Tag: usability

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I appreciate that Apple offers a single software updater for all its free Windows software. But one thing annoys me about it.

It opens a window, then opens a message box showing a progress meter as it checks for updates. Only one problem: It fills out the “New software is available” caption before it actually checks.

New software is available from Apple.... Your software is up to date. No updates are available.
New software is available… oh, wait, no it isn’t.

This isn’t an issue on Mac OS X, because the progress meter is shown as a sheet, which drops down from the top of the main window and obscures the caption. But on Windows, that caption is visible from the moment the window appears, saying that you really do have something new available, raising your hopes that maybe, just maybe, Apple has finally gotten around to releasing that new version of Safari, or that security fix for the flaw you heard about a week ago, then dashing them to the ground.

Or, less dramatically, it’s jumping to conclusions, providing potentially false information.

And then, even if it turns out there isn’t anything new, the caption stays in place…leaving you with two contradictory statements as to whether any updates are really available.

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This is a story on phone menus, though it applies to anything where the user interface can change. I phoned in a refill on a prescription this morning. The phone system lets you choose when you plan on picking it up, presumably so that the pharmacy can prioritize people who are coming in sooner. Generally, it asks you to enter the hour, then #, then 1 for AM or 2 for PM.

I wanted to swing by around noon, so I entered 12, then #, and then without listening for the option, I hit 2. I wanted to pick it up around 12:00 pm.

So I was surprised to hear, “We’re sorry, the pharmacy is not open at midnight.” I flashed back to elementary school, when I was out on the field trying to explain to my friends why noon was 12 PM and not 12 AM as they insisted. Had someone managed to get into a programming position, without clearing that up?

As I re-entered the time, I listened for the options. It turns out that they had anticipated just such confusion, as after I chose 12, the option was, “Please enter 1 for noon, or 2 for midnight.” That works great for people who are using the system for the first time, whether they know noon is PM or not. Unfortunately, for people who have been using it for years and (normally) don’t need to listen to the options, it switches the buttons around. It’s like those WinZip registration dialog boxes that would rearrange the buttons every time, so that you couldn’t just click through, you’d have to pay at least some attention to it.

Of course, then there’s the question of why it even gives you the option for midnight…

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Walk button with raised arrow.I recently took a walk through some streets that have only recently opened to traffic. One of the things that struck me was that the buttons for triggering the walk/don’t walk signs had a new design. Instead of a tiny recessed button, or a larger rounded button, they had a ~2″ flat button with a raised arrow.

My first thought was, why the extra arrow? It’s pointing in the same direction as the sign. And it means you have to press the button carefully instead of just whacking it with your hand. The answer hit me later in the walk. I was leaning on the button with my hand when the light changed, I and felt the button vibrating. Of course! It was for blind pedestrians!

The raised arrow makes it easier to hit the right button, rather than just hope that the buttons have been placed in standard orientation. And vibrating the button makes it clear not only that it’s safe to cross, but in which direction it’s safe to cross. That’s one thing I could never figure out about the chirping walk signs in San Diego. It tells you the light’s changed, but if there’s any indication as to which light is green, I’ve never noticed it.

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Since I’ve been using Opera a lot more than usual since Opera 9 Preview 2 came out, I’ve repeatedly run into the canonical reason that sharing one button for stop/refresh is a bad idea: Reaction time.

When a button changes in response to your own actions, it’s easy to adjust. When a button changes in response to something over which you have no control, there’s a possibility that it may change between the time your brain tells your finger to click on the mouse button and the time it presses down, registering the click with the computer.

Case in point: A web page is loading slowly. You’ve already seen the part you’re looking for, and you don’t need the rest of the images, or the rest of the 587 comments on the blog post. Maybe all you needed to do was confirm you had the right site, and you need to copy the URL. So you go to hit Stop. The web page finishes loading before your finger finishes clicking, the button changes to Reload… and the browser starts reloading the entire slow page from byte one.

I’ve done this at least four times in the past week.

The bad news: I can’t find separate stop/reload buttons anywhere in Opera’s button collection. The closest I could find seem to apply only to panels, not to browser views.

The good news: The Custom Buttons page at NonTroppo.org has them!

Once I get these on all the computers where I normally use Opera, accidental reloads should be a thing of the past!

*This post originally appeared on Confessions of a Web Developer, my blog at the My Opera community.

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Wow… Jakob Nielsen certainly woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. His latest Alertbox, Search Engines as Leeches on the Web, starts out:

Search engines extract too much of the Web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.

Nice. Because, God knows, you wouldn’t want people to find your site, would you? He rambles on with a whole bunch of garbage about search engine advertising—wait, this is all about advertising? I thought this was supposed to be about searching!—and how, over time, it can take up more and more of your budget until it cancels out the gain you made on that new customer who got there through the ad.

There’s actually a useful bit at the end, though, in which he describes other ways to get people coming to your site—or rather, coming back to your site.

The real goal is to make users come back, and to have them come directly to your site instead of clicking on expensive ads. The ideas above are just a few ways to encourage repeat business. Further in-depth studies of user behaviors and customer needs should reveal many new ways of keeping users loyal.

Of course, no one has ever done that sort of study on how to keep people coming back to a store, or a brand name. Shyeah, right!