IT'S BROKEN - user experience

Convince me first

nospam@example.com (Adriana Beal) — Sun, 17 May 2009 18:23:00 -0500

How many times have you seen a link to an online resource that seemed interesting, and clicked on the link only to be taken to a form saying "Please sign up or log in to your account to access this page"?

This happens frequently with me, always with the same result: bouncing.

What is going to take to get people to understand that this model is broken?

Please go read Sign Up Forms Must Die, by Luke Wroblewski, and learn how smart web services use the process of gradual engagement, letting users learn first what you have to offer, before asking them to provide an email address, select a password, tell you their name, their location, verify this strange word and agree to your terms of service.

One of Wroblewski's examples, Geni (a website that allow users to build a family tree), has produced five million profiles in five months with their gradual engagement approach. Do you really think your "register first" approach is better?

Update:

I started reading Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition by Guy Kawasaki right after writing this post, and was happy to see the author offer a similar advice:

In: Chapter 32, "Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption"

1. Enforced, immediate registration. Requiring a new user to register and provide a modicum of information is a reasonable request--just do it after you've sucked the person in. Most sites require registration as the first step, and this puts a barrier in front of adoption. At the very least, companies could ask for name and e-mail addres but not require it until a later time.

Kawasaki's book was included in Amazon's Top 10 Editors' Pick in Business & Investing for 2008, and there wouldn't be so many broken interactions in the Internet if more web designers and online content owners read it. Buy it following the link on this post and using Amazon's one-click checkout, and you will be also helping a charitable cause.

It's all about the experience

nospam@example.com (Adriana Beal) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:39:39 -0500

Don Norman, author of the excellent The Design of Everyday Things, explains why you have to design products for how your customers are, and not how you want them to be.

Complexity is OK. It's complicated that is bad.

Boring is not necessarily bad

nospam@example.com (Admin - It's broken blog) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 00:04:58 -0500

Having a radically creative mentality sure has its value, but in the design of everyday things, doing the typical boring things that everybody expects typically works best.

Use well established conventions so people don't have to think for even a millisecond: Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

Photo credit: Wonderlane

The curse of knowledge, con queso

nospam@example.com (Adriana Beal) — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 13:52:58 -0500

(Photo credit: B Tal)

In their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die the Heath brothers explain the concept of the "curse of knowledge": once we know something, it becomes incredibly difficult to imagine not knowing it, and consequently teach others the same thing.

I was just invited to join a party having dinner at this restaurant. If you are a web designer, I'd like you to visit the link, and find the address of the restaurant for me.

Edited to add: the people responsible for the website were contacted and said they would be fixing the problem, so your experience may be different now with this particular website.

Continue reading "The curse of knowledge, con queso"

When mistakes in technology amplify the mistakes in marketing

nospam@example.com (Adriana Beal) — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:45:40 -0500

Another day I received a small, uninteresting newsletter I never signed up for, from a new company I never heard of. At the bottom of the message was a link to unsubscribe. I clicked, and was taken to a page saying this:

(The email supposedly unsubscribed wasn't mine.)

Let's count the ways this company damaged its reputation with this newsletter:

They didn't use permission marketing

Permission marketing is a term coined by Seth Godin to designate a form of marketing in which prospective customers first have to give explicit permission before they are sent a promotional message. This type of marketing allows advertisers to reach a more specific audience that may be more receptive to their product or service.

"By talking only to volunteers, Permission Marketing guarantees that consumers pay more attention to the marketing message" Godin writes. "It serves both customers and marketers in a symbiotic exchange."

They didn't take the time to write a compelling message

The newsletter they sent merely included an excerpt from a PR announcement. To read the rest, I would have to click the link provided in the message. No motivation whatsoever for people to actually care enough to click and read more.

They didn't test the unsubscribe option

What kind of reputation will be associated with a company that tells people that they can unsubscribe by clicking a link, only to take them to a page where they are told that another person has been "successfully unsubscribed"?

They didn't use security measures to protect subscribers from email harvesting

The unsubscribe routine not only wasn't working, but it also allowed me to repeatedly click the same link and see other people's emails addresses, one at a time, along with the message that the address was "successfully unsubscribed". If the unsubscription process is working, I must have unsubscribed 30 people before I finally reached my own email so I could get out of that list.

I'm sending the link to this post to the company that sent me the newsletter. Hopefully they will learn from their mistakes and do a better job in the future so people will actually enjoy receiving correspondence from them.

Do you trick people into subscribing to your newsletters?

nospam@example.com (Adriana Beal) — Sat, 15 May 2010 18:10:30 -0500

The method described below is used by many content-driven websites, and is completely disrespectful to users. It may be very effective to increase your subscription rate, but not without damaging your business reputation with many visitors unhappy with the number of unsolicited email messages now flooding their inbox.

(Photo credit: Mzelle Biscotte)

1. Ask for an email address in exchange to access to a seemingly useful article or free resource.

2. Automatically subscribe the person to one or more spam email newsletters.

3. Include an option to unsubscribe at the end of each newsletter, requiring the victims to fill out a ludicrous user profile form asking for name, address, phone number, etc. before they can complete the request.

The system will not let users unsubscribe until their personal data is filled out. This is the type of traffic-building move that will work in the short-term, but is likely to make potential customers irritated – so frustrated, in fact, that many will now go out of their way to avoid doing business with the perpetrator in the future.

