The terminology of usability.

Posted on February 21, 2012 by calum

In this article I want to look at terminology and the way usability professionals portray themselves to clients and the general public. There is a growing trend coming from the web design side to refer to everything as UX – short for User eXperience – the most common one being people referring to UX design and calling themselves UX designers. This is an oxymoron. You can’t design what someone experiences. You can test what they experience, which is what UX was about originally.

UX, the way I and many long term usability professionals use it, is all about understanding how users experience the product (web site, app, desktop application, controls on a microwave etc.) so that the results can be fed back into areas such as IxD (Interaction Design), IA (Information Architecture) and visual design in order to refine the existing design of the system and make it more usable to improve the UX of the person who will end up using it. Continue reading →

The usability of living shop bought herbs

Posted on February 19, 2012 by calum

I know, this is somewhat off the norm even for me. Regardless, I do believe some corrections to popularly held beliefs are in order and it would be reasonable to consider this a discoverability issue, handily.

Ok, so you’ve just bought a potted herb from some random supermarket and plonked it on the windowsill in your kitchen. So far all the advice I’ve heard from TV chefs, cookery books & magazines and friends is that these plants have been very poorly looked after by the supermarket supply chain and will only last a few days, so you want to use it up fairly quickly. A stance not entirely dismissed by the fact they normally have a Best Before date on the plastic sleeve they usually arrive in. Well, I’m here to dispel that myth. Continue reading →

Publish and be damned (apparently).

Posted on February 14, 2012 by calum

I’ve just been distinctly annoyed by the habit of companies refusing to make pricing available on their website, asking you to “call them” so they can “discuss your needs” with them. Now, there are clearly some areas of business where this is necessary, mostly where the product will be built to your specification and the cost will vary as a result or where it’s a service offering where the cost depends on the amount of time spent carrying out the work. However, there are many situations where it’s an off-the-shelf product where the company in question are nothing more than a reseller of a boxed product … and they still refuse to make pricing easy to come by.

For the purposes of this article, I will focus on those unaltered off-the-shelf products where pricing is simple and easy to make available without effort. Even when pricing may be tiered depending on the volume of business you give them per purchase or per quarter in total volume, they still know how much they’re going to charge you and if they can work it out to generate an invoice, why are they unable to place such basic information on a website? Continue reading →

What a wonderful user experience!

Posted on September 16, 2011 by calum

It’s so rare I get a chance to write an article about a good user experience that I feel all warm and squishy about it. So here goes…

Yesterday evening I was sitting in the COSCA Counselling Skills course I’ve recently started and we were having a discussion about the books listed as indicative reading and which were the most important to read. There are a fair number on the list and most people simply wouldn’t have the time to work through them all. Continue reading →

Facebook really could be more helpful…

Posted on September 16, 2011 by calum

I just saw something in my Facebook news feed that annoyed and slightly upset me. That was my first reaction. Now I’ve had time to think about it, I realise that there are a number of different interpretations open regarding what I saw – so here it is in a nifty little screen grab. Lifeboat Launching

As you can see, someone likes the announcement an RNLI lifeboat has launched in order to help or rescue a person or group of people who could be in serious trouble. Continue reading →

How to enhance a website.

Posted on September 20, 2010 by calum

I’m feeling in the mood to point out what I find to be really obvious errors of judgement in design at present, so I’ve just returned to one that’s been annoying me for several weeks now and taken a selective screen shot to demonstrate my irritation.

The following screen shot from 1stwebdesigner is the start of an article on how to use breadcrumbs to enhance a website. A much more obvious point I believe it shows – is how to completely destroy a website design by placing a ridiculously large block of adverts between the title and main body of an article. Continue reading →

Please don’t leave me!

Posted on September 1, 2010 by calum

In a previous article, Unsubscribe me from this hell, I commented on how difficult it often was to find out how to stop receiving email from some companies along with providing an example of an easy to discover and use unsubscribe option. In this sequel I look at Verisign, one of the largest providers of SSL certificates used to secure website traffic etc.

I am fed up receiving useless emails from Verisign. They contain no information and often use scare tactics (falsely, I might add) in order to get you to choose their product over a competitor. I am, however, lazy and it’s taken me years to bother to look for an unsubscribe link. I found it in the expected place – tiny text at the bottom of the email buried amongst plenty of irrelevant lines of words. Continue reading →

Unsubscribe me from this hell!

Posted on May 6, 2010 by calum

Well not quite. Although I do want to talk about that nifty little “unsubscribe” link that comes along with, or should come along with, corporate emails you’ve signed up to receive (because we all know businesses won’t email you without your first having chosen to be contacted, right?). Assuming there is one present, I’ve usually found it lurking right at the bottom of the email, often in a smaller font and not unusually buried amongst a fair amount of irrelevant dribble absolutely no one except their legal department cares about. Continue reading →

Auto-generated passwords.

Posted on March 15, 2010 by calum

When you create a new account on a computer, some software or a website, you will normally be asked to create a password at the same time. On occasion, however, the system will automatically generate a password for you without asking if you would prefer to do this yourself. There are a number of reasons for this and one, for websites at least, can help to reduce spam as automated scripts would have a great deal of difficulty discovering this new password, thus preventing the script logging in and pasting adverts all over your forums, comment fields or messaging other users etc. Continue reading →

Break the Wall

Destroying the barriers to reach usable systems.

Category Archives: Website usability