and a layer of blue will appear, showing exactly where the flood risk areas are. It couldn’t be easier and while the data comes from the UK Environment Agency where you can also find a flood risk map of sorts, the OnOneMap interpretation makes this information vastly more accessible and usable than ever before.

Hats off to the people at OnOneMap (and Google), this is how it should be done.