Convince me first

How to annoy users during sign-up in two easy steps

Pull To Open

nospam@example.com (Jeff Howell) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:40:40 -0600

Perhaps this has happened to you. I went to the store and got a package of X. When back at home I wanted to use the X. The packaging was beautiful. Obviously someone had spent some time on the design of every aspect, especially the self-promoting advertising that covered the whole package. My puzzle was about how to get the X out of the beautiful package. Upon careful examination I found (in 8 point type, 25% gray printing over top of a giant image of a happy, beautiful person enjoying X) the word “Open” and a little tab of packaging. I puled the tab. It came off in my hand without altering the beautiful package in any other way.

So I attacked the beautiful package with a knife, making it impossible to reseal. I put the whole beautiful mess in a zip lock bag after extracting my portion of X.

I thought this may be a case of function being subverted by form. Not really. The package is a billboard designed to make you buy X. That is it’s function. Once bought, the job is done and you’re on your own.

OK, so the purveyors of X are capitalists and selling X is their goal. That’s all fine.

I will even go so far as to say that I got a tiny bit of enjoyment from the game of finding the “Open”. Then it all went badly. Don’t tease me like that, it infuriates!

Why can’t they get it right? Just make it obvious and easy to enjoy a fresh portion of X.

“Open” sets an expectation in my mind that isn’t fulfilled. Worse, I feel cheated, double crossed when it goes wrong. My experience of X becomes negative before even getting to the main attraction.

____________

Jeff Howell has thirty years experience in computer industry, spanning hardware, manufacturing, QA and software in engineering, management and consulting.

Thankfully, bears don't need the Shift Key to hibernate

nospam@example.com (Adriana Beal) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:12:08 -0600

Microsoft products are known to defy user interface standards of comfort and friendliness, so there isn't any novelty in complaining about its products, but here is an annoying feature that I use every day when switching from Windows to Ubuntu in my dual boot netbook that makes me question the sanity of the person in charge of defining the user interface for this feature.

On Ubuntu, when you want to go to the Hibernate state, you click on the "Shut down the computer" button, and this is what you see:

Pretty easy to choose "Hibernate", right?

On Windows XP, when you select "Turn Off Computer", you see 3 buttons: Stand By, Turn Off and Restart. To see the option "Hibernate", you need to press the Shift Key so the Stand By button changes into Hibernate.

You need to press Shift Key to see the Hibernate button

Will someone from Microsoft please explain why would you make something as basic as choosing to "hibernate" more complicated than necessary?

I am sure no UX designer was involved in the creation of this "Turn Off Computer" feature. Requiring the user to press Shift Key to have access to a fourth option that could very easily fit within the options menu only makes sense if The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.

Related article:
In the age of rapid cycles and connected data, how long are we going to have to settle for dumb software?

Evil interfaces

nospam@example.com (Admin - It's broken blog) — Wed, 05 May 2010 01:03:01 -0500

Good interfaces help users achieve their goals as easily as possible. "Evil interfaces", on the other hand, are meant to trick users into doing things they don't want to.

Professor of Computer Science Greg Conti offers serveral examples in the video below:

"You may also like..." NOT

nospam@example.com (Admin - It's broken blog) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 17:49:56 -0500

Giving people the gift of discovery is a noble pursuit, but clearly there’s room for improvement in recommendation engines.

Nick Cernis watched a video about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in YouTube, only to be recommended this video.

Why YouTube recommends heroin

Reza Behforooz was looking for a metronome in Amazon. Apparently their recommendation engine was at loss at what to suggest as a cross-selling item:

Better Together: white & red!

Read also: Tapping the Power of Recommendation Systems to Build a Broader Web 2.0 Audience

This ATM machine needs a better interface

nospam@example.com (Admin - It's broken blog) — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 23:04:13 -0500

Another great (and funny) example of how just adding new features without proper user interface considerations can cause user frustration:

We're talking money here and all of a sudden my ATM is giving me practice questions for the SAT. If all men eat turnips and John is a man, does John eat turnips?

Read the article at The Humane Experience.

It's called "forgiving format"

nospam@example.com (Adriana Beal) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:35:49 -0500

From time to time, as I try to log in to a website, I get a message like this:

It looks like you're trying to login with your email address. You must use the username you selected when signing up. This can be found in our welcome email.

How annoying is that the system will recognize that you are using your email to log in, and instead of actually accepting it for identification purposes, tells you to go find the username you selected when signing up?

Here are an example of a much better design solution:

Clearly, Twitter was created by people who care about user experience, and has a design that plans for errors, and tries to support, not fight, the user's responses. Other websites, like AAPH.org, have also come to the conclusion that typing into text fields isn’t most people’s idea of a fun time, and that the burden should be in the system, not the user, to fetch information that is readily available:

To make things easier, you can now log in using your email address or your username, whichever you like. In the case of AAPH, many people had created complex user names, e.g., "John Smith, Ph.D, CChT, MFC". That caused problems because the username had to be entered exactly the same each time to log in. Try using your email address - it'll be easier.

Unfortunately not all designers seem to realize that the user just wants to get something done, not think about "correct" formats. Refusing to allow spaces or dashes in entry fields such as credit card number and zip code is another common example of disregard for the design practice of "forgiving format" (see "No Dashes Or Spaces" Hall of Shame for samples).

Computers are good at figuring out how to handle input of different types, so when you design an application that requires user input, please let the user type whatever he needs, and make the software do the right thing with it!

Related posts:

How to annoy users during sign-up in two easy steps

Convince me first