Posts Tagged ‘bad UX’
Replacing the Desktop?
Just under 40 years ago, the desktop metaphor was devised as a way to allow computer users to understand graphical interactions with their computer. Standard tasks, like using a calculator, or deleting files, were presented in a manner familiar to workers from a traditional office place, as an effort to build their experience of computing upon pre-existing knowledge. And, as is evident by this metaphor’s continued existence today, it was a massive success.
Just under 16 years ago Microsoft attempted to reinvent the desktop metaphor, and bring it up to date. The product, Microsoft Bob, aimed to shift computing from an office metaphor to a home metaphor. And it was a massive failure. My first home computer came with Bob installed, and so today I’ll be looking at why it failed, and what we can learn from this failure.
Usability advantages of the desktop metaphor.
So why has the desktop metaphor proved to be a lasting success? Introduced at a time when graphical methods of interacting with a computer were new, it had several key characteristics that led to its success.
...such as fun games
First of all, the desktop was familiar. Rather than having to learn context specific methods of interacting with a computer, it built upon the user’s pre-existing knowledge. For example, when deleting a file, a user could use their existing understanding of a trash can, and drag the file into it (rather than running a deltree command, which doesn’t map with any real-world knowledge). Therefore the desktop metaphor was easy to figure out, and consistent with real life experience, reducing the learning curve upon adoption. This meets Nielsen’s heuristic on a ‘match between the system and the real world’.
Building upon this familiarity was the appropriateness of the desktop metaphor for the tasks at hand. Before home computing, the workplace was the most likely place for users to use a computer, and the computer would be performing office-based tasks, such as word processing or calculating. Hence the adoption of a workplace metaphor seemed appropriate for developing a graphical user interface, as it registered with the target market. This meets Nielsen’s heuristic on ‘recognition rather than recall’.
Furthermore, the desktop metaphor was wide enough to expand to meet the growing roles that computers played. By extending the workplace metaphor through terms such as ‘cut’ and ‘paste’, and the development of graphical tools emulating image manipulation tasks, the desktop metaphor proved that it wasn’t static, and could extend to reach an ever growing range of requirements.
The desktop metaphor also met the heuristic requirement, of having a wide degree of flexibility, by allowing ‘experienced’ users to automate or speed up tasks, such as by selecting groups of objects, or utilizing keyboard shortcuts.
What did Bob try to do?
In the mid 90’s, Microsoft Bob was devised as the successor to the desktop metaphor. Recognising a growth in home computing, Microsoft aimed to shift the graphical interface model for computing from a business/creative focus, to the ‘home’. It was thought that this would open the computing world to a whole range of ‘novice’ users, who would have found the desktop metaphor inaccessible.
Bob presented the user with ‘their room’, covered with clickable objects, such as bookcases, clocks and a notepad. Clicking these things will launch the relevant program (or help you locate files), and you can add your own programs to the shelves. It’s just like your home! (assuming your home is littered with boxes that say ‘Internet Explorer’ and ‘Corel Draw’).
Bob in action
Why did Bob fail?
Microsoft Bob offered an alternative to using the desktop metaphor, aimed at novice users, but its primary failure was that it didn’t offer any significant advantages. For a product that came over twenty years after the ethos of its competitor, this wasn’t a good sign…
Despite being based on the home, Bob still had a learning curve, and so missed it’s key objective of being intuitive. Clicking on a clock to open a calendar, or a pen and paper, still required just as much learning as a calendar or notepad icon in a traditional desktop environment. More complex tasks than just opening programs still require further learning. Also, the enforced ‘home’ layout is just plain inefficient – rifling through a cabinet to find a file offers no advantage to browsing a list of files in a folder.
By attempting to change the way people interacted with computers, Bob alienated itself from existing computer users, and prevented new users from being able to ask for help from power-users. By offering only ‘simple’ ways of interacting with computers, the user was unable to allow users to grow, and learn superior (and more efficient) ways of performing tasks.
It’s also apparent that the ‘cuteness’ of Bob didn’t sit well with users. The two elements of this operating system which outlived the OS itself are among the most hated villains of computing – Virtual assistants like Clippy, and the Comic Sans font. Obviously Microsoft failed to understand the needs of their target market.
The final nail in Bob’s coffin came within a year of its release. Microsoft released Windows 95. It sold… quite well, and offered a fully-powered alternative to Bob based on the traditional desktop metaphor. Bill Gates punished those responsible for the mess that was Bob. He married lead project manager Melinda French. Burn.
What will replace the desktop?
It’s obvious through Bob’s failure that the Desktop cannot be beaten by a simple re-skin or appropriation of another metaphor without offering significant advantages.
