Usability – designing for people

Sandisk’s Sansa ‘microsite’ is a frustrating and unsuccessful attempt at a product oriented Web site. It looks quite respectable on the surface, but if your goal is to find information and make a purchasing decision, this site fails to deliver.

Here are some of the problems I noticed:

• No deep linking – many issues arise from this.
• Poorly presented product information.
• Text content crammed into a small pane with fiddly scroll up/down buttons.
• No summary of key product features, just a few pale icons which look like spurious design elements.
• Small text with weak contrast will be difficult to read for some users.
• Navigation buttons scattered around the screen, inconsistent positioning.
• Site starts playing a sound track without choice or warning – not good for covert surfing in an office environment.
• Product comparison table lacks detail, makes for difficult horizontal eye tracking and has no links back to individual product info.
• Hover highlight on accessories nav block conceals next/previous buttons.
• Product reviews are pointless: they don’t quote any review content or link to the original source.

Fortunately, the Sansa microsite also has poor SEO and no deep linking, which will limit the number of people who find and ultimately have to suffer this Web site.

In a recent article on the BBC News web site entitled “Do small firms really need a website?“, there were some counter arguments from people who were not necessarily in agreement with the Federation of Small Businesses view that small businesses need to keep up or lose out.

One of these views, from a building contractor, commented that nine months after a new Web site was launched, it had ‘not generated a single phone call’.

Update: this web site has been significantly improved since I first looked at it. The comments below are based on the original site.

After assessing the Pople Design Construction site, it becomes immediately apparent this site has many serious failings which prevent it from being found in the first place and render it next to useless for anyone who does manage to find it.

Here are a few reasons why this site will not be successful:

1. Almost zero search engine visibility
   • no text for search engines to digest and index.
   • opening page has a JavaScript link which opens a pop-up window.
   • site uses one page containing a Flash object: no SEO, deep linking, etc.
   • use of a .com domain will lead some people think this business is not UK based.
2. Unhelpful content
   • There is no explanation of what services this business offers. You are left to take a guess based on project images alone.
   • Projects are titled unhelpfully – ‘fairwarp’, ‘highfields’, ‘holly bank’, etc. – there is no information about the nature of the project or the type of work which was done. For example, if you were looking for loft conversion projects, you would have to sift through everything.
   • Most of the images on the site are good, showing a wide range of work. There are, however, some which look out of place. For example, a shot of a roof top vent next to a wall with a splat of bird poop on it. Some other photos show unfinished work, which is not the outcome you want when you get the builders in.
   • Recommendation is a crucial source of new business in the design and building industry. Where are the testimonials?
3. Poor usability
   • The navigation menu is not visible until you click on a small grey arrow.
   • Designed as one single Flash object, this suffers from a range of problems, as I have already highlighted in my posting about the problems with bad use of Flash.

This Web site will not generate much attention in its current form. Due to its very design, it is turning its back on many potential visitors, which of course are potential customers.

There is probably a great business behind this ailing Web site. A Web site designed to be found, usable and useful will really benefit any small business – Pople Design Construction could have a vastly more positive experience of being on the Web.

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.

Laterlife.com has quite a few problems, but consider this one forms-related issue:

View the work and retirement survey form and check out the highly prominent ‘reset’ button near the ’submit’ button. Just what you don’t want to click on by mistake after filling in this long and badly designed form.

Reset buttons are nearly always a bad idea due to accidental clicking. Users rarely want to clear a form and start over.

The reset function can be useful as an undo button for editing a pre-filled form, but we rarely see undo buttons in situations where they would actually be useful rather than a hazardous.

It’s a tasty motorcycle for sure, but on the Triumph Street Triple Flash microsite, there are a couple of irritating little niggles which hit you fairly early on.

For people who actually want to read text on this Web site, two faults will make this a difficult task:

Firstly, the text size is on the small side, which on a high pixel density display (not uncommon) makes it difficult to read.

Secondly, the Flash object automatically cycles through a content sequence, which breaks the usability guideline of putting users in control. Biggest problem in this case is that each frame does not stay on screen long enough for you to comfortably read all of the text. There are some small and fiddly to use control buttons (pause, previous, next) but users should not need to resort to these just to read a paragraph of copy.

There are a few other problems with this site, but I’m only going to address text readability in this post.

This is a great looking ‘bike and a nice looking Web site too. It’s just a shame about those niggly little faults which are clearly evident, even without user testing.

Topfield UK recently launched their redesigned web site. It has quite a few major problems and for a new site, scores surprisingly low on the usability scale.

I won’t go into too much detail right now, but here’s the first problem I tripped up on: most of the links on this site have changed and there has been no provision for keeping old links working.

Most of the topfield.co.uk links in the Google index no longer work (at the time of writing, it will get updated at some stage) and to make matters worse, clicking on one of the dead links takes you to a default user-hostile error page (example) with no onward navigation links.

One really important rule of web site redesign is to keep existing links working and if this is not possible, at least have a useful error page with navigation links.

As a result of this oversight, most people clicking on a deep link to topfield.co.uk will hit a dead end error page. Many of these users will not find the site and some may even assume the site is down or Topfield has gone out of business.

An otherwise great mobile phone is let down by one niggling fault: the lens cover does not lock closed securely enough.

As most Sony Ericsson k800i owners have found out fairly quickly, the sliding lens cover will flop open at the slightest touch.

Pick up the phone, pop it into a pocket and the chances are the lens cover will open, thus activating the camera.

This can result in the lens getting dirty or damaged and the battery running down. All a bit annoying.

If a problem like this is so easy to spot, why does it get through to production?

I would expect the next design revision of this phone not to have the same problem. We shall see.