I have always wondered.
Would a customer select a usability expert company whose website has a bad user experience?
I followed the link that Vinodh has pointed out in his earlier blog. Here is a screen grab.
Notice...
1. Using the typical (and a tad boring) Web 2.0 pattern, the designer tries to create a three step process to obtain the calendar. So step one, select the language, step two select the size and whoa.. where is step 3? Is translating the third step?
It is right there, blind boy, the green box - the one that looks like an ad - is actually the action button
2. The "translate the calendar" link takes you to a landing page for YOU to translate the calendar and send it to THEM. It has no relationship to the step 1 and 2 described above
3. And what's with the grammatically incorrect sentences? Surely, this not part of the causal English syndrome, is it?
Sad. BTW, had this not been the output of a usability expert company, I would have let this one pass
Here is one of my earlier rants about another user experience magazine.
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7 comments:
Hello,
Thanks for the feedback, we appreciate it! :)
The translation link was at first placed underneath the language list, but because the list got longer, the translation link was moved to the right. It sure should not have been placed there.
Regarding the button; it does not seem to be a problem. Based on the statistics, we can see that of all the people entering the site, a very high percentage (nearly 100%) does click that button.
We made it slightly smaller and gave it a focus after a selection is clicked.
The design sure is boring, but we put most of our efforts in the calendar itself.
Hi Anders,
Thanks for your super rapid reponse to this post.
Well, the fact that people eventually ended hitting the download button does not mean that there isn't a usability problem :) Think about it.
Hi again,
You are *guessing* that the site has a usability problem.
I am reading the statistics of the *user behaviour* and...
-Very few people were clicking the translation link.
-Nearly 100% of the people entering the site actually did what we wanted them to - to click the button - and in a short amount of time.
-Although (if) the users were frustrated and confused during usage of the site, at least we know that the average time of frustration was very short.
A design can actually work fine even if it does have a button that looks slightly different than "other buttons" or does not follow Jacob Nielsens guidelines 100% :-)
Anyway, I think you have some good points in your blog post, and we will continue to improve the site.
If you any other suggestions, we are happy to hear them :-)
@sunil whats usability? its the ease of using something. if a screen as a usability problem that means users are finding difficulty in doing what they are intending or supposed to do. On the page in question the first thing i saw was the button to download which was what i wanted to do.
The interface design is ofcourse not done the right way (according to me and u, pls remember that there is no right and wrong in design) like you explained. but what the hell, it works.
What we have to understand from this is that even though a good user experience can be achieved by a combination of all the right design elements sometimes many of the aspects can be mutually exclusive. eg a bad UI or visual design doent really always mean that there is a usability problem. and vice versa. I can find 101 usability problems in Windows if i really sit and look for them but i can still get things done without much issues as i have got used to it. Mac is supposed to be usable but as a person who is used to windows i dont find Mac usable at all. I'm not saying UI design is not important. There is certainly an objective to it. I know people who use Yahoo messenger coz it looks better than google talk. The screen in question would improve the whole experience if the UI has a better design. Users wouldnt have missed the translation part etc.
Thats why the reason behind Ander's argument that there is no usability problem with his site coz users have no problem in finding the download button and downloading the calendar. You and I might look into the whole aspect of the UI etc but not everyone will do that. Their objective is not that. We have to accept that.
The other day i was teaching my friend HTML coding. As he was writing the code i noticed that he missed out a close tag. I shouted its wrong and he has to change but he had already saved it to preview it. The preview on the browser showed no problem as it was rendered with no issues. He asked me So what did I say was wrong? I just mumbled that some browsers are apologetic towards wrong code. Then he said "But what the hell... it works and thats what i want." :-) May be a wrong example, but just thought of saying this.
There are no rights and wrongs. There are no rules.
@umesh:
I would like to point out that I did not write that the site *does not* have usability problems.
I am just saying that a designer can presume and guess, but it is much better to look at how actual users think and behave.
I guess you have two kinds of usability:
-Theoretical: a designer is learning from observing users in various contexts, and takes the collected experience into improving similar problems in another specific context. I.e. guessing that there will be a problem. Since each context is unique and often composed of hundreds of design elements affecting each other, this can be quite hard.
-Actual: what the users actually do. If a designer enters a site and thinks "hey, i think that specific design element will be a problem" that still may not mean that the users will actually have a problem.
In this specific post, thinking "that button did at first look like an ad, some users will probably think that it is an ad and will have problems" may or may not be correct. It is up to the users :-)
Again, I think Sunil has some good points, and we did fix parts of our site based on the blog post. Hopefully this will avoid potential problems that the site had.
@Anders, One more request. Can the text be fixed as well?
Quoting: [with embedded comments]
It´s here; a new edition of the (in)famous Bad Usability Calendar.[para?] The past three calendars [hyperlink to the past three calendars?] have all been successful in distributing examples of bad design around the world. [para?]Check out the [the not needed] fresh examples of exaggerated use [of] fancy of [remove of] Web 2.0 design, cover flow, personalization, pull-down menus and more...
What do you think?
Possibley breat it down into a couple of paras destroying the wall of text...
@Umesh: To me, (good) usability is simply finding things where you expected them, when you expected them.
From that perspective, had the download button been where the translate link was (and had been numbered 3), it would be perfect.
And then nobody would even have noticed that it is usable :)
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