Usability

I am feeling annoyed and frustrated with making bookings on he Internet. I’m off on holiday and thought that rather than drive straight through to the southernmost tip of England in one day, we’d stop off to see some relatives on the way. There’s six of us, so staying with anyone is no small undertaking. This time we decided to look for a hotel or B&B. Read more about: Thank goodness we have no dog! Booking a room for six people

A recent project to redesign an online form and create a version for mobiles reminded me, once again, of the importance of user testing.

According to Caroline Jarrett in her (very user-friendly) book Forms That Work, ‘Slot-in answers such as name, address, and date of birth are so well known to us that it is much easier and more natural to type them in directly rather than selecting from the list.’  For instance, she notes that it is difficult to scan options in a ‘Year’ dropdown because they look very similar.

I always find date of birth dropdowns annoying and would be able to type in my date of birth much more quickly, so I completely agreed with Jarrett. Therefore, I made the date of birth fields text fields in the first iteration of the prototype (desktop version), expecting that this would make it easier for participants to provide their date of birth. (Note: I know dropdowns prevent Americans from getting confused with the UK date format, but this form would only be used by UK residents.)

Well, half of the participants agreed with me. However, the other half made formatting errors during the testing session (e.g. D instead of DD). What I, a touch typist, had forgotten was that many people must look down at the keyboard to type and therefore may misinterpret or forget the field labels (YY instead of YYYY) or not notice that they have accidentally tabbed to the next field. These participants, who were less proficient at typing, welcomed dropdowns because they reduced the amount of typing they had to do.

I replaced the text fields with conventional date of birth dropdowns in the second iteration of the prototype (see below) and, surprise surprise, participants didn’t make any errors.

Despite this, for the mobile version of the prototype I had participants try entering date of birth using both text fields and dropdowns because I thought dropdowns might be more fiddly on a mobile device.

I got the same result: all participants preferred using date of birth dropdowns on their devices (smartphones with either touchscreen or QWERTY keypads) because it was much quicker and more accurate for them to select dropdown options than numbers (especially on QWERTY keypads).

So, reading books (and getting a UX person to create the prototype) is no substitute for user testing. And sometimes conventions are there for a reason. Even if they are annoying.

The topic of whether to allow users to check bets before they place them has come up a few times and often the arguments spread to the wider e-commerce world. Checking the contents of your basket before you make an order is common practice, especially for complex orders. Recently, one of our clients decided to remove the confirmation step from the checkout process to make it shorter, under the premise that “shorter checkout processes are better”. Read more about: Check your baskets but not your bets

I suppose like most people who work in the related industries, I have been having lots of conversations and thoughts about the iPad recently. Nearly all of them have ended with two conclusions: That the iPad is game changing (something I have not always agreed with); but no-one is really sure how. Well now I am convinced and I think I do know how. Read more about: The iPad is the latest business tool

Just like every year at the same time, a new version of the hugely popular iPhone was recently released on the market. The iPhone4 boