Why we don’t hide the front door handle inside the Batcave.
25 January 2008 I’ve just completed another round of usability testing for some clients. At times like these I find myself reflecting (yet again) on how deceptively difficult usable web design really is.The key problem this time was that old favourite, hidden functionality.
I was testing a B2B online application, effectively a VERY large catalogue site with ordering and online invoice payment functions. The owners had found that uptake was below expectations, and anecdotal feedback was that the site was ‘slow and complex’.
When I did the test sessions I found that users did in fact say this. What they objected to was the ‘pick and add’ cart shopping model. This is all very well in a B2C situation, where retail shoppers might buy 2-3 items and the repetitive steps of finding items and adding them one by one to the cart aren’t too arduous. But when you’re ordering 25-50 items for a shop it’s a bit of a chore.
But in fact, I eventually realised (thanks to a really experienced user), the site had been built with a solution. Users could ‘pre-load’ a range of commonly-ordered items into any number of ‘ranges’, one for socks, one for undies… In effect, these were ‘pre-loaded template carts’. Users merely had to check items in the range to load them into an active ordering cart. No more searching across the whole site for correct styles and sizes - if users added the item to their ‘range’ whenever they first ordered it, the job was then done for next time as well.
Magic! The only fly in the ointment of cleverness was that the developers then made this crucial function effectively invisible.
The main navigation on the left side had a heading called ‘My ranges’ - which in almost all cases was below the page fold line, due to an excessive proliferation of much less important links higher up the navigation bar. As a result, few users ever saw it, and if they did, its lowly placement gave no clues that it was something everyone wanted.
Worse, the home page of the application, which appeared once users logged in, had a handy three-part flow diagram showing the main steps to making your order. The three main user steps (apparently) were:
Product search > add to cart > checkout.Doh! What’s missing here, people? No wonder no one knew about creating a range… it’s being kept secret!
It’s easy to lampoon this kind of thing, but the simple truth is, if designers don’t spend time with users finding out what their experience of a site really is, then they’ll never realise when their ever-so-clever functionality is actually completely inaccessible.
Batman has lots of cool stuff in the Batcave, which he uses to fight crime. How useful would all that cool stuff be if the only door handle was hidden on the inside of the front door?
Labels: IA, user experience, web design
posted by Bruce on Friday, January 25, 2008,
