I have mixed feelings on the usability of eBay in general. They’ve optimized the selling flow and rightly so as they make all of their money on listing and final value fees. Twice this week it occurred to me that I should be listing additional items in my early spring cleaning. Selling is so terrifically easy that between meetings I was able to list both items in about 3-5 minutes.

In the past I’ve pointed out the over-abundance of controls in the mail interface. Today I want to talk a bit about the modification of navigation elements in that same interface.

As a seller, I often perform two operations:

1. Check the total selling price of all of my items (the single green number on top of my “Selling” page).
2. Respond to messages (i.e. questions from potential buyers, payment-related issues after items have closed).

Both of which are easily accessible from the left-aligned navigational structure in the “My eBay” section of the website.

As you can see I’ve sold 9 items with 1 pending and while authoring this post, another message has just arrived. Let’s respond to that message.

Note that my left navigation is gone even though the breadcrumb indicates that I’m still in “My eBay”. Normally I’d just hit the Back button. Taken out of context, that would be my analysis as well. Typically, however, I respond to messages which means several presses of the Back button to get back to My eBay. The problem with this approach is that I frequently “overshoot” my target: the “Sold” items page.

How about using the “My eBay” quick links in the top right?

Nope, can’t get back to sold items from there. Note my confusion, as indicated by the question mark. Thus begins the multi-step process of figuring out which of these links will take me closest to the Sold page (all of them, it turns out will put it one click away).

This “reeks” of separate teams designing the interface, or at least of the messaging interface being designed in seclusion without a holistic view of the selling and settlement processes.

Continue Reading

A dialog from the Cisco VPN installer reminded me of an episode of Seinfeld.

Seinfeld Season 9 – “The Maid”

JERRY: What’s around you?

KRAMER: I’m lookin’ at Ray’s Pizza. You know where that is?

JERRY: Is it Famous Ray’s?

KRAMER: No. It’s Original Ray’s.

JERRY: Famous Original Ray’s?

KRAMER: It’s just Original, Jerry!

JERRY: Well, what street are you on?

KRAMER: Hey, I’m on first and first. How can the same street intersect with itself? I must be at the nexus of the universe!

Cisco’s VPN software is/was notorious for its stability issues on the Mac. Of course skepticism followed me to my Vista laptop. Every so often it would forget all of my connection settings forcing me to re-enter several bits of easily-forgettable information: IP addresses, obscure passwords and VPN configuration settings.

Let’s get the latest version.

Start the installer:

This is an upgrade from a previous version yet the installer is asking me to uninstall… itself? I must be at the nexus of the universe!

Consider the following:

1. Cisco was able to detect this condition.
2. Cisco wrote the installer for this application.
3. Cisco wrote the installers for all previous versions of this application.

Perhaps Cisco, with its intimate knowledge of its own software, might be able to handle all of this for me? Isn’t this what computers are great at? Automation?

“Aww c’mon Rob!” you’re thinking.  “Just uninstall and reinstall yourself.  It can’t be that hard!”  Here’s how that process went:

1. Uninstalled original client which crashed the machine.
2. Uninstalled (again) ‘successfully’.  Reboot.
3. Installed new client, detected remnants of previous install (even though I uninstalled it), rolled back install progress, started some sort of Cisco uninstall.  Reboot.
4. Installed new client (again).  Reboot.
5. Installed new client (again for the third time) and was successful.

Let’s learn from Cisco and Yahoo!’s less-than-stellar examples of error reporting – if we can detect it, we can probably do something about it.

Continue Reading

McAfee’s update notification configuration dialog has several options for us to choose from. Unfortunately they all suffer from the same fundamental problem:

Each of them requires user intervention.

The less aware users are of our applications, the better. This is difficult for many from both sides of the aisle to internalize (business, engineering) and I believe it is primarily a psychological concern – many people lack the courage of their convictions that their applications should be instilled with.

A security update is available? Download and install it! Big download? Chunk it and do it in the background. Requires a reboot? That’s fine, the machine will be rebooted eventually. In the rare case where it’s a code red, a prompt is acceptable – those situations are few and far between though.

