Needles and Plastic: September 2007 - a blog about information design

Usability at del.icio.us

27 September 2007

Great to see the team at del.icio.us using user-centred principles in their product improvement work their product.

They've done some usability testing, which is great to hear, and will be incorporating the results in their next version.

If you haven't come across del.icio.us before, I recommend the service. del.icio.us is a way of managing your bookmarks/favourites so that:

you can easily find something you've lost
can categorise them through simple tags
can access your bookmarks from any web-connected computer
can share them easily with someone else.

I don't know about you, but managing my bookmarks has always been a problem. I love the web and have collected links to good sites since the day I first discovered the bookmark button in Cello. Before del.icio.us, I would regularly have to re-order and purge them because I'd misplaced a bookmark to some great site I'd found, and, believe it or not, could not find it again through a search engine.

The behaviour around bookmarking interests me. I've met people who claim they don't, but those of us that do obviously don't trust ourselves to be able to locate a found site again. Even with the power of Google at our fingertips, if you can't remember what something is called, it can be difficult to find again days or months later. What makes me bookmark is that frustrating feeling when you go looking for something you know you've seen before, but just can't locate it using search.

I've been using del.icio.us for two years now, mostly just to maintain my web bookmarks. It works well and I like the simple, clean interface and the fact I can see it from any computer, at home or at work. It doesn't work for everyone, or so I've read, but one reason why it works for me is because I'm tough on tags. I don't add a new tag to my list unless I really can't use one I've already got. This has helped keep my list of tags short-ish, and I think still of use to me. James Melzer once complained that large tag clouds were useless, and I can see what he means when they get as large as his have.

You may ask how come I can easily re-locate bookmarks in del.icio.us but not find the site in Google? Good question, and I think the answer is tagging. Somehow that and the process around creating them helps me find things again.

One thing I forget to do, is use the power of del.icio.us when researching a topic. Because del.icio.us bookmarks are public, you can search the tags used by others when looking for something. This can be more useful than a keyword Google search, because you can see how many other people have tagged a bookmark and gauge how relevant others have found it. In a world of SEO smoke-and-mirrors and webmaster skull-duggery, del.icio.us can sometimes be more helpful when looking up a topic than a key-word search can. I find the Wikipedia similar in this respect, being a good first-stop for a topic.

I suspect I forget to use the social-power of del.icio.us because I mostly use it for managing my own bookmarks, rather than tapping into the bookmark folksonomy. There are other services that do this for you and let your friends or whoever rate the bookmark links. My primary need is to manage my own bookmarks, so using my mates' bookmarks, or having them rate mine, becomes second priority. In the end, this article by Long tail man Chris Anderson suggests just using yer mates to rate stuff may not the best way to do things anyway.

Labels: usability

posted by Greg on Thursday, September 27, 2007, ,

Usability: the elevator speech

12 September 2007

I’ve been having an interesting time recently trying to develop a knowledge base of marketing collateral we can use to sell usability services to people who don’t know what usability is. This is one tall order.

People who already get usability seldom have to worry about this. The internet, I’ve found, is full of definitions and pep talks about usability. These are generally written by people who use acronyms like UIX and UCD as though they were part of common parlance. They are not. Some of these definitions I used to think were pretty useful, till I met Keith.

Keith is many things, and one of them is a ‘sales guru’. He can really sell stuff, and like all good salesmen, he does this by reading people, working out what floats their boat, and then floating it for them. Keith and I are trying to nail the ‘thing’ that will sell usability to corporate clients, and to my surprise, we haven’t nailed it yet.

Keith’s point, and it’s a good one, is that most of the existing definitions require you to know what usability is in order to unpack the terms used to define it - and the rest of the definitions are fundamentally uncompelling. His sales targets, if they get it, still tend to go…

So what…?

Either they don’t see the point of it, or they think they already have it covered.

I’ve made a little progress – but its slow going. The good thing about Keith is that not much impresses him, because he seems to have heard it all before. So I thought I’d share the few things that are starting to gel.

Usability is advocating for real product users in the design process.

The pop-up toaster story helped here. Imagine the original manual electric toaster as designed by engineers who only made toast in the lab. Controlled conditions, no distractions, perfect toast. The pop-up toaster, on the other hand, was designed by engineers who had talked to your mother about how she actually uses the toaster. In a family kitchen – uncontrolled chaos, five things happening at once, no chance to monitor the cooking process. The pop up toaster doesn’t burn the toast because real users’ needs and actual conditions of use were made central to its design.

Usability is not the same as quality assurance.

