…which I found in the blog of a german journalist living in London, writing about what happens if you have a great zest for life and are disabled at the same time.
I don’t want to describe it there. Just watch it (it’s a short movie), it’s really worth it. And think about that next time you are designing a web site.
We received a phone book. It appeared on our doorstep. It was heavy and printed on paper and wrapped in plastic.
I looked at it like someone from a different planet. I hadn’t touched a phone book in years! Why on earth would somebody still want one?
My friends all have mobile phones, not landlines; and I have their numbers stored in my phone anyway, so I don’t need to look them up. For business contacts I have their business cards, which I store in a contact management database, which is also easily searchable. And if for some reason I don’t have somebody’s number, I would look it up in an online phone book which contains all people in the whole of the UK, not just Cambridge.
When I have children, they will probably fail to grasp why anybody could have possibly wanted a big heavy book with their neighbours’ phone numbers. And I will feel like someone from the middle ages because I still remember using them (back in the day when it took 2 minutes to connect to the internet by modem, so it was actually faster to use the paper phonebook). And hey, I’m 24 — how are my parents’ generation going to feel?
But then, take a step back. Why are they still distributing paper phone books for free? Because there are still many, many people who do not have internet access. Many millions in the UK — and outside the industrialised world it’s the vast majority of people. That online oxygen which I take so completely for granted, it’s not actually as omnipresent as I would like to think.
The internet has completely changed the world, I can hardly repeat it often enough — it is the same kind of massive shake-up as the industrial revolution or the invention of the printing press. But we who are involved in making that technology must not forget about those people who lack internet access. There is a divide between those who are part of the communication and democratisation which the internet is bringing, and those who are “digitally excluded”. We must not forget them, and we must do our best to get everybody online, anywhere on the planet, by making technology accessible, usable, and affordable.
Someone put a lot of money, time and effort into printing that phone book. Although it probably didn’t require a tree to be felled, it has still consumed a lot of recycled paper. I would have felt bad to put it in the recycling immediately, even though I know that we are never going to use it. So I stripped off the plastic wrapper and placed the book carefully in the drawer under the living room table. Last year’s phone book was there too, just as unused. At least now, the two phone books can keep each other company.
A while ago I wrote some posts about the user interfaces of ticket machines in Germany (article 1, article 2). Meanwhile I am told that they have been improved considerably: the ‘Fast purchase’ route is now considerably faster, requiring a minimum of only 4 or 5 clicks to buy a standard ticket (compare that to 16 clicks previously!). The way they have done that is to skip the whole timetable thing; instead you only select whether or not you want to take the fast trains (which has an effect on the price). That’s a very good start, since it optimises the common case: people who routinely buy the same ticket and know exactly what they need. And for those with unusual requirements, there’s still the long route with its multitude of different options to choose from.
Despite these changes, plenty of usability challenges remain. For example, my friend told me that he didn’t realise when using the machine when he had reached the payment screen: he could have just inserted his card, but instead found himself looking around for the “next” button to press. There was just some small and non-obvious bit of text on screen explaining that you were now ready to pay.
In fact the usability problems of German train ticket machines are still so pronounced that the national rail company (DB) is now offering courses to teach people how to use them. (See the scanned newspaper article, taken from Aalener Nachrichten/Schwäbische Zeitung, Tuesday 18th December 2007. Sorry that it’s more than a month old, I’ve not had much time to blog recently.)
This article is somehow slightly scary and hilarious at the same time, in the way how the train staff systematically blame the users for their inability to use the system, rather than seeking the blame with the system itself. Hilarious because it’s so stereotypical, and scary because such a big organisation can get away with it without people putting up a fuss and explaining that this is just not acceptable.
Some highlights from the article:
Moschner [the course instructor] says that the new ticket machines have a more visible display and also accept cash besides credit and debit cards. “Are they just as cumbersome as the old ones?” an over-70-year-old lady enquires. The course instructor remains calm: “They are not cumbersome.”
Hmm. Complete denial of the existence of problems. Two more quotes indicate that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of user behaviour going on:
“Read what it says there. It is important.”
“The ticket machine really does tell you what it wants, you just have to look.”