As I wrote about in my review of The Humane Interface, Raskin proposes a ‘Zoomworld’ which offers a non-windows environment with no gaps between the operating system and the files. However development by Archy has stalled and they seem to have fallen off the internet…
Or maybe the future will be more like Google, and involve typing queries or commands into a prompt to find answers and perform tasks? Although this does seem like a regression, and breaks several key usability best practises.
So what other systems are out there that offer a viable alternative? Or will it be desktops forever? As ever, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts in the comments below!
Watching ‘average users’: Word
It’s easy to forget how useful it is to watch less technical people use some common programs, and how helpful observation is as a tool to understand the ‘average’ user. I recently watched someone using MS Word (2003 I think), and it was…enlightening. They made a large number of ‘errors’ when using MS Word, but as we know as usability specialists, its not the the user that creates errors – the software does.
The task was relatively simple – design some worksheets, including textboxes, and pictures, and lay them out in an eye-pleasing manner. I’m sure there are many more appropriate packages to make this in than Word, but it was the user’s software of choice, due to familiarity, and the task shouldn’t be beyond MS Word. I observed, and let them lead the interaction, but advised when they asked for help (naughty I know, but it wasn’t a formal lab setting!)
The lab was busy that day anyway...
How my ‘less-technical user’ used Word:
I noted down (obviously away from the user) some of the more ‘interesting’ characteristics of how they used Word.
- Used the ‘cut’ function as a ‘delete’ (with no understanding of how it links to paste). Taken out of context from “cut and paste”, ‘cut’ would more likely imply removing or ending something, and so this mistake is understandable. Incidentally this method has some pluses. I still don’t know how to remove a table easily (not just the information within it), and cut seems to do this.
- No knowledge of the alignment tools, and so using spaces as a method to align text to the center or right. Obviously ran into problems when editing the text later, as changes would make the text run over the end of the line, ruining the formatting.
- Drew horizontal lines, across the page (i.e. a space to write in your own answer) with –‘s. Seems a pretty effective method, even though I’m sure Word has its own way of doing this. Is there a better way of doing it?
- Displayed difficulty moving images in Word. Is it right that you have to click on an image twice to move it? The first click just gives you resize options, which confused the user.
- Had difficulty with resizing objects. What happens if you make an image so big that it falls off the edge of the paper, and you cannot see the border to make it small again? I guess you could format picture, and manually change the size, but this is an entirely different method of resizing, and isn’t cognitively related to the standard way.
- Constant (constant!) rewriting of words, when word autocapitalised/auto formatted them in an undesired way (which was seemingly every autoformat). User had to delete the word, and re-write each time.
What could word do to improve?
This immediately throws up some questions about how Word was developed. It’s clear that the tools available, such as the alignment, or horizontal lines, are not making their functionality transparent to new users. It wasn’t clear to my user that they existed, or how they should be functioning. Obviously just having the icon on the toolbar isn’t enough, and this should be rethought.
This was also the case with image manipulation. The functions that the user needed do exist in Word (i.e. resizing, moving), but are modal in nature, and so are difficult to find, and don’t offer a consistent user experience to someone who is not familiar with Word’s nuances.
It’s also clear with auto format in particular that the system isn’t adapting to the user’s needs. The constant changes that Word was making to the user’s document, which were then undone each time only created a large degree of frustration in the user. The software should be learning how the user wants auto format to work, and adjust to their preference. In this user’s case, it was causing trouble, and should have turned itself off (or at least given the option)
What they need is some sort of helpful assistant
What should we learn from this?
It occurred to me that these issues were not unique to the user I watched since I encounter similar problems with Word. The difference is I’ve had enough familiarity to learn the workarounds, or solutions to these problems that Word throws at you. For example, it’s an unthinking reaction to press Ctrl+Z after Word incorrectly auto-formats things incorrectly. My user just hadn’t used the program for long enough to train that reaction, and so word’s error became more of a big deal.
Its important when considered usability to realise that users aren’t just like you. If you are in a position to make a difference with usability, it’s very likely you are not an ‘average user’, and as such its difficult to comprehend how ‘average users’ use software.
‘Average users’ are not stupid. They are your mum, and just don’t have the time, or effort to put into learning these workarounds, or making them second nature. The solution, rather than ‘educating’ users, is to make the programs better; make programmers understand who their users are, and how they use the programs. And make them program for the ‘average’ users, rather than the power users. And that is the point of usability.
