usability: 9/10 users miss the Big Red Button

[Stomme poes]

This is what usability testing is all about: find out the Big Obvious Thingie you've put on your web site is apparently completely invisible to most of your users:
http://www.gavinelliott.co.uk/2010/1...ton-user-test/

Man I've love to grab a few people and watch them go through our sites. This test was SIMPLE: 10 people, 5 tasks:

* Can you go to jobsindigital.net?
* Can you view the permanent jobs?
* Can you search for a web design job?
* Can you navigate back to the homepage?
* Can you post a job?

Simple tasks even.

Looking at the thumbnail of the whole site, I wouldn't have considered clicking it either.

What's Big and Obvious on your site that users may be missing??

[rguy84]

you should have asked us what do we see first at JiD. I don't know if it is my issue with red, or you telling me to look for the red thing, that is all that I saw.

[Stomme poes]

I saw it, because it was big, but I wouldn't have "seen" it when doing the tasks. My eyes skip everything that I know isn't what I'm looking for. If I'm looking for a major link, I don't look at banners. Which is what that looked like to me.

[Atle Iversen]

Very interesting, thanks for posting this !

Everybody always says that users don't click (or even see) buttons, so MAKE THEM BIGGER !

However, in your case, I believe you've actually managed to make it TOO BIG :-)

Looking at your design, the HUGE red button didn't look like a button anymore, but more of a design element (kind of a heading since it is located in the middle)

[Stomme poes]

Yeah, it seemed many people (like me) saw it as a banner.

Also, Nielsen has an interested, somewhat related note:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/fancy-formatting.html

Only 14% of users could find the US population on the US census site!


The eyetracking of that site is discussed in detail in his Eyetracking Web Usablity book which I really enjoyed. The folks who did the study I linked to in post 1 were considering removing the price from the button and using eyetracking software. I'm sure they'd find that people may look at it once when the page first loads, but slide right over it/around it when doing tasks.

[Karpie]

Even though I know now it's a button - it doesn't look like a button. It looks like a heading.