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Usability 2.0
: Usability BlogReddit’s Flawed CAPTCHA: Adding Insult To Injury
Usability is an inexact science, but I’m pretty sure there is at least one golden rule that is non-negotiable, and that’s this:
Never, ever, insult your users.
Unless your web site revolves around insults, and every error message consists of a purposefully engineered insult for humorous reasons, treating your users with disdain or disrespect is a huge no-no.
Earlier today I decided to sign up for reddit, the popular social bookmarking service. My experience has turned me right off the service. Here’s my rant:
1. The CAPTCHA
First, I clicked Submit Link, and was presented with an option to register.
I’m personally not a huge fan of CAPTCHAs, for many reasons (there are alternatives, but there’s no panacea), but I do empathise with why people put them in place. Unlike someone who has poor eyesight, I can usually read the letters, and it’s usually only once that I need to type them in, so we’ll let that slide for now. And at least the letters in reddit’s CAPTCHA are relatively easy to decipher compared with others that I’ve seen in use … right?
Wrong.
2. The Insult
Here’s what I was presented with after clicking the Create Account button:
Apparently those letters weren’t as easy to decipher …
Web Directions UX Wrap-up: Andy Budd and Steve Baty
I’ve just published the transcript of an interview I did with Andy Budd at Web Directions UX last week. It’s quite long, but well worth the read — we cover all sorts of topics such as careers in web design, the future of CSS, IE8, HTML 5, the role of usability testing in the design process, CSS frameworks, CSS gallery sites and more!
Sifting through the notes I took last Friday, here are some snippets that I jotted down from another speaker whose talk I got a lot out of — Steve Baty, who spoke about Analysing User Research Data.
Steve managed to introduce a number of quite scary and complex looking statistical formulae, without having his audience drift off to sleep or turn and run for the exit. Being passionate about his chosen field and a charismatic presenter certainly helped matters. Perhaps it’s just because, with his glasses off, he looks like Charlie (David Krumholtz) from Numb3rs, which probably reinforced his credibility in my mind.
The takeaway that I got from Steve’s talk is that user research data is useless unless you do something with it, and that “something” needs to be well-defined before you collect it. He …
Web Directions Gov: Making eGovernment Reality
Nathanael Boehm is reporting for SitePoint from Web Directions Government 2008, in Canberra Australia.
It was a chilly start to the day with the temperature hovering just above zero degrees as we waited in the dining area of Old Parliament House, cups of coffee in hand, listening to people who’d attended the breakfast session tell us how good Jason Ryan’s presentation had been. Jason is currently Communications Manager at the State Services Commission in New Zealand and presented on “Government 2.0: The public management challenge”. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to meet Jason however I did talk with one of his colleagues at the State Services Commission Rowan Smith who is involved with the New Zealand Government Web Standards project.
At 9:00am John Allsopp opened the conference and talked about how the focus of these conferences has expanded and is no longer about accessibility and other technical low-level issues. Although these are still as relevant and important now as 5 years ago the adoption and integration of best practice in those areas has reached a point where can move onto the next big thing, which for this conference was eGovernment: how …
Web Directions UX: Making Your Users Feel Special
Andy Budd kicked off the Web Directions User Experience conference this morning with some terrific insight into what makes a site that really works so memorable for the site’s users.
The core message of Andy’s presentation was that other industries have long understood the importance of a positive user experience, and the Web can learn a lot from this.
His presentation gave lots of tips, with plenty of rich examples:
- First impressions count: Hoteliers understand this, hence good hotels offer smiling greeters in the lobby, chocolates and written notes on your pillow.
- Attention to detail gets noticed: Apple are a company that realize the difference that attention to detail can make — consider the effort that has been put into the packaging of their products, which results in customers actually photographing the unboxing of their iPod. From the sound of the door closing on a new BMW to the rubbish bins at Disney theme parks being themed, people notice this stuff.
- Personalisation and customisation matters: Starbucks allows its customers to customise their coffees, and the Nintendo Wii and other games let users create their own characters. Second life takes this to a new level to accommodate people’s needs to assert their individuality. …
WCAG 2 Requirements at Risk
Since April 30, when the WCAG 2.0 Candidate Recommendation (CR) was released, there has been a ton of posts across the web telling us the WCAG 2 is almost, almost complete.
I’m not here to do that. The news is 5 days old and I have no intention of clogging up your RSS by regurgitating the same content… as important as it is.
What I do want to highlight is that there are a number of WCAG 2 requirements at risk.
It is important to note that some WCAG 2.0 requirements are at risk; that is, they may not be included if there are not sufficient implementations [By 30 June 2008].
