Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category

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Jun 20 2008 at 9:17am

OSX makes it easy to create a great website … or not

I finally got around to trying out the local web server on my Mac today. At first I was quite impressed — it’s obvious from the default installation, everything is set up and ready to go, and they even include a handy quickstart index.html page*. How cool is that? Get newbies started with web page design. It even tells them how easy it is to create a web page.

Then I read this:

HTML is easy — so easy that even a first-time user can do it. That’s because you don’t have to learn HTML to use it.

Leading word processing applications, such as Microsoft Word and AppleWorks 6, actually generate HTML webpages for you with just a few clicks of a mouse.

Noooooooo….

* link only available while my work computer is on, which is only when I’m at work, or you can try this one.

Posted in Usability, Web Standards | 2 Comments »

Jun 05 2008 at 8:38am

Why can’t they just give you instructions in one language?

I just got my new Thinkpad advanced dock (so I can hook my laptop up to my DVI monitors with a KVM switch. V. l33t ). The docking station came with a users guide and a “Read This First” safety booklet. The problem is that the user’s guide includes about 13 languages and the safety booklet 34 languages. Do I need those languages? Of course not. It’s a waste of paper. And in this case it’s even worse because there aren’t separate sections for each language, it’s all mixed. You have to flip past all kinds of spanish and chinese to get to the English bits. The user’s guide also has about 6 pages of extra information for Turkey only.

What else could they do?

Provide an language option when purchasing the product and only provide documentation in that language.
Skip the paper documentation and provide a little card with a link to the download site. Nobody reads the documentation anyway, might as well save some trees.

And the worst part about it is that the user’s guide is mostly a bunch of bullshit. Thank you for purchasing this product blah blah blah, this is what it’s does, and this is what’s included in the package. Um, I bought the product I think I know what it does!

The connection instructions are on a separate poster with diagrams only, no words at all. I’m not sure which is worse.

The dock was also wrapped in molded syrofoam, unlike the LaCie external hard drive that arrived yesterday (not for me), which had egg carton like cardboard packaging. Boo to Lenovo (although I really like my laptop so I won’t criticize them too much!)

Posted in General, Usability | 4 Comments »

May 23 2008 at 2:02pm

Tutorials need to teach

I just came across a certain article on some drupal theming techniques that called itself a tutorial. What’s the problem? It didn’t actually teach (or tutor) anything. It simply gave you some code to copy and paste and told you where to paste it. How does that help?

People aren’t going to learn if you just give them the answers. This happens all the time in the forums –people post a question and someone comes along and gives them the code to paste in. That solves the problem but the poster doesn’t learn anything in the process.

With coding questions in particular I’ll often give people most of the answer, even writing out a step-by-step tutorial, but I won’t post the full code or a link to a working page. This way the user has to put things together themselves and figure out how things work. There was a really great post at Creating Passionate Users called “Cognitive Seduction and the “peekaboo” law”:

In learning, the more you fill things in and hold the learner’s hand, the less their brain will engage. If they don’t need to fire a single neuron to walk through the tutorial, lesson, lecture, etc., they’re getting a shallow, surface-level, non-memorable exposure of “covered” material, but… what’s the point?

(I totally love that blog. So sad that she’s no longer posting. It’s a must read if you’re interested in education and/or software development or something in between).

With the tutorial in question I came out with some samples of the code I would need to do something similar to what I really want to do. It doesn’t help me understand what those variables are doing and how I can use them in different ways. Not a tutorial.

See, it’s a short post for once. Aren’t you happy?

Posted in Usability, Writing | No Comments »

May 11 2008 at 11:13am

I upgraded my Wordpress and I don’t like it!

The much celebrated Wordpress 2.5 upgrade was released about a month and a half ago and I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading my installation. I was really looking forward to the new Happy Cog designed admin interface. But guess what? I was disappointed.

The new design is surely nicer looking than the old (although I didn’t really have a problem with the old design). They’ve made quite a few interface changes – some good, some not so good. Read on to see some screenshots and analysis of the new interface.

If a cool feature is never used, is it still cool?

At work I take care of a couple of web apps that were developed by the guy who had my job before me. Most were built to address particular needs raised by others in the office. The thing is that they got bit creative with the functionality in some areas. For example, we have this events calendar that includes personal profiles that can pull in events from Facebook and Upcoming.org profiles. It’s a cool feature – users can use this system to consolidate their University and personal events. Seems like a neat idea.

The problem is that nobody uses it. I took a look in the database the other day and there are only about 11 facebook keys and none for upcoming.org (not counting the devs). Granted, the functionality isn’t particularly obvious and is not explained to the user all that well either. There’s also a feature that can send reminders to you by email or sms. That’s only been used about 12 times so far this year.

That brings me to the question raised in the title: If a cool feature is never used, is it still cool?

Browser upgrade campaigns, four ways

I’ve come across a couple of interesting browser upgrade campaigns lately. Yes, lots of IE testing! Anyway, it’s kind of interesting to see the way different sites have presented the message.