The normal mode of operation for our applications should be not be to “stop the proceedings with idiocy” (to quote Alan Cooper) but to proceed as one would expect.

Continue Reading

Borrowing from Fowler’s “Refactoring,” I’m using the phrase “bad usability smell” as something that tips us off; that things might not be quite right.

In order to return my notebook warranty, HP provided a link to an online FedEx label printer.

Notice the two bits of instructional text: “(Please select one or more labels)” and “Click the Continue button for dropoff/pickup options.” Why is this a bad smell? Such a simple interface should not require instructions. It doesn’t use any complex components. Checkboxes and buttons have been in the mainsteam for almost 20 years. We have:

• (2) Buttons
• (1) Checkbox
• (2) Links – We can ignore links since navigability is implied, they should be ignored by users as well.

What’s wrong?

1. The “Print Selected Labels” button is out of sequence. If the first step is to “select one or more labels” it should be after the checkbox(es).
2. The enabled/disabled state of “Print Selected Labels” is all but impossible to discern.  By disabling it, they’re giving you a hint that a requirement isn’t met, but by such obfuscation there’s no way you’ll be able to tell when it’s disabled.

   

3. The “Continue” button should be a link. It’s acting just like a link, moving you on to the next step – a navigation function.
4. The “C” section heading is in the same font size as the table headings.  If the function is different (section label v. column header) it should look different.
5. Arial and Times fonts are mixed – why?

Instructional text usually tells us that the text itself should be incorporated into the interface.  Quick mockup:

There’s much room for improvement and I’m late for work.  Hopefully someone else picks it up and runs with it :)

Continue Reading

A quote from the under appreciated Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

I’m considering replacing my Citizen watch as it’s more a decorative timepiece than anything else (the battery is dead, I wear it when I need to dress up a bit). Let’s have a look at the ESQ SWISS website.

1. The ubiquitous “Skip Intro” as a Flash movie greets us. Select “Canada” when prompted. The entire site is Flash based which precludes deep linking – landing inside the site because a search engine or other site directed you there.
2. Resolutions are trending upwards and the majority of us are at 1280 x 1024. The content of this site (excluding the navigation) is limited to a minuscule area of the screen some 425 x 425 pixels wide.  Normally I have to aggressively resize images to fit them in the blog; this is pretty close to what you’ll see at the ESQ site.
3. The font size on this screen is 9px – very tiny.  Taxing to read even with my 20-20 vision.  Copyright or disclaimer text?  Sure, not the navigation for your site.
4. All of the wording is in CAPITAL LETTERS removing the font hints that we rely on to rapidly process text. The effect isn’t as disturbing here because of the short headings.
5. Usage of the letter “U” in place of the word “You” is somewhat surprising given the appearance of and market for ESQ wristwear. The watches run from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Do you envision the wearer of the diamond studded watch texting “omg u have 2 see my nu watch!!” to the girls in 1st period English? Not likely.

I’m interested in a watch and “STYLES FOR U” seems like a good pick… I mean I have to pick something and I have no idea – may as well pick the first one. The drop-down (shown below) is “COLLECTIONS” (variously coloured rectangles are mine):

1. Here we have a list of approximately 20 ESQ collections and unless you’re an ESQ employee you’ll certainly be lost. “KINGSTON”? “SIMONE”? “MUSE”?
2. The drop-down has a thin, 1-pixel line on the left and no other defining characteristics, overwriting the navigation with invisible borders in a way that makes the page appear broken (indicated in green).
3. The absolute worst problem with the ESQ site is how there is no overview of a line of watches. In order to view a complete collection, you have to manually page through dozens (hundreds?) of watches one at at time. This process is slow and painful to sit through.
4. The previous and next watches are desaturated and shown to the left and right of the current timepiece. This is a hint that there are things off screen in either direction yet both distract from the timepiece front-and-center.

Contrast this with the Roots Canada website:

Do you feel as though you cannot predict which kinds of watches you’ll see when you click those headings? Notice also the use of a representative watch from each collection, making the text headings almost redundant – simply reinforcing our idea of which style we’re about to choose.

