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“Don’t make me think!”
All kinds of things on a Web page can make us stop and think unnecessarily. Take names, for example. Typical culprits are cute or clever names, marketing-induced names, company-specific names, and unfamiliar technical names.
There’s almost always a plausible rationale—and a good, if misguided, intention—behind every usability flaw.
The fact that the people who built the site didn’t care enough to make things obvious—and easy—can erode our confidence in the site and the organization behind it.
users shouldn’t spend their time thinking about, like Where am I? Where should I begin? Where did they put _____? What are the most important things on this page? Why did they call it that? Is that an ad or part of the site?
The actual Average User is kept in a hermetically sealed vault at the International Bureau of Standards in Geneva.
You’d be surprised at how long some people will tough it out on sites that frustrate them, often blaming themselves and not the site. There’s also the “I’ve waited ten minutes for this bus already, so I may as well hang in a little longer” phenomenon.
who’s to say that the competition will be any less frustrating?
FACT OF LIFE #2: We don’t make optimal choices. We satisfice.
Weighing options may not improve our chances. On poorly designed sites, putting effort into making the best choice doesn’t really help. You’re usually just as well off going with your first guess and using the Back button if it doesn’t work out.
FACT OF LIFE #3: We don’t figure out how things work. We muddle through.
Faced with any sort of technology, very few people take the time to read instructions.
A lot of people think Google is the Internet.
The user may even find what he’s looking for eventually, but by then the people watching don’t know whether to be happy or not.
Innovate when you know you have a better idea, but take advantage of conventions when you don’t.
CLARITY TRUMPS CONSISTENCY
Users have varying tolerances for complexity and distractions; some people have no problem with noisy pages, but many find them downright annoying. Users have even been known to put Post-its on their screen to cover up animation that’s distracting them while they’re trying to read.
In general, you’ll want to use more headings than you’d think and put more time into writing them.
Don’t let your headings float. Make sure they’re closer to the section they introduce than to the section they follow. This makes a huge difference.
Long paragraphs confront the reader with what Caroline Jarrett and Ginny Redish call a “wall of words.” They’re daunting, they make it harder for readers to keep their place, and they’re harder to scan than a series of shorter paragraphs.
Almost anything that can be a bulleted list probably should be. Just look at your paragraphs for any series of items separated by commas or semicolons and you’ll find likely candidates.
Ginny Redish’s book Letting Go of the Words.
It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice. —KRUG’S SECOND LAW OF USABILITY
On the face of it, “number of clicks to get anywhere” seems like a useful metric. But over time I’ve come to think that what really counts is not the number of clicks it takes me to get to what I want (although there are limits), but rather how hard each click is—the amount of thought required and the amount of uncertainty about whether I’m making the right choice.
the rule of thumb might be something like “three mindless, unambiguous clicks equal one click that requires thought.”
Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left. —KRUG’S THIRD LAW OF USABILITY
If you’re not sure whether something is happy talk, there’s one sure-fire test: If you listen very closely while you’re reading it, you can actually hear a tiny voice in the back of your head saying, “Blah blah blah blah blah....”
A lot of happy talk is the kind of self-congratulatory promotional writing that you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional copy, it conveys no useful information, and it focuses on saying how great we are, as opposed to explaining what makes us great.
The main thing you need to know about instructions is that no one is going to read them—at least not until after repeated attempts at “muddling through” have failed. And even then, if the instructions are wordy, the odds of users finding the information they need are pretty low.
Adding “Type a keyword” is like saying, “Leave a message at the beep” on your voice mail message: There was a time when it was necessary, but now it just makes you sound clueless.
If there is any possibility of confusion about the scope of the search (what’s being searched: the site, part of the site, or the whole Web), by all means spell it out.
If you want to give me the option to scope the search, give it to me when it’s useful—when I get to the search results page and discover that searching everything turned up far too many hits, so I need to limit the scope.
Too-subtle visual cues are actually a very common problem. Designers love subtle cues, because subtlety is one of the traits of sophisticated design. But Web users are generally in such a hurry that they routinely miss subtle cues.
In general, if you’re a designer and you think a visual cue is sticking out like a sore thumb, it probably means you need to make it twice as prominent.
Done right, Breadcrumbs are self-explanatory, they don’t take up much room, and they provide a convenient, consistent way to do two of the things you need to do most often: back up a level or go Home. They’re most useful in a large site with a deep hierarchy.
When I do usability tests, I’m surprised at how often people can overlook horizontal navigation bars at the top of a Web page.
Imagine that you’ve been blindfolded and locked in the trunk of a car, then driven around for a while and dumped on a page somewhere deep in the bowels of a Web site. If the page is well designed, when your vision clears you should be able to answer these questions without hesitation: What site is this? (Site ID) What page am I on? (Page name) What are the major sections of this site? (Sections) What are my options at this level? (Local navigation) Where am I in the scheme of things? (“You are here” indicators) How can I search?
people are lost when they start out, they usually just keep getting...loster.
Don’t confuse a tagline with a motto, like “We bring good things to life,” “You’re in good hands,” or “To protect and to serve.” A motto expresses a guiding principle, a goal, or an ideal, but a tagline conveys a value proposition. Mottoes are lofty and reassuring, but if I don’t know what the thing is, a motto isn’t going to tell me.
I once saw a particularly puzzling feature on the Home page of a prominent—and otherwise sensibly designed—site. When I asked about it, I was told, “Oh, that. It came to our CEO in a dream, so we had to add it.” True story.
The more you watch users carefully and listen to them articulate their intentions, motivations, and thought processes, the more you realize that their individual reactions to Web pages are based on so many variables that attempts to describe users in terms of one-dimensional likes and dislikes are futile—and counter-productive.
The problem is there are no simple “right” answers for most Web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.
And while usability testing will sometimes settle these arguments, the main thing it usually ends up doing is revealing that the things they were arguing about weren’t all that important.
For instance, they might discover that it doesn’t make much difference whether you go with cascading menus or mega menus if nobody understands the value proposition of your site.
I think every Web development team should spend one morning a month doing usability testing.
If you’re doing Agile development, you’ll be doing testing more frequently, but the principles are still the same. For instance, you might be testing with two users every two weeks. Creating a fixed schedule and sticking to it is what’s important.
You can find more problems in half a day than you can fix in a month.
It’s good to do your testing with participants who are like the people who will use your site, but the truth is that recruiting people who are from your target audience isn’t quite as important as it may seem. For many sites, you can do a lot of your testing with almost anybody. And if you’re just starting to do testing, your site probably has a number of usability flaws that will cause real problems for almost anyone you recruit.
One of the most valuable things about doing usability testing is the effect it can have on the observers. For many people, it’s a transformative experience that dramatically changes the way they think about users: They suddenly “get it” that users aren’t all like them.
You should try to do whatever you can to encourage everyone—team members, stakeholders, managers, and even executives—to come and watch the test sessions. In fact, if you have any money for testing, I recommend using it to buy the best snacks you can to lure people in. (Chocolate croissants seem to work particularly well.)
