Usability

"Lowering the barrier of entry" should not be equated with "one form or many"

When considering registration/sign-up with clients, there is a spectre floating about the room, the "Lower the barrier of entry in order to prevent drop-offs" spectre. This is a very good thing. Just ten years ago, I remember being told in no uncertain terms that we had to "force" users to give us as much information as possible. What is interesting to me now though, is that this "how to lower the barrier of entry" question has started to become synonymous with "should we do one long form or multiple short forms".

Don't Lose Sight of the Single Most Important Principle

Before I give my answer to that question, I would like to take a moment to remind folks that the single best way to lower the barrier of entry is to -- ask only for the absolute minimum amount of information you need. Honestly, every other form consideration is secondary to that single guiding principle.

Think you already are? Try looking again. Or have a relative or neighbor look with you. None of my relatives create websites. They are very helpful for seeing sites with fresh eyes..

Common Reasons Folks Use Form Processes

Now, back to one form versus multiple.... Let's start by looking at the thinking behind using multiple short forms rather than one longer form.

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I have often been asked by clients about the better order for the OK and Cancel buttons. Finally, Jakob Nielsen has published an 'official' answer To sum up:

• Either is perfectly fine.
• The question is not of great concern as neither poses a big threat to usability.
• If you need a tie-breaker, go with the platform convention that most of your users are known to use.
• Generally on the web, most users are on Windows, so "OK" then "Cancel" is the platform convention to follow.

Lastly, and perhaps, most importantly, he points out:

• There are questions in usability that are, perhaps, not worth the time spent debating them

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Have you ever read something that resonates so loud to your experience that you want to run around and share it with everyone you know? I found such a passage today in Jared M. Spools "UIEtips: 4 Design Lessons from the Flip".

"We want to make designs simple, but we don’t want to make them dumb. There’s a difference. The goal is to simplify the design by keeping only the most valuable bits, eliminating everything else.

This is not easy to do. You really have to know something about the users, what they are trying to do, and how they go about doing it. Just having that information will likely push the team to add more features, not less, so you then need a solid vision of how simplicity will make it better. Finally, you have to be ruthless and stubborn, cutting all the unnecessary bits out and sticking to your guns about keeping to the essentials." -- Jared M. Spool

Honestly, I have nothing really to add... Amen...read more...

A few days ago, Jakob Nielsen posted a summary of some eye tracking studies, verifying or reiterating things we've known or suspected for years. In Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings, Nielsen reminds us that users don't see banners. In fact, his heatmaps below show that users don't even see content that looks like banners.

It turns out there are three things that attract readers' eyes more than anything else when they're reading a page:

• Plain Text
• Faces
• Cleavage

We probably could have guessed as much. There are two lessons here that we already know, but for which we can be thankful to Mr. Nielsen for reminding us.

First, content creators: make your content look like content and not like advertisements. Separate it visually AND spatially; readers are going to breeze right by it if they even suspect it's an ad.

Second, advertisers: make your ads look like cleavage, but you know this already.

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In the testing phase for a recent release, I received an email from the client's third party development team stating that there was no way to return to the homepage once they clicked on any link off of it. They were having to reload the URL. No way home? How could I have missed that?!

I didn't know what to think. I had run through all of the changes myself, paying particular attention to the navigation just the day before. I immediately loaded the site and checked it out. It was fine, the corporate logo was successfully linking to the homepage on every page I tested. What could the developer have seen that I was missing... JavaScript error? Browser-specific problems?

Then it occurred to me...

In reworking the utility navigation, we had removed the explicit "Home" link. We opted instead to have the corporate logo serve as the link to the home page. We were adding a "Subscribe to Company" link and the area was already pretty full, so we decided to simplify things. It was a convention that we have employed countless times and seen employed countless others. The Utility navigation, for those who use different terms, is what we call a group of global links reserved for user actions (rather than content) grouped together in the header -- things like "Login/Logout", "Subscribe", "Contact Us".

I re-read the developer's email and suspected that I had found the problem. The developer was looking for the "Home" link, not finding it, and reporting it as a bug. I looked down at the signature in the email and saw that I was dealing with a Senior Systems Analyst.

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Iterative design is the process of making small but significant changes to improve your site after its launch. The source of these changes is usually based on feedback from your target audiences and usability studies. As great as it is, it is hard for designers and clients to actually use iterative design as a concept because we tend to be well… perfectionists. Further, we all like to see a “finished” product when it is finished. Even with these drawbacks iterative design has proven to improve your site and some would argue it a necessary concept in design.

Iterative Design can be Difficult to Implement

The perfectionist trait in designers often rears its imperfect head. What will the client and target audience think when they see this rounded-corner box or that dotted line? How will they respond to red? We as designers want it to be right on our first try. The truth is you aren’t going to get it right the first try every time. And that’s okay.

Clients may also expect perfection. After all, they are paying you for your professional services. A finished project should only need to be “finished” once. The key term is expectation. Make sure to set the expectation of iterative design up front so your team and client will know that sites and interactivity take time to get right.

How to Iterate

After you have released your design, you need to measure your results. Feedback tools do just that, and can take on many forms: an actual form, a simple link on your contact page, or any page for that matter. There are also sophisticated feedback tools found on sites like Adobe. Choose a way to display your feedback tool, with the idea of gathering real feedback from real users. You can cater your feedback tools to ask general questions on layout, or more specific details like color or shape. It really is up to you and the level of detail you and your clients wish to iterate to. Feedback should come in, but do not act on anything quite yet. Strive for iterative design, not reactive design.

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"Solutions" as a primary navigation item.

I recently had a meeting with a prospective client, a software company looking to make some strategic changes to their site. They had previously organized their site by audience and were now looking to focus on their primary audience and bring their product content a level up. "We are thinking that we want the navigation to be "Products", "Solutions"...

What exactly is a "Solution"?

I have seen solutions as:

• product packages
• product/service packages
• hardware/software/service packages
• vertical-specific product packages
• vertical-specific case studies
• product listings for a particular audience
• product offerings for a particular business challenge

What do users think of "Solutions"

I had the opportunity a few years back to do a usability study for a large hardware/software/services company who also offered "solutions". In fact, the goal of the study was to see why a particular division's hardware/software/services offerings were failing to satisfy their users. Part of the problem? Yup, you guessed it... solutions.

We tested both engineers and business decision makers from large and small organizations and found that generally users don't know what to expect when they see the word "Solution" so most shied away from that area, opting to try repeatedly to find the information they sought in the Products area.

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