Bad usability – how to notice it on your site
It’s often easy to get carried away with criticizing what’s wrong with a website, because what’s wrong manifests itself in our personal user experience of that site. In order to understand good usability you have to train yourself to recognize it. When you’re at a great site, you usually don’t think “wow this is a really good user experience”, you just enjoy the site. When it’s a bad experience however you usually end up getting frustrated. Both these types experiences are valuable learning tools.
Windows 7 and multi-touch
Several sources this week have reported on Windows 7 and its multi-touch features. Windows 7 will be the successor to Vista and no one is sure when it will come out; Microsoft dates can be slippery. That said I am a huge geek when it comes to new technology. Multi-touch is already a reality, but several years ago it belonged to the realm of Science Fiction and there is no denying that it is very cool. Playing with the Apple iTouch/iPhone for the first time is awesome as long as it’s not in the Apple store. Those things can get pretty nasty looking with Ebola boogers smeared all over them.
Huminized and Enso
I read a post on Slashdot a few days ago about Mozilla hiring several developers from Humanized to work at the Mozilla Labs on Firefox. The original article is available on Ars Technica. The Humanized developers are known for their expertise in usability and innovative user interface design.
Anyway, after surfing around on their site I found this interesting app called Enso. If you use a Mac it is similar to Quicksilver. Right now Enso is Windows only, but it says on their site that they are planning a Mac and Linux version in the future. Basically Enso is a launcher app. You can launch things very quickly just by pressing the caps lock key and typing the commands. You can type “open program name” to open an application. You can type “Google search query” and bang you are on Google with your query. It will even do inline math on the fly, so if I type out 5*72 and highlight it, then type calc and select calculate (four-function) it will solve the equation right in the app you are using whether it be a word processor or an online form.
The best way to understand this app is to watch the Enso demo and actually try it out for yourself. So far I’m using it at work and it does take some getting use too, but I think it could really speed up a lot of people’s productivity. The site has lots of other cool projects on it too, so check it out if it interests you.
Usability — the date is very important
What is with website articles and blogs not putting the date on their work! I find this so frustrating. The article will say something like “Company ABC just released XYZ 3 days ago” Okay, 3 days ago when? Many posts become useless without a date and it affects the usability of your site. It’s great to have archives of everything ever published, but with time some of it will become dated… pun intended. This information may still be of use to some people, but for many it will not. Don’t annoy your users — date your work.
Click Here!
This has to be the bane of my online experience. Okay, that’s probably a bit strong, and there are plenty of other web taboos, but this one is so easy to avoid. Don’t use click here. It means absolutely nothing.
Anyone surfing the web longer than a few days has the look of an html link ingrained into their head. Highlighted or highlighted and underlined text, this is common day web link and it comes with a little cursor pointer to boot. A lot of us scan type, as we do this links will usually be stronger than the surrounding text. When we see click here, there is no context associated with the link without reading the text describing what the link is.
Here is an example.
Your privacy is our priority. To view our privacy policy, click here. To unsubscribe at any time, click here.
Try scanning these links and you will get no context at all. This could be reworded.
Your privacy is our priority. View our privacy policy now. You can unsubscribe at any time.
The second line has much better scanability and just makes sense. Users do not need to be told where to click. As a designer I find myself constantly telling editors not to use click here. Not only does it look silly it’s also bad usability. Remember, links should be able to be read out of context and still make sense.