Let’s have a look at the Classic Watches.

I can tell right away I’m interested in only one watch and that happened in 1 to 2 seconds. Seconds. Detour Watch for Men – Brown. We process colour preattentively which eliminated half of he watches before I even know what I was looking at.

To examine the same number of watches at ESQ’s site, it would have taken 15-30 seconds.

If you knew of a way to speed up decision making by 15-30x, would you do it?

Continue Reading

For the last 10 years, web browsers have been more or less capable of downloading files on their own. The worlds’ collective “downloads” folder sags in testament to this fact.

Adobe, continuing its tradition of wildly over complicating the download process, presents us with this confusing array of controls, progress meters and data – all while downloading a single file (Adobe Reader).  Here we have the “Adobe Download Manager powered by getPlus”.

Some observations about this dialog (that appears to have been programatically generated?)

1. Three progress meters. Three. To download a single file? Anything more than a single progress bar is exposing too much of what’s going on under the hood – none of which we need to know about.
2. “A short-cut to resume download and installation from point of interruption has been placed on your desktop.” What is a “point of interruption”? Has the download been interrupted? It appears to be proceeding normally.
3. Why is the icon so bloody large? It’s positively massive, dwarfing all other components in the composition.
4. There’s too much confusing terminology for Adobe Reader downloaders.  Unless this audience is computer scientists or software developers, because who else understands “KB/sec” or “Decompression 20.9%”?  More importantly, who cares?

What if we reduced this dialog to its bare essentials? And what are those “essentials” anyway?

Progress and termination.

Look, we’ve even left the gargantuan icon in place. I had to point it out in case you missed it…

Continue Reading

Every Asian grocery store I’ve been to features an aisle of extraordinarily priced items, typically with no English labels. I can only assume these are shark fins?

Notice the pricing: $260 per pound. This jar was surrounded with several others, all of which were priced well over $150 per pound. Are these the typical purchasing weights for items like this? At those prices?

How about: 1/4lb or 4oz. – $65

The usability implications should be obvious – label appropriate to use, saving people the effort of calculating these numbers on their own. Especially when the division isn’t quite clear (I used the Mac calculator widget to do this :)

I could be wrong… people could be scooping up shark fins by the pound!

Continue Reading

One of my first posts was in regards to custom scrollbars – a way that designers can take an already cumbersome interaction and turn it up to 11.

With the release of Office 2008, I had a quick visit over at Mactopia, Microsoft’s Mac homepage which received a recent revamp. Clicking on each Office product kicks off a Flash movie. During the movie, different areas of the screen activate depending on which feature is being discussed. I had a look at the Entourage video.

This is something I’ve never seen before.

The extreme ends of the scrollbar aren’t anchored. The entire thing moves when you drag it. I thought the interface was broken when I picked it up.

Why go to all this effort when they could have just used a few more vertical pixels and shown the entire paragraph? My guess is the designer valued uniformity and alignment of the text blocks over functionality. Nope, take a look at the full row of text.

They aren’t uniform to begin with.

“Well Rob, there was probably a lot of scrolling and it would have really knocked things out of whack.” Actually, there’s about 10 pixels worth to scroll, if that. The initial viewport obscures about half a line of text.

I’m amazed how we find new and interesting ways to abuse scrollbars.   I hope the irony of that section’s name (“Tame the Chaos”) isn’t lost on anyone :)

Continue Reading

Today while depositing a few cheques, the Wells Fargo ATM asked me an interesting question.

To which account should the cheques be deposited?

Hmm… Well in this situation I’m just going to say that I feel comfortable in allowing the ATM to make that decision for me.

Then again, if anyone or anything could get this one wrong, it would be a computer :-)

Continue Reading

In Windows XP, you’re asked to repeat your wireless network password, which is really quite meaningless because if the password is invalid, you won’t be able to connect to the network.

While one might argue that there are several things that might prevent you from connecting, a bad password is likely your problem.

Microsoft got this one right between XP and Vista.

Peripherally related are cases where we ask users to repeat themselves even when they can see the data they are entering. It is not uncommon to see this strange phenomenon with email addresses.

Continue Reading