Archive for the ‘HCI’ Category
Usability Fail – Twitter on iPhone
This week I have another small usability issue that would be incredibly easy to identify and fix with small scale user testing. This time it’s with Twitter on the iPhone.
Typically people read the oldest tweets first, working up to the latest ones. The app is made to support this, retaining your ‘last read’ tweet, so you can read up from there.
Another feature of Twitter on the iPhone is, if you’ve been away a while, your timeline will be missing entries. You’ll see a tear, like in the picture below, and clicking this will download the missing tweets into your timeline.
Downloading missing tweets...
Now the usability issue here is small but incredibly annoying. When the tweets download, you’re presented with the latest ones first, and the oldest ones at the bottom. Completely the opposite to how people use the twitter app, reading the oldest ones first. Effectively this means scrolling down a list of potentially hundreds of tweets, looking for where you were before clicking the tear (which is not indicated).
The workaround I currently use is behaviour that would be spotted straight away, and fixed, by usability testing. To prevent being taken to the most recent tweet, the user has to ‘press’ the tear, but then scroll down to hide it from view, before taking a tentative peek up the timeline after 10 seconds or so to see if the act has been successful.
User testing would quickly identify this behaviour, and make it unnecessary by fixing the problem. Instead of showing you the most recent tweet when ‘filling in the blanks’ of the timeline, Twitter should take you to the oldest, hence not breaking the user’s flow, and aligning with how the rest of the app works.
Job done!
Usability Fail – Lotus Notes
Lotus notes has many usability issues (or ‘features’ as they’re called). One of the most annoying is below:
Accidentally click ‘request more details’ in Lotus Notes? Bad luck, as you now have to send the request.
Here are the options presented to you if you try and exit.
(Note that the dialog box appears when you click the ‘x’ in the top corner to close the window)
None of these options allow you to exit without sending the request for more information. Maybe they should have actually tested with users?
The User Experience of waiting for the bus
How information is presented affects people’s perceptions, and ultimately their experience of performing a task. I had a great example of this yesterday morning. It started, as my day’s too often do, with an early start and a rush for the train…
To get to the train station, I get the bus. One of the best thing’s about Brighton and Hove’s bus service is that the stops have electronic information boards, showing the next few buses due to arrive, and the time they will take. They look like this:
Simple, right?
Chatting as you frag – Why you’re better at games when not paying attention.
Every day after school, I used to rush home to play Perfect Dark (later San Francisco Rush) with my friend. We’d put Chris Moyles on the radio (remember when he was in the afternoon?) and play endless death matches until tea. After a while, we started to notice something weird. Often, we’d get chatting, or listening to something interesting on the radio, and zone out of the game, before ‘waking up’ at the end of the round to find that we’d done amazingly well.
This is a common phenomenon that I’ve noticed when playing games – while distracted through chatting or listening to something, you end up playing much better. Today I’ll look at the psychological and physiological reasons why this happens.
So why do you feel you 'r0x0r'?
Amazon understands its customers
Twice this week, I’ve had to discuss the success of Amazon. In my opinion, it’s not due to their content, but rather their successful application of usability and user centred design. Today I’ll be looking at how Amazon has applied user experience principles to build upon their early success and stay competitive in the marketplace.
Click to continue…
