Categoría 'usability'

Heuristic evaluation is one of the most popular usability techniques; it basically consists of reviewing an interface and check if it fulfills some well-known guidelines and principles (the "heuristics").

Once you overcome the fear of performing a task with such a fancy name, the following step is obvious: choosing the heuristics (guidelines) to use. There are some popular heuristics lists, but there are some risks when using them for a usability evaluation:

• If the heuristics are too generic, they don't help you to identify real issues.
• Otherwise, if the heuristics include detailed checkpoints, you may concentrate on small or very specific issues while overlooking the important ones.

Consequently I suggest using alternative heuristics: the 'top lists'.

Which lists?

With 'top lists' I am referring to lists similar to these by Jakob Nielsen: 

• The ten very worst design mistakes of all time
• Most violated homepage guidelines
• Top homepage usability guidelines
• Good deeds in Web design
• Web design mistakes (2005) 
• Web design mistakes (2003) 
• Web design mistakes (2002) 
• Web design mistakes (1999)
• Web design mistakes (1996)
• Application design mistakes
• Information Architecture (IA) mistakes

I think this kind of guidelines might be used (or the mistakes avoided) in small projects, or even in big projects as a preliminar evaluation, or in other situations.

(sigue …)

Has this ever happened to you? You want to send a file to someone, so you write a nice e-mail explaining what it is; then you click the send button, and some minutes later you receive the reply: "ok, very nice, but … where's the attached file?".

Yes, you forgot to attach the file. It's a common but hard to avoid problem; a good rule is always attach the file before writing the e-mail, but aren't there any better ways to avoid this?

Some systems, like GMail or Thunderbird, have options to alert you when you try to send an e-mail which includes specific words ("file", "enclose", "photo", …) but has no attached files. It's a nice idea, but far from perfect: you will still miss files if the system doesn't detect these words, or you will get an annoying alert about an attachment you don't want to send.

A simple solution

Here's a simpler solution: the user gets notified of how many attachments the e-mail has when he/she is about to send the e-mail, not using annoying alerts but simply including that information in the send button, like this (GMail example):

So when you are going to send the e-mail, you realize that the message has no attachments. Simple and effective, don't you think so?

(sigue …)

Sometimes I have looked for an usability logo or icon, without luck. Hmmm, interesting! We have icons for almost every other issue, but why not for usability?

Let me suggest these:

Ok, usability specialists know icons and logos are overused in many sites, and they're not really important for the user; it should be so natural than there's no need to say "we care for usability". Anyway, I think it would be a good idea having a logo to identify sites related to usability aspects, or maybe to identify sites that specially care about those issues.

The teapot is from Don Norman's book 'The Design of Everyday Things', and it's sometimes used (with different designs) in presentations, web sites, etc. The 'u' is supposed to be the handle of the teapot so as to make it more usable. Wait! It's not a great logo if I have to explain this

You get the idea, don't you? Now, remember I'm not a graphic designer and leave your opinions in the comments (and feel free to use them if you want to, of course).

La semana que viene asistiré a dos jornadas del User Experience 2007, que se celebra en Barcelona del 4 al 9 de noviembre. Este evento, organizado por el Nielsen Norman Group, es uno de los más importantes a nivel mundial en el tema de interfaces de usuario.

Resulta difícil elegir únicamente dos charlas de todas las que tendrán lugar, y que se antojan todas más que apetecibles; inicialmente, estas son a las que asistiré:

• El martes 6, Designing Multi-User Services: Lessons from Social Psychology (John Boyd). Puede ser interesante conocer cómo se comportan los usuarios ante los interfaces de usuario desde un punto de vista psicológico y no tanto técnico.
• El miércoles 7, Application Usability 2 (Chris Nodder). Por lo que he leído, es posible asistir a esta segunda parte (en la que se explicarán procesos de diálogo, tareas y workflows de interacción) sin hacerlo a la primera (en la que se tratarán los elementos de interacción individuales).

¿Nos vemos allí? Espero escribir algo sobre el evento en el blog del grupo SQUaC.