A Terrible User Experience & how to fix it– Zoomerang.com
When running a website, its important to make sure that the user can achieve their goal with the minimal fuss. This is especially important if you are selling, or trying to sell, a commercial service. I recently had to use Zoomerang.com, a survey site, and had a few notes about the user experience. As you’ll remember, I don’t rant often…
I’m in the process of designing a GPS game, and am currently discovering the functional requirements for the project. As UX practitioners, we know that involving the user is of critical importance at this stage, hence we designed a questionnaire to establish peoples experience, and perception of GPS games, and what they’d like a GPS game to be like. (linked here)
When at university, our internet access goes through a proxy server, which blocks unsuitable content. For some reason, this includes surveymonkey.com, a site I’ve used a few times in the past to construct online surveys. Interestingly, the ‘site blocked’ dialogue said “for survey sites, try zoomerang.com”. However, when I search for some hardcore action, it never gives me alternate suggestions for that. Have I uncovered a conspiracy? Nonetheless, I followed the link.
And so I ended up on zoomerang.com. Being fair, there is one key advantage to zoomerang which immediately put me in a good mood. On surveymonkey, for a free account, you are limited to ten questions. On Zoomerang, you can ask 30 questions before you have to pay. This meant we didn’t have to redo, or concatenate our questions, and made me smile inside
Pictured: an inside smile
Problems with Zoomerang.com
This goodwill was shortlived, when I tried to use the site to implement my questionnaire. Heres why:
- The workflow isn’t clear when making a survey, and so I entirely missed the step where you add your questions. Clicking through the process actually caused me publish a blank questionnaire. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except…
- …You can’t edit an existing survey. Once its published, you cannot add/remove/change questions. Surveymonkey allows this. So I was stuck with my blank survey, and had to start again from scratch.
- Having figured out how to add questions, I got started, and selected “insert question”. It added a header, which then had to be changed to type question. I guessed that was because it was my first item, but no, it always defaults to inserting a header (odd, since you’d only need 1 per page, whereas you’d need multiple questions).
- So I finally got to add a question, and this is when the terribleness of the design struck me. I selected a question where a radio button would select from a number of answers, and typed in my list of 15 or so alternative answers into a rich text field. I hit submit, and … got an error, saying “answers can only be 1000 characters, including HTML”, and even worse…
- …It deleted the data I had entered in that field. All 15 answers. This is a critical failure of any system, since the data a user inputs should be considered sacred.
- There was no counter telling me how many characters I had entered, so I had to retry a few times. Eventually I realised that I could only enter 5 potential one word answers before it’d error that I was over 1000 characters. That had to be a mistake? I investigated further…
- …Looking at the HTML, it turned out that the rich text editor was writing rubbish html. At the start of each answer, it’d add needless style tags, often multiple times. Heres an example of the HTML it generated for my one word answer “complicated”
<p><span style=”font-family: Arial; color: #000000; font-size: small;”><span style=”font-family: Arial; color: #000000; font-size: small;”><span style=”font-family: Arial; color: #000000; font-size: small;”>Complicated</span></span></span></p> - …no wonder it was hitting the character limit after 4 or 5 words. I had to manually enter the html for all the possible answers, just so I could get round this.
- My last fault with zoomerang.com is just a suspicion. I look after my email accounts, and so have never received spam in my current primary address. After signing up for zoomerang last week, I received my first random spam email. Might just be a coincidence, but I didn’t sign up for anything else that week!
I had to call this guy to fix my survey
How to fix zoomerang.com
To improve their user experience, they should look at red-routing the goals the user needs to achieve:
- Make the progression through survey design clearer, highlighting which step questions are added in
- Also make it clear how far through the design process you are, and what steps remain
- Restrict what the user can do, so they cannot post a blank questionnaire. Its obvious if they are about to do this that they’ve made a mistake, tell them!
- Don’t make question types default to “header”. Surely users will only use this type once at most, whereas they’re going to have more than one question on the questionnaire. Make it default to that!
- Fix the WYSIWYG code generator, so that the user doesn’t have to manually code the answers in HTML. A lot of user’s would get stuck at this point!
- Don’t send me spam!
And what can you do, until these fixes are made? Use surveymonkey.com. Or, if you’ve found anything better, leave a comment and let me know!
The user experience of Ticketmaster ruins Christmas
I told you it was coming, and here it is – Ticketmaster’s design faults from a user centred perspective have annoyed me enough to blog on them. And then deliver the killing blow by suggesting how they could be improved. If you’d just let me buy those Paul McCartney Tickets, it wouldn’t have come to this!
No-one will simply be having a wonderful christmas time this year.
To demonstrate my point, let’s walk through two interactions. For each one, we will see how the user’s interaction with the website takes place, note any issues or redundancies in the process, and then suggest how they could be improved.
