user experience
The iPad as a serious business tool for toddlers
Jul 29th
This format was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as a format for young designers to show their work, each presentation being 20 slides each lasting 20 seconds. (Our average age is 32, so we count as young.)
Of course, part of the point of the event is to be light-hearted and entertaining (and I hope we were) but we did have a serious point to make. Toddlers are very serious about two tasks – exploring their world and eating. The iPad is great for the first, and survives the consequences of the second (smooth, wipe-clean surfaces).
Inevitably, I referred to the ISO 9241-11 concept of usability in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Finley, as the user, elaborated on these:
- Effective: lots of effective apps to explore.
- Efficient: a natural interface which is efficient for young hands and motor skills.
- Satisfaction: it’s fun.
We found the iPad did well on all three factors with thousands of really great apps for kids (and some not so great but cheap enough not to be a problem.
Finley particularly likes ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’ from DuckDuckMoose.com which is full of interactive features that baffle his grandpa, but not him (we used to sing it to his mum as Incy Wincy Spider but it’s recognisable none the less).
We both have a favourite drawing app which bristles with options. It’s called Drawing Pad from TouchScreenPreSchoolGames.com. At the moment, ‘stickers’ are Finley’s preferred medium and the multi-touch interface is a joy even with small gooey fingers.
Less good, some of the apps are very American (I expect he may develop a transatlantic twang) and as Jakob Nielsen pointed out, there are inconsistencies between apps.
As toddlers do, he particularly likes pressing the home button (the only button on the top) and seeing how nervous grandpa becomes when he explores my email! I’d like to be able to lock it so I know he can’t send his drawings to my clients.
But as a device which encourages exploration, exhibits endless patience (even at 4am in the morning, good old jet lag) and survives sticky fingers, we believe the iPad is a serious business tool for toddlers. I have actually found it useful too, but that’s another article.
Ipad for kids
View more presentations from System Concepts Ltd.
34% of shoppers prefer to buy online: report
Jul 21st
Factors influencing online purchases
The survey also looks at the features on websites which make it more likely that consumers will decide to shop online.
Free shipping was the most popular motivation for 82% of UK and 80% of US consumers, and gives etailers that offer this option a clear advantage over competitors.
Plenty of well-known retailers have caught on to the power of free shipping, with the likes of ASOS, John Lewis, Amazon all offering some degree of free shipping, and just as importantly, promoting it heavily throughout the site.
Price guarantees were an influence for 72% of UK and 64% of US shoppers, and suggests that providing promises to match competitors’ prices and even listing them on site can be a useful tactic for online retailers.
Offering alternative payment methods makes sense for etailers, as it allows them to capture as many customers as possible, appealing to those that may be concerned about card fraud or who simply don’t have a credit or debit card.
60% of UK consumers and 48% of those from the US said that alternatives such as PayPal would make it more likely that they would shop online.
Availability of product ratings was a factor for 59% of UK shoppers, as was the availability of user-generated or consumer product reviews (57%).
Online chat was less of an influence on purchases, with just 15% of UK and 22% of US respondents saying it would make them more likely to purchase online.
This is not surprising, since online chat is not widely available, especially in the UK. However, if it helps 15% to 22% of consumers to complete their purchase, then it is a worthwhile tool for online retailers.
E-commerce site issues
We also asked consumers how often they encountered various problems when attempting to make purchases online.
The most common problems uncovered by the survey were slow-loading pages and being unable to have specific questions answered (which is where online chat can be useful). These were frequent issues for 13% of respondents, and somewhat frequent for 31%.
Other common problems included inadequate site search functions, with 34% finding this a problem either frequently or somewhat frequently, and insufficient information (41%)
Online purchasing
Respondents were asked how much their most recent online purchase cost. Nearly half (46%) of surveyed consumers spent between £0-£100, with the largest proportions (29%) being between £25- £100.
37% of respondents spent between £100-£500 which may well account for a large amount of electrical or computer purchases.
Other highlights from the report
The continued importance of targeted and relevant email marketing came through in consumers’ responses. 50% said that irrelevant information devalued emails they received. while 50% said that emails weren’t valuable because there was “no special advantage” to receiving them.