Me escribe Jesús Hurtado, CEO de Kroonos, solicitándome que le ayude en la promoción de su web ya que pronto (el 31 de octubre) dejará de estar abierto el registro de usuarios; a partir de entonces, será necesaria una invitación. Una mención en este blog no le va a causar ninguna avalancha de visitas, pero aquí queda esto.

El sitio web se autodefine así:

Kroonos es una web 2.0 que te permitirá sacarle partido a tu tiempo libre. Un banco del tiempo global donde podrás dar y recibir ayuda de forma gratuita de otros miembros de la comunidad.

Por el momento no se puede acceder directamente a ninguna funcionalidad específica del sitio; ésta se puede intuir buceando en el foro, en el blog, etc.; pero la falta de algo más tangible posiblemente le resta cierto atractivo a la hora de registrarse. Eso sí; el concepto de una comunidad en la que los usuarios intercambian tiempo para obtener otras cosas a cambio suena lo suficientemente interesante como para tomar nota y seguir su evolución. Yo ya me he registrado.

En lo que respecta al diseño, sin hacer un análisis profundo (es decir, echando un vistazo), el aspecto de la página es bastante claro y agradable. En el caso de una web con un propósito tan original es de agradecer el texto que lleva por título "¿Qué es Kroonos?", en el que se describe su objetivo, aunque como comenté anteriormente se echa de menos una visión más concreta de la funcionalidad que ofrecerá el sitio.

Por último, no puedo evitar que me venga a la memoria Momo, la novela de Michael Ende en la que unos misteriosos hombres grises se fumaban el tiempo de la gente. Seguiremos el desarrollo de Kroonos, aunque sea sólo para comprobar de qué otros extraños modos consume la gente su tiempo.

Usually, submit buttons in web forms should be clicked just once; but many users click them twice or more. Why?

• Because they're used to launch actions by double clicking (as on Windows icons).
• Because the server doesn't replies instantantly, and they click again "just to see if something happens".

What's the result? The form data is sent twice to the server, and users usually don't realize it; they just get the response to one of the submits. Try this simulation to see what happens when submitting several times the form before the server response arrives:

This is not a big issue if it's, for instance, a search form: the query is being launched twice but the user simply gets the result. It may be annoying if someone is receiving the same mail several times just because users are submiting several times the contact form. And it's a real big problem when the user is submiting a payment (you can be pretty sure they don't want to pay twice the same object!).

The solution

There's an easy solution for that problem! Simply disable the button just after the form is submitted, and you can change the button text too. The result is something like this:

This is done using the onsubmit form event:

<form onsubmit=document.forms['formname'].submitbutton.disabled=true;
document.forms['formname'].submitbutton.value='Sending...';" action="action" name="formname">
  <!-- some form controls here -->
  <input value="Send" name="submitbutton" id="submitbutton" type="submit">
</form>

With this technique, you achieve two positive effects:

• avoiding the double submit problem; and
• giving feedback to the user confirming the submit

Of course, there's no perfect solution. If JavaScript is disabled at the browser, it doesn't works; if it's really important avoiding multiple submits (for instance, when it's an economical transaction), it should be done at server's level.

It's really simple to use and without negative effects. Try it if you are really tired of multiple submits and tell me how it goes!

Google Analytics has a nice new interface, much more intuitive and usable, but I still miss something I think it would be really usefull: an integrated calendar of events.

I can select a range of dates at Google Analytics and get different statistics: visits, unique users, etc. But there are many events (internal and external) that may affect that data. For instance:

• Changes at the site: contents, layout, etc.
• Changes in Google Analytics configuration (for instance, in filters)
• Google Adwords campaigns linking to that site
• etc, etc.

Any webmaster would be happy to know how those events are related to the statistics, wouldn't they?

How could Google do that? We already have a solution: Google Calendar. So we simply would associate a site monitorized by Google Anlytics to a calendar in Google Calendar. A webmaster could add events to that calendar, and they would be shown at Google Analytics.

Here's an example; this graph shows a decrease in the number of visits on June, 2nd:

Hmmm… What happened that day? Oh, maybe that new filter to exclude inner visits. With the feature I suggest, I would link the Google Analytics account with a Google Calendar which includes events related to the site, like this:

(sigue …)