Usability – designing for people

Web sites are often used to get location info – the classic ‘how to find us’ page – and despite some fantastic dedicated mapping sites, many sites still offer poor maps and difficult to follow directions.

Including a link to an external mapping or route planning site – such as Google Maps, MultiMap, ViaMichelin, Map24 UK, MapQuest – should be a no, brainer. These sites offer large easy to use maps and/or great route planning facilities which can map out a custom route for each individual visitor.

Another option is to embed a third-party map into your own page, but this can result in a small map with many of the interactive and route planning features missing, so always include a link to a full mapping / route planning site.

Sites should also clearly display a postcode for satnav users. Mobile route planning devices are very common these days – make it easy for people to use them!

For downloadable PDF maps to print out, Give Way produces superb custom maps which are very detailed yet extremely easy to read. (download a sample Give Way map – PDF, 235k). Incidentally, this is a great example of usability in print design.

Here are some examples of sites with poor location maps, weak directions or no help for satnav users:

• Coors Visitor Centre – update: the CVC has now closed, presumably because nobody could find it.
• Salisbury Race Course
• Scottish Arts Council – users are invited to download a Word document.
  
• Silverstone Circuit
• The O2 (Dome)
• University of Sussex
• York Art Gallery
• Chessington World of Adventures – update: this used to be in the list of good examples. As well as changing the address of the page, therefore creating a load of dead links all over the place, the updated page seems to be a step backwards. Acceptable map, with a link to a routeplanning site where you get dumped at the front door and have to do the rest yourself.

Some helpful ‘how to find us’ pages:

• Alton Towers – update: another address change, more dead links.
• Birmingham NEC – embedded Google map, but needs a link to open the map in a new window.
  
• UK Identity and Passport Service – embedded Google map, but needs a link to open the map in a new window. Update: another address change, more dead links.

New Web sites, particularly newly registered Internet domain names, can take many months, sometimes 6 to 12 months to become fully visible on search engines. Get something out there early, even if you are not ready for a full-on Web site.

Some businesses are in the fortunate position of not needing a Web site to help them generate business. Indeed, there is something very cool about being so good, you just don’t need a Web site.

Other businesses may have plans for a new Web site, but need to delay for budgeting reasons, or have a large project in the pipeline which could take many months to complete.

In all these cases, the new Web site could take a long time to show up in search results, particularly on Google which sandboxes new Web sites. Google considers established Web sites to be more credible and trustworthy, which directly affects how highly that site will rank in search results.

Here’s a good tip: even if you don’t need a Web site, or have plans to launch one in the future, get at least one search friendly Web page out there as soon as possible. This helps to get you established with the search engines and will pay dividends when the real Web site comes along, helping you to generate traffic sooner and achieve results quicker.

Make sure your holding page is search friendly and contains some content relevant to the business you are in. Don’t just sling up a ‘coming soon’ or ‘under construction’ page. Create something useful and relevant even if it doesn’t reveal the true identity or purpose of the site which will replace it.

Flash and Usability have always had a contentious relationship. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Flash itself, but when it gets misused, the problems created can be quite damaging in terms of traffic generation potential and user goal achievement.

Flash is great for delivering enhanced content, embedded video, animations and for achieving more complex interactions. It even makes development easier with consistent and predictable results across different browsers and platforms.

Many of the problems its misuse can cause are demonstrated quite nicely by the Manchester Central Web site, (exhibition / event complex).

The interface on the Manchester Central site has quite a few problems, which I’m not going to describe in detail here. Perhaps its most notable weakness is the way in which it limits inbound traffic due to its very design.

As this site demonstrates, the most serious problems arise when Web sites function entirely within Flash from one container page. Taking the Manchester Central Web site as an example, here are some of the problems it has created for itself and its visitors…

One URL, no deep linking

Without support for deep linking, quite a few serious problems arise because all inbound links, including search result links, dump you in at the front door, so you have to navigate through to find the information you are looking for.

By not being able to link to a suitable landing page, this also hinders online marketing initiatives such as email marketing and paid advertising.

Other problems:

1. The browser back button doesn’t work as expected. Navigate around the site and as soon as you click the back button, you get dumped out to whatever page you were looking at before you entered the site.
2. Accessibility compliance is probably non-existent. Unless an accessible alternative is provided, users with disabilities are shut out.
3. You cannot print out pages of information from the site unless PDF downloads have been provided.
4. The site will not be viewable on most mobile or hand held devices. Unless a non-Flash version is provided, an increasing number of mobile users will be excluded.
5. The JavaScript loaders will effectively block any users who may not have script functionality running on their browsers.
6. Site owners are probably getting little or no analytics data on site activity. This is even more important for sites that have SEO and usability problems.

In short, this makes the site harder to find (= less traffic) and when users do visit the site, frustration is likely to feature highly in the whole experience.

Try it now!

Visit Manchester Central site and find out what music events are scheduled in two or three months from now.

If and when you eventually find this information, can you Email that page to someone? No. Print it out? No. Bookmark it? No. Go back and re-trace your navigation steps to find something of interest you noticed a few pages earlier? No.

You may also have noticed one of the other big problems with many Flash sites: non-standard home-brew UI gadgets. In this case it’s a painfully slow scrolling frame, no page jump, no grab box, and no other means of navigating easily to the information you want.

There are other problems with the Manchester Central site: low text contrast in places (bad readability), inconsistent style on active/linked text, use of ‘click here’, confusing navigation with poor sense of orientation, no site search or site map. These are classic problems, not caused by Flash itself.

Flash is great, but use it wisely

Flash encourages creative expression, design freedom, an opportunity to do something different and push the boundaries. This is great – just make sure the result is usable, can be found and linked to.

Many of the problems exhibited by the Manchester Central web site can be avoided by sensible design and it is quite possible to allow at least partial deep linking into Flash sites. Flash content can also be accessible – Adobe provides plenty of documentation on Flash accessibility.

There is no reason why imagination and creativity should be stifled by usability issues. However, always remember that Web sites are used by real people attempting to accomplish real tasks. Make sure that designs work for the people who really count.

For business owners, deliberately losing traffic and frustrating their customers is indefensible.

Using the words ‘click here’, ‘here’, ‘read more’, or ‘more’ as your link text is nearly always bad, very bad. Click here is this decade’s skip intro, worse in fact.
Because users scan pages for highlighted text – bold, different colour, and particularly underlined linked text – using meaningless link text makes a page more cumbersome to navigate and useful links become difficult to see.

Scanning through page text to see ‘click here’ several times and you have no idea what those links relate to or what is on the other end of them.

Using relevant link text makes links much easier to read and understand.

A few people will spend time to read more of the surrounding text and therefore won’t suffer so badly from ‘click here’ syndrome, but for most people, link text is very important.

This example of ‘click here’ shows why.

Other click here examples:

• www.greatrun.org
• www.dma.org.uk (note tiny unreadable text size)
• www.emigroup.com
• www.conferencebookings.co.uk

Meaningful link text is essential for intuitive navigation and contributes to good pagerank in search results. Good Web copywriters know how important this is and will know how to write useful link text.

Thankfully, ‘click here’ is becoming less common, but we still see too much of what is one of the easiest usability problems to fix.