36% replied that receiving an email had prompted them to make a purchase online, whilst around a quarter (27%) reported that an email was the cause of an offline purchase.
The younger the audience, the more mistrust there is towards advertising, though the majority of consumers appreciate receiving advertising messages when it is directly beneficial to them, such as receiving a discount on a product or service (57%).
Ryman: site review
Jul 15th
Homepage
Here’s the old Ryman homepage, which was pretty cluttered:
And the new version, a much cleaner page with more white space and much clearer navigational links and clearer merchandising. In addition key areas, such as the search box, the shopping basket link, the free delivery offer, and the store finder are more prominently displayed.
The result is a homepage which is much easier to understand and navigate from for visitors to the site. A big improvement.
Navigation and site search
The main navigation menu has been placed on the left side of the page, and the site uses large drop-down menus to display product sub-categories.
This allows users to see all of the menu options at once without the need for scrolling, and helps to provide a shortcut to the product pages they are seeking.
Once customers arrive at category and sub-category pages, plenty of options have been provided on the right of the page for users to filter and narrow their product selections.
Providing effective and relevant filtered navigation improves the user experience, as it reduces the amount of cognitive effort required, and makes it more likely that they will find a product that suits them.
The site search function works well and returned accurate results for the terms i tried out, as well as providing the filtering and sorting options to allow customers to refine their search results.
Product pages
The new product pages contain much more detail than on the previous version. Product photos, even for smaller and lower priced items, are all high quality and provide the ability to zoom in and see products from different angles.
The key information that customers will look for is all there; delivery charges and details, product specifications, stock levels etc.
While the ‘add to basket’ button is in a prominent position, but I think this call to action could be made to stand out more clearly with better use of colour and contrast, and perhaps a larger button. The call to action should leap out at users.
Shopping basket & checkout process
As mentioned before, the basket link is prominently positioned and catches the eye with a basket icon and a summary of the price, which drops down to provide a summary of its contents.
The basket page is clear and easy to edit, though again the call to action could be clearer:
Registration is compulsory on the site, which can be a barrier to purchase for customers. The length of the new customer registration form makes it even more of a potential roadblock for customers:
Once customers are past this point, they will find a checkout that has been well-designed and easy to use.
A clear progress indicator has been provided, a prominent phone number should provide some reassurance to those customers that need it, and the process has been enclosed with all navigation removed to avoid any distractions for customers.
Conclusion
There are a few improvements which could still be made, such as removing the need for customers to register before checkout. This example from Jared Spool of a major site which made $300m simply by removing the register button should make retailers think twice about this.
Registration aside, this new website represents a massive improvement on the old site in terms of user experience which should reward Ryman with increased conversion rates.
ITV way behind on World Cup web usability: study
Jun 25th
The results table:
I looked at the ITV live online World Cup coverage last week, and it was poor compared to that from the BBC, the actual live footage was hard to find thanks to confusing navigation, while the quality of the coverage left a lot to be desired.
The Webcredible study finds similar issues with ITV’s navigation, with key areas such as fixtures and team information being hard to find. Also, news links in each section aren’t as relevant as they should be. For example, none of the four news links on the England team page actually relate to England.
FIFA.com tops the study, thanks to a strong performance across all the criteria, including clear navigation and findability of key information on fixtures and team news, though it did lose marks for video content.
The video wasn’t always easy to find, and some of the videos that were prominent turned out to be unavailable:
Business Link website costs £2.15 per visit
Jun 25th
This UK trade website cost a total of £4.7m to build and run, and has been visited by just 399,501 users, which equates to 28,085 per month.
Another expensive website, and the most expensive of any on the list was Business Link, which provides advice for UK businesses. This site cost £35.78m to run, and attracted 16.7m visits last year, 1.6m visits per month, at £2.15 per visit.
You might think that a site costing £35m would be an incredibly useful and valuable resource, but the Business Link website looks outdated, and some of the information contained on internet marketing is out of date. The money could clearly have been better spent.
Other findings from the report include:
- A quarter of government organisations did not know the costs of their websites and had no consistent way of measuring and reporting cost.
- 16% of government organisations had no information on how their websites were being used.
- A third of all government websites did not comply with government’s own user accessibility standards and all should meet the requisite standards by 2011.