I told Keith: “Just because it’s not broken doesn’t mean people can actually use it”. That turned on a light. People are always assuming usability is QA or accessibility or other means to ensure products work. The important thing is to stress that while that’s all necessary, it’s not enough on its own. I told Keith to imagine he had just bought a new VCR. It’s in perfect working order, fresh out of the box, but after an hour he still can’t programme it to record the final of the Sopranos that evening, because the interface and all the documentation are not designed to help real users perform real tasks. That’s not at all usable, but not because its broken.

A usable product is one that pretty well anyone can pick up and use first time.

If you want a definition of a usable product, ask: “Can you; a. take it out of the box and start using it straight away - or; b. do you need to take a class first?” If the answer is “a.” – it’s usable. Usable products are intuitive, they either show you what you have to do just by looking at them – or you can work it out by just trying to use it once. In New Zealand the best online example is the auction site TradeMe – everyone, from computer geeks to your grandmother, can use TradeMe first time.

I was starting to feel we were near having this nailed, till Keith said: “We still don’t have an elevator speech”.
An elevator speech apparently is the two minute speil you give the person in the lift on the way up to your hotel room, when they ask: “What do you do?” I’ve been trying, but I still haven’t come up with one that really has traction. The key is, can the other person go away afterwards and say one sentence starting: “I just met a guy who…” If they can’t sum it up that simply, after hearing it once, then it’s not an elevator speech.

I’ll let you know when I’ve got it.

Labels: marketing, usability

posted by Bruce on Wednesday, September 12, 2007, ,

How to spend money and make sites worse

03 September 2007

A couple of months ago I organised a comparative review of the homepages of the fifty biggest NZ companies not in state ownership. This revealed a few interesting things, including that in NZ good homepage usability is at present largely the preserve of B-to-C transactional sites. Currently NZ companies are not regarding the web as the primary, or even a major, means of investor or customer relations management. But that’s a separate story.

What I want to discuss today is what happened next. After a month or so I decided to check the sites and find out what changes had occurred, since we were getting ready to mount a bit of publicity on the back of this thing. My curiosity was roused by the discovery that five sites had had pretty major makeovers in the intervening weeks. Could we discern any trends, I wondered?

And the answer, friends, is yes we can.

The sites that had been worked on are the following:
http://www.affco.co.nz
http://www.bnz.co.nz
http://www.fisherpaykel.co.nz
http://www.guardianhealthcare.co.nz
http://www.works.co.nz

The sites themselves gave some background to this. The BNZ site was redesigned in order to introduce enhanced customer security, Works was redesigned because of a corporate rebranding exercise, and the others stated no reason. Obviously I don't know what these exercises cost, but my guess is that at least three of these were fairly expensive.

And the bad news in summary? Two went up in ranking, and three went down.

Those that improved were:

AFFCO was rated at 44%, now 86%, that's a climb from 47 to 2 out of 50.
Fisher & Paykel was rated at 52%, now 69%, that's a climb from 44 to 21 out of 50.

Those that became worse were:

Works was rated at 73%, now 45%, that's a drop from 12 to 47 out of 50.
BNZ was rated at 78%, now 69%, that's a drop from 4 to 21 out of 50.
Guardian Health Care was rated at 67%, now 57%, that's a drop from 27 to 37 out of 50.

To my mind, these results are actually fairly random, and that’s a trend in itself.

I would honestly have thought that a business that is going to expend some serious shareholder coin on revamping its website would give thought to the issue of making the homepage more usable to site visitors.

I don’t feel I have to justify or explain that – it’s a no-brainer, even if there’s an ulterior motive for the redesign, such as rebranding. And yet, whether or not their usability improved is pretty much a coin toss. If there is any trend, it’s towards declining usability.

Frankly, I find these results a little shaming. Is this how poorly our major corporates are ‘getting’ the web? Sadly, I think that’s true.

In fact, if I may be permitted an anecdote to support this contention, the case of MacquarieGoodman is even more damning. In a separate study of the NZX Top 50, I rated this homepage as second most usable of all the Top 50, on 85% [http://www.goodmanintl.com].

A week after the study was made public, they rebranded the company with a major ad agency-driven makeover. The homepage plummeted to a 56% rating, taking itself down to 49th out of the 50. You could smell the money they’d spent, wafting out of the monitor - and the net result was, you couldn’t tell from the homepage what their business was about, who the site was intended for, nor what content you might expect to find in it. It looks very glossy, but usability isn’t just a beauty contest - and this thing looks good in a bikini but can’t name the current president of the USA.

It’s really hard to credit, but so many businesses still think a good website has to look uber-glossy and utterly minimal, and consequently be completely opaque as to your actual meaning. This is a sign of terminal corporate self-regard, rather than an indication of a mature user-centred web presence.

Please work with me people. Repeat after me - in preparation for that next web strategy meeting with your managers: “What is the web? The web is a medium of communication… Stupid!”

Labels: usability