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90 Percent of Everything: Usability Blog

Experience design, User Research & good old-fashioned usability

Ahh, they don’t make ‘em like they used to…Today

Nothing says “I am a user interface” than 100 form fields crammed into about 850×550 pixels.

The unsubscribe roach motel: an email subscription anti-patternNovember 26

For those of you who don’t know the US cultural reference, the Roach Motel is a cockroach trap. Essentially just a small cardboard box with sticky paper inside, Roach Motels were made famous by Muhammad Ali, who at the tail end of his career was hired in as the product spokesman. Interesting choice.

“Roaches check in, but they don’t check out”, as the saying goes. While this might be a passable way of getting rid of cockroaches, it’s a terrible way to treat your website visitors, yet it’s very common to see this pattern in email service subscription UIs.

Lets look at the steps required to sign up to an email service on a typical site:

1. User clicks on the ’subscribe’ link
2. They then register, entering their email address
3. Then enter a new password
4. Then enter it a second time in the ‘repeat password’ field
5. And finally, they submit the form and subscribe to the service

So, that’s 5 or so steps, and each of those are pretty low effort. While it is annoying to be forced to create an account, there’s no serious brainstrain going on yet. Now, lets imagine a couple of weeks have passed and the user is getting fed up with the emails they are receiving. What steps are involved in unsubscribing from the same service?

1. User clicks on the ‘unsubscribe’ link
2. They then have to log-in. They enter their em

Morae 3 and dual camera supportNovember 25

One of the main limitations of Morae 1 & 2 was that it could only do PC based user research. The new version offers dual camera support, which is a big deal. This means you can now use Morae to do mobile device testing (shown below), paper prototype testing, paper card sorts, participatory design studies, group activities… you name it. Obviously the resolution and picture quality you get from a webcam isn’t going to be fantastic, but it’s passable for research purposes.

Well done Techsmith for responding to their customers’ needs. More info on the Techsmith site.

A/B test results for the Firefox download button wordingNovember 22

Mozilla’s blog of metrics has released the results of a small A/B test they ran recently. Which of the following buttons got the best clickthrough rate on the “customise firefox” page, and by how much? One of them was significantly less effective to a 99.85% confidence level.

Recipe A

Recipe B

You can find the answer and more information over at the blog of metrics.

Change blindness and the role of the grey flickerNovember 21

Chances are, you’ve seen a few change blindness videos before. The clip below is slightly different because it demonstrates how the effect works.

The grey flicker gives just enough time for your visual short term memory buffer to empty. Take it out and it’s easy to notice the difference between the before and after shots. (Read more here, or here)

What’s the implication for UX design? It provides an understanding of the cognitive basis of the yellow fade technique (aka one second spotlight). When you use the web in a natural setting, your eyes are constantly on the move, taking in your environment, blinking, and so on. In doing so, you introduce your own “grey flicker” effect. If something changes in the split second that you glance away, you are going to find it surprisingly hard to notice, just as you found it surprisingly hard to notice the missing engine of the aeroplane in the test above. The animation used in the yellow fade technique helps minimise this problem.