- The total costs of the 46 government websites in the study came to £128m. The total number of visits was 568m. This comes to roughly 23p per visit.
Ten free usability testing tools
May 19th
Fivesecondtest
This app, reviewed for this blog by Paul Rouke, allows you to upload an image from your webpage and to find out which elements of the page stand out for users. Useful for testing the clarity of calls to action.
UserPlus
This free tool, currently in alpha, allows users to upload a screenshot, tag elements on the page you are looking for advice on, and find the usability score.
Usabilla
You can create a test via Usabilla’s website in a guided process that begins with you entering basic test information and creating pages and tasks for testers to complete, and enables you to invite participants to the test. There are various pricing levels, but you can test two pages with up to ten participants free of charge.
Concept Feedback
Not really user testing, but this site allows you to submit a design and receive free feedback from the Concept Feedback community.
Chalkmark
After uploading a screenshot of the user interface they want to test, users can set tasks and invite others to participate. The results are presented with heatmaps to show where people clicked, and a report showing the average time taken to complete tasks.
4Q
This is a free online survey tool which integrates into any website and seeks to find out what visitors are at your website for, whether they were able to complete their tasks, and if not, why.
Feng-GUI
This site uses an algorithm to simulate users, and generates an eye tracking map to show which areas of the page attract the most attention. There is a free demo that allows you to test one image every few hours.
Silverback
Billed as a guerilla usability testing tool app, Silverback allows to to set up and video user testing sessions. It is Mac only, and there is a 30 day free trial.
Userfly
Adding the Userfly code to your site allows Userfly to record a screencast of your users’ behaviour, providing some very interesting feedback on how they are interacting with your site.
ClickHeat
This OpenSource software provides a visual heatmap of clicks on a webpage, and since it sits on your web server, the results are from actual users of your website.
Usability or interaction design: who does what
May 10th
The international standard ISO 9241-11 defines usability as:
The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.
So, good usability is part of an excellent user experience which is what we aim to achieve when we design products, systems or services. Interaction design is part of the process by which we do it.
The newly published Human Centred Design standard ISO 9241-210:2010 says interaction design is where we “design the tasks and the interaction between the system and the user”. It is central to the ‘produce design solutions (to meet user requirements)’ step in the human-centred design sequence shown here:
- The standard identifies seven interaction design activities (although only some of them are explicitly called interaction design):
- Making high level decisions (for example, initial design concept, essential outcomes).
- Identifying tasks and sub-tasks.
- Allocating tasks and sub-tasks to user and other parts of the system.
- Identifying the interaction objects required for the completion of the tasks.
- Identifying and selecting appropriate dialogue techniques [see ISO 9241 parts 12 to 17].
- Designing the sequence and timing (dynamics) of the interaction.
- Designing the information architecture of the user interface of an interactive system to allow efficient access to interaction objects.
Of course, such activities should never be done in isolation and I guess when lots of different people are involved, it’s difficult to be absolutely clear about the boundaries between the roles. Interaction design skills are valuable throughout the iterative human centred design process in helping to create visual designs which can be readily understood and evaluated by users.
For example, in a recent project, our interaction designer was involved at the beginning of the project creating quick-mock ups of design options for a CMS which were used to help specify the system and gain buy-in from business stakeholders.
Whereas, at insurance provider LV=, interactive storyboards and annotated lo-fidelity wire frames were produced to visually summarise results and to act as design templates at the end of the review and testing process.
Frankly, I do not really care what we call it, as long as we help our clients develop or procure effective and efficient systems which work well for their users, but I think it might help all of us explain what we do and why it is important if we could work towards using a common description for our services.
Lib Dem website tops for usability: study
Apr 21st
We know already that the party leaders’ websites are pretty poor, but it also seems that most political parties have a lot to learn about user experience, with an average score of just 50%, and only two sites scoring over 60%.
The study assessed the websites of ten political sites across a number of guidelines. Here are a few highlights…
Contact details
One of the most important things that visitors to political websites are looking for are contact details; they may want to contact their local MP or candidate, or else join the party or volunteer to help.
Both Labour (with one point) and the Conservative party (two points) scored poorly for promoting contact details. Both bury the contact link among a lot of small text at the foot of the homepage.
Labour doesn’t provide any email address, just a contact form which requires the name and addresses of users. The Tories do the same, but at least the site allows users to search for their local MP or candidate, providing contact numbers and email addresses for them.
The Liberal Democrats get full marks here, thanks to a prominent contact link at the top of the homepage and providing email and phone details for local party offices and MPs.
Site search
As on any e-commerce website a useful site search option can help users to find information if they can’t access it by browsing, or else prefer to search by keyword.
No points here for Labour, as it doesn’t have a site search option at all, at least not one that I can find. Both Conservative and Lib Dem sites do have the option, prominently displayed at the top right of the page.
The Lib Dem site doesn’t cope well with spelling errors, meaning users have to start the search again:
The Conservative site recognises the same spelling error, and does at least offer some suggestions:
The average score for site search and presentation of results was 1.5 (out of five) and 1.6 respectively, so this is an area where there is plenty of room for improvement.
Listing key tasks on homepage
If visitors are arriving at these party sites with the intention of taking a particular course of action, such as joining, or are looking for policy information, it should be easy to find out where to go from the homepage.
This is an area where most websites are performing reasonably well. Of the three main parties, Labour and Conservatives both scored three out of five, with the Lib Dems gaining full marks.
Webcredible has assessed these homepages according to the five key tasks for visitors:
- Finding out about the party’s policies.
- Finding out why to vote for the party.
- Getting information on party figures.
- Finding party news.
- Find out about campaigning/fundraising/volunteering.
While the Labour and Conservative homepages mark it hard to find information about party figures, the Lib Dem homepage provides an excellent example, providing all of this key information clearly, and above the fold. It also uses photos and icons to make this key information more clearly visible.
Shell tops corporate website league table
Apr 21st
Here’s the top ten:
Trends from the study:
US firms improving their websites
While European firms have been ahead in this area for the last few years, and still occupy the top slots, US firms are steadily improving and putting more resources into their web presence.
Big improvers are AT&T and Proctor & Gamble, which have both overhauled their sites in the last 12 months.
Social media
The study found that very few firms has incorporated social media into their websites, though two of the firms that are doing this have both stirred up some controversy recently.
Nestle, which found itself on the wrong side of customer anger after a recent Greenpeace campaign, does actually provide clear links to its Twitter account, Facebook page and YouTube channel.
Another example is chemical firm Chevron, which is the subject of a $27bn class action suit in Ecuador, and has been fighting its corner via its website and YouTube channel.
Apple, Google and Microsoft need to work on their websites
The report mentions that some of the ‘worst constructed’ websites are those from Google, Microsoft and Apple. The issue is that these firms ‘let their decentralised philosophy roam free on their web estates, leading to dire dysfunctionality.’.
Of these sites, Apple is especially poor when it comes to the serving the media metric, one example being that it is impossible to get to the media section from the investor site.
App review: Nigella on iPhone
Apr 19th
The app has an attractive and easy to use interface, with clear and intuitive navigation.
The main menu page allows uses to browse through recipes under a number of headings, and users can also search by keyword to find recipes that use particular ingredients.
Once users choose a heading, they can easily scroll through the available recipes before tapping to see some more details about the recipe.
Recipes are broken down into stages to keep text easy to scan, while voice control has been added so that users can go back and forth between pages of the recipe while keeping their hands free for cooking, which is a nice touch.
Some of the recipes are accompanied by videos, some show Nigella cooking the whole recipes, others are extracts which show techniques or explain particular ingredients.
There are some other useful features in the app, such as a shopping list feature which allows users to add all of the ingredients from a recipe to the list and tick them off as they buy them.
The app also provides details of Nigella’s books, and even links to Amazon so you can buy them direct from your phone. However, it links to the desktop version of the Amazon site; sending users to Amazon’s mobile site would be a better idea, as it would make it easier to people to complete the purchase.
Conclusion
At £4.99, it is decent value compared with the price of the books. If you have a number of Nigella’s books, some of these recipes will be familiar, though it can be useful to have them available on the phone.
This is a very well designed and usable app. It looks good, it’s fast, navigates well, and judging by the reviews that have been left on the App Store so far, it seems to be popular with users.