Why should I be trying to find out what the ticket machine wants? It should be trying to find out what I want! Also, I shouldn’t have to read every word on the screen. That’s simply not what people do. People don’t even read whether doors are labelled ‘PUSH’ or ‘PULL’ before trying one or the other. People just press random buttons in the hope of getting somewhere quickly, and the system should be designed to cope with this sort of behaviour. Anything else is just unrealistic and designed for robots rather than humans.
Fortunately this course is a positive initiative, probably with a thought along the lines of “well, if we can’t get the design right, at least we can teach people how to use the broken design”. I guess that’s a valid approach to the problem. And hey, 8 people turned up to that course, maybe that’s 8 fewer people who get frustrated with the machines. Sounds a bit like a drop in an ocean to me though.
Netlife Research, a usability consultancy from Norway, has come up with a neat humorous way of pointing out some design elements which can help improve usability (or rather, design errors which can render a product pointless for most of its potential users). They have put these handy hints together in the form of a calendar — the Bad Usability Calendar. You can download it and print out a copy for yourself. Such as I have done, see the photo (which includes a gratuitous reference to potted plants). Thanks to Johannes for pointing it out to me.
Amusing though the exercise is, it proves once again how hard it can be to practise what you preach. The Bad Usability Calendar website, although apparently designed by usability experts, doesn’t actually work. I was going to enter their prize draw for an Amazon voucher, for which a required step is to provide your address. This address appears to be used to look up your longitude and latitude, so that they can plot a little pin on a map. I tried four or five variations of my UK address, but unfortunately none of them was accepted by the site. It failed with a badly written error message which gave me no clear indication as to how I would have to construct the address so that it would be accepted. Well, I would have even been perfectly happy to find Cambridge on the map myself and stick a virtual pin into it, but no, that wasn’t a foreseen option. Moreover, the option for uploading a photo didn’t appear to work either — and there wasn’t any error message at all, just no picture. So unfortunately I was excluded from the prize draw.
At least I’m glad to see that nobody else from the UK has managed to place a pin yet. You know, bad usability always makes you feel stupid (even if it’s clearly somebody else’s fault, not your own), so it’s a bit of a consolation that nobody else has figured out how to make the site accept a UK address. Now I am wondering whether something like that could be incorporated into other products. Some means by which users can see that they are not the only ones who are grappling with a dysfunctional product, maybe by social network or something like that. Not that it makes the product any better; it just makes its users feel slightly better.
Edit (29 January 2008): Meanwhile the issue has been sorted out and we have been placed on the map manually. The address search also seems to be working now, and we’ve even been joined by another UK pin in London. Netlife handled the matter very quickly and nicely — thanks!
As part of the re-launch of Ept Computing’s website I’ve also published a white paper on user satisfaction on the mobile web. Some of it consists of observations which I’ve previously blogged about, now pulled together and presented in a more coherent and structured manner. I’ve structured it according to some interesting findings from the Online Publishers’ Association. They surveyed mobile web users and found that their main sources of dissatisfaction with the mobile web were:
While I’m not quite sure what they mean with “user friendliness” — it’s a kind of compound term for all sorts of factors which contribute towards the user experience — the other two, load time and navigation, are very clear areas which need to be addressed if the mobile web wants to move forward.
Site load time is a tricky problem to address, because slowness is mainly due to packet round-trip times on mobile data services. I see Ajax and Flash to be the most promising approaches to beat the network latency — i.e. transferring more data up front in order to make the site more responsive once it’s loaded. Site navigation is mainly a question of information architects figuring out how to present information most effectively on a mobile, and there are already some very good examples of good mobile navigation design on the net.
If you’re interested, you can download the white paper (PDF, 124 kB). Here’s the abstract:
The use of internet and web services on mobile devices is expected to revolutionise our attitude to information and communication in the near future. However, in order to attract mainstream adoption, the mobile web must overcome some fundamental user experience problems. In this white paper we approach the user experience from a technical point of view, explaining reasons for deficiencies of the current approaches, and introduce some technical means for improving the user experience.
About a month ago Victor Keegan of the Guardian wrote: “The mobile web is finally getting started”. He points out both some of the benefits…
“It is interesting why so few of us use one of the breakthroughs of recent years: the ability to search the web from wherever we are with a mobile phone. This ought to be hugely empowering, enabling us to answer any question from wherever we happen to be instead of having to wait until we are within reach of a computer.”
