Toluu

90 Percent of Everything: Usability Blog

Experience design, User Research & good old-fashioned usability

New Google Reader: RollovertasticDecember 5 2008

I remember when I was a lad, Google was the world leader in minimalist UI design. Mind blowingly, paradigm shiftingly, amazingly clean, elegant design, where every unnecessary pixel was carefully whittled away using Occam’s own razor, leaving nothing but perfection.

Looking at the new Google Reader, I can only hold my head in my hands and weep. What is going on with all the rollovers? It practically needs an epilepsy warning!

(The short clip above shows the new Google Reader on Chrome 0.4.154)

Multiple select controls must evolve or dieDecember 3 2008

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the standard form controls offered in the HTML specification are a good thing. They’ve stood the test of time, they’ve evolved and users have grown up with them. It’s always far safer to use the standard html form controls than attempt to reinvent the wheel, Right?

If only that were true. In reality some of them suck big time, and front-end developers around the world are forced to build workarounds on a regular basis. The worst culprit is probably the multiple select box. In fact, I don’t think I’m exaggerating if I say that the multiple select box is probably the least usable form control in the history of the web, and should be best avoided at all times.

I am
a world
of pain
designed
by
an
evil
genius,
with the
express
intent of
annoying you
just enough
to wind you
up,
but not
quite enough
to get myself
killed off.

Here are some of the problems I see in face to face research sessions when watching low competency users struggle with multiple select form controls:

• Some users don’t know about the ctrl-key. If there is a label, they don’t read it. These users will click an item, scroll down until that item is hidden, click another (thinking that both are now selected) and then continue doing this a number of times until they realise it somehow didn’t work. So they start

Ahh, they don’t make ‘em like they used to…December 1 2008

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 2008

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

A/B test results for the Firefox download button wordingNovember 22 2008

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.