An ideal scenario:
In this first scenario, I’m buying tickets to see Brighton based singer songwriter Chris TT. Due to the fact that the tour has just been announced, and that he is nowhere near as popular as he should be, there are still tickets available. So I go to Ticketmaster’s website (.co.uk, not .com. It wont realise you’re looking in the wrong region).
Here are the steps involved in buying tickets
- Look for the artist I’m after – He’s not on the front page, so I’ll use search.
- Having searched, I’ve found Chris TT. I click his name.
- It presents me with a list of venues/dates. I scroll down to the one I want, and click “find tickets”.
- It then asks me to select how many tickets I want, and how much I want to pay. I make my selection, and click “find tickets”.
- It loads a captcha. I type in the words “brighton rock” and click “continue”
- It loads a loading screen. I wait.
- It loads up and tells me it found my ticket. It asks me if I want GB shipping, Northern Ireland Shipping, Republic of Ireland shipping, or to another country. I make my selection and press continue.
- It then asks me to log in, or register. I select register and continue…
- …. Onwards through the many address entry screens, until I’ve got my ticket
So what were the problems, and how could they be improved?
This was an ideal case scenario, and so we should expect the simplest and easiest interaction. There were still however a few problems:
- I had no idea whether the venues/dates were sold out. This should be indicated on the page when selecting the venue/date.
- I had no idea which ticket price ranges were sold out or in stock. This should be indicated on the page when selecting the ticket price range.
- The captcha comes before deciding whether I want to buy the tickets or not. It should come after I’ve decided I want to buy.
- I had to choose which region I wanted the tickets shipped to. Later I had to type in where I lived. Could the system not use this information to auto-calculate which shipping region applied to me?
A less than ideal scenario:
This is the real scenario, and my reason for writing this post. Paul McCartney tickets went on sale at 9am, and I was sat in front of a computer (kindly assisted by Anna Fuller) refreshing and waiting for the tickets to go on sale.
Here are the steps I followed:
- Look for the artist I’m after. He’s not on the front page, so I’ll use search
- Having searched, I find Paul McCartney. I click his name
- It presents me with a list of venues/dates. There is only one. I select it.
- It loads a page that says “these tickets have not gone on sale yet.”
- I press refresh
- Go to 4.
- Eventually, the event is open, and it asks me how many tickets I want to buy, and what do I want to pay. I select ‘2’ and the mid price range. I press “find tickets”
- A captcha comes up, I enter “glass onion”, and press continue
- It loads a loading screen. I wait.
- It tells me no tickets could be found, and suggests searching for ‘best available’.
- I press back 3 times
- It asks how many tickets I want, and how much I want to pay
- I select ‘2’ and ‘Best available’. I press ‘find tickets’
- A captcha comes up. I enter “john is better”, and press continue
- It loads a loading screen. I wait.
- It tells me no tickets could be found, and suggests searching for ‘best available’.
- I lose all hope of ever getting tickets, but press back 3 times, to see if any single tickets are available.
- It asks me how many tickets I want to buy, and how much I want to pay.
- I tell it “1” and “best available”. I press ‘find tickets’.
- A captcha comes up. I enter “paul is dead” and press continue.
- It loads a loading screen. I wait.
- It tells me no tickets could be found, and suggests searching for best available.
- I give up.
Sorry paul
So how could this process be improved?
- First of all steps 7-23 could have been avoided by a simple note saying ‘sold out’.
- In fact, since it looks like the event was sold out before it went on sale (due to presale I guess?), steps 3-23 could have been avoided by saying “sold out”.
- Since there was only one date, I should not have to select the date after selecting Paul McCartney. It should automatically load that date.
- Again, the captcha should come after having searched for tickets.
- The page should not let the user select price ranges that have no available tickets.
- After my first search failed, I shouldn’t have to press back three times to search again, I should be able to do it from the page I’ve landed on.
- Even better, if it fails to find your ticket selection, it should search ‘best available’ automatically.
- It should stop suggesting ‘search for best available’ if I’ve just searched for ‘best available’ and it’s found nothing.
Because the tickets are released at specified times, the website suffers a huge rush at these peak times. The fact that each page takes a few minutes to load does not make all the needless navigation the site makes you do easier. This stress is made worse by the site’s user experience issues, and buying tickets through Ticketmaster is a lot more frustrating than it needs to be.
I decided to phone the phone line instead. It gave me an automated ‘you will be placed in a queue’ message, and then went blank. No hold music, no ‘you are ninth in the queue’ message, nothing. I had no idea if I was still connected or if it was broken. After around 5 minutes waiting on this very expensive number, still with no noise at all, I gave up.
Bah Humbug!