…as also the main reasons for its slow start:
“There are a number of reasons why this hasn’t happened and why it may be about to change. It is partly because the operators have been shamefully greedy in trying to raid our pockets by charging for all the data we download [...] the user experience is still not good enough. Mobiles were designed to make telephone calls. Now things are changing.”
– Victor Keegan, “The mobile web is finally getting started”
I recently came across some great examples demonstrating why for complex web sites, there is no alternative to designing a specifically mobile version. This is not so much for technical reasons, as rather that mobile users may have totally different requirements. It’s not so important to be able to access every single bit of content; instead those things which mobile users do require need to be instantly accessible. After all, think why a user may want to use the mobile web rather than the desktop web: it’s very much tied to now, an instantaneous requirement. In the words of Sarah Lipman, from an interesting paper on mobile search paradigms:
“‘Mobile Search’ = I want it NOW. I can’t wait, I won’t wait.
When a user gets the sense that ‘I’m not going to find what I want right now’ he stops looking, because that is almost always the path of least resistance. At the same time, he will also have a small sense of failure. [...] If search cannot deliver on the promise of ‘I want it NOW’, it won’t be utilized.”
– Sarah Lipman, “Search patterns in nature: Informing computer search interfaces”
For mobile users it is even more important than for normal web users that the designer has figured out exactly what the most frequently needed aspects of his site are, and made those aspects immediately and very easily accessible. This means that a mobile page can contain far fewer navigational elements (links) than a page intended for desktop viewing. Going from desktop to mobile therefore involves prioritising links in a page — some of them are going to have to go (moved into a sub-page, or removed entirely). This is not something which software can do automatically — a human editor or information architect has to sit down and decide.
Two examples to clarify:
Blue Flavor has also produced a presentation on the basics of good mobile web design.
Jimmy sent me some screenshots of Windows Vista which exemplify my complaints about unclear labelling of buttons — a usability problem which occurs so frequently that I’ve named this whole blog after it. He was running Windows Update, which was installing a bunch of software updates:
It turned out that he didn’t actually want to install those updates now, so he hit the “Stop installation” button. Up pops a dialog box:
Now what does this mean? Does continue mean “continue stopping the installation”, or does it mean “continue the installation”? If we press cancel, will this cancel the request to stop installing updates, or will it cancel the installation process itself? And what does the red X button in the corner do? (The temptation to press X in cases like this is huge: I consider it to mean “shut up, go away, I don’t want to think about what you are asking me”.)
But there is still hope: a “Details” button, which will surely reveal the answer and tell us what button to press. So we click “Details”:
Oh, that was really useful. You know, we love hexadecimal numbers. Thank you, Microsoft!
But Microsoft are not the only offenders in this regard. Barbara Ballard is having similar problems with OpenOffice.
The Yahoo user interface blog recently featured a good post introducing some of the limitations of designing for mobile devices. It points to the limitations of both output (small screen) and input (keypad, touchscreen, joystick and many other variations), and emphasises the most important basis for the design of mobile sites and services: keeping in mind the context — who the user is, where and when and how they are going to use the service. Outdoors in difficult lighting conditions? On a train which goes through tunnels and therefore keeps losing its network connection?
Here it is — my photo series documenting the menu madness of German ticket machines. See part 1 of the story for an introduction. This post contains a lot of graphics, so I’ve split it out into a separate page. Please click the title or the following link to read it.
Marketing professionals are finally beginning to understand the importance of designing a coherent and positive user experience is an important part of online marketing. Usability News quotes from a recent report: “…the biggest benefits of usability investment are improved perceptions of brand, increased conversion rates and greater customer loyalty and retention.”
However, there is still a long way to go. Although usability is on the increase, there are still plenty of people who do not recognise it. But the benefits are huge: the average e-commerce site can increase its sales by 79% through a usability overhaul, according to the world’s leading user experience expert, Jakob Nielsen.
I discovered an unbelievable website today: UsabilityNet is supposed to promote usability resources, but the website is itself a usability nightmare. The whole page is in embedded Flash, and there is not even a good reason for it. The navigation is totally confused, it looks ugly, and the button asking you to complete a survey on the quality of the website just adds to the irony. In fact, it features as one of the 10 worst websites of 2007 on Vincent Flanders’ webpagesthatsuck.com.