- Web Accessibility Initiative Interest Group mail list
Get Involved
I would urge you to take a look at each of the At Risk requirements to see if there are any relevant to your area of expertise that you are able to implement over the next couple of months. Alternatively, there may be someone with complementary skills that requires your assistance in implementing one of the at risk requirements.
The primary purpose of this CR stage is for developers and designers to “test drive” WCAG 2.0 to demonstrate that WCAG 2.0 can be implemented …
The Open Letter Initiative and the Mobile Web
One of the things I find absolutely frustrating about the web community in Sydney is the lack of information at industry nights and other local web events about mobile accessibility and, in particular, anything related to the W3C and Mobile Web Best Practices.
For the most part seminars and industry nights hosted by the Mobile Monday guys or AIMIA focus on marketing, advertising, gaming and identifying ways of further monetising the mobile industry. BORING. I’ve even stopped attending the Mobile Monday events because they appear to have such little interest in promoting any discussion around best practices or mobile accessibility.
Given that these are the two most prominent Australian industry groups hosting discussions on mobile technology at the moment, it seems pretty obvious that there’s little interest in this area for either group. Even the Web Standards Group has had very few mobile related events.
Mobile Means Mobility
Mobile use is at an all time high globally and it offers affordable access to the web for a huge proportion of people including many users with disabilities. It’s time for industry groups to get back on track and deliver informative sessions on how we can produce accessible, usable web content.
The W3C WAI Mobile pages …
Twitter’s turning me to drink
About a year and a half ago I was totally over Twitter. When I say “over it”, I mean So Over It that I couldn’t even get Into It. Twitter was new, I didn’t know many people using it, and all the twits and tweets seemed so utterly self indulgent… some would say, many still are. To make matters worse, my husband is an EEO (early, early, adopter); if he can beta test something, he will. So when Twitter came along, he was pretty excited.
Like many others, I didn’t really get the relevance of Twitter. To some extent I thought it was a prime display of insecurity via the Look at Me channel. As someone who really struggled with the decision of whether or not I should even enable comments on my blog, Twitter was a real challenge.
I saw it as a one-on-one activity (i.e. person - device) rather than a one-to-many relationship via the device. Face to face conversations were interrupted by regular mobile beeps alerting a DM (not a Deep and Meaningful, but rather a Direct Message), and in one instance I was even woken up at 3am no less, by a message alert on my partners …
Oprah’s Book Club? I don’t think so…
Some of you will already know The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) mail list. For those that don’t know it, the website and mail list are great resources and sources of discussion for anyone interested in interaction design, user experience and design.
The IxDA is a member-supported organization committed to serving the needs of the international interaction design community. With the help of more than 1,500 members worldwide, we provide a forum for the discussion of interaction design issues.
Now, as Michael Jackson once said: “I’m a lurker, not a writer”.. OK well maybe that was me. But all the same, there’s been a really good discussion going on over the last few days that I’ve been watching with great interest. List members have been posting ‘The One Book’ they’d recommend to Engineering Management folk (or anyone else for that matter, I’d venture).
So without further ado, here’s a summary of some great reading on User Experience, Usability, and Interaction Design:
- The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper
- Designing from Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engineers Can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology, Ellen Isaacs & Alan Walendowski
- Communicating Design, Dan Brown
- The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman
- Subject To …
WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has released a last call for comments on the working draft of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0… again:
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group invites you to review the second WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft published on 11 December 2007. WCAG 2.0 explains how to make Web sites, applications, and other content accessible to people with disabilities. Please submit any comments on the following document by 1 February 2008.
This second WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft is provided for public review of the document now that it has all resolutions from previous comments incorporated. The WCAG Working Group hopes that it has resolved all substantive issues with this draft, and looks forward to progressing to the next stages in completing WCAG 2.0.
Leave your comments on whether you think any progress has been made here at the W3C site.
Design Great Billboards
We can learn a lot about designing usable web sites from the offline world.
For instance, when I was in Adelaide a couple of weeks ago visiting family, I took a drive around the Adelaide Hills. Cruising along the freeway at 120 kms/hr, I passed the sign in the picture on the right. The first thing that popped into my head was “What the heck does that mean?”
I’m not sure what it’s like in your part of the world, but when I was last living in Adelaide, South Australia, the term arrester bed definitely wasn’t common language.
(I was half expecting to see an intimidating king-size mattress in full police uniform step out from the bushes and order me to pull over.)
The second thing that popped into my head — and this is possibly an indication that I spend far too much time online — was this:
“Imagine if something similarly obscure was used to describe a tab on a web site. No-one would know what the text linked to!”
Steve Krug wrote about this very concept — that we should think of our users as driving by in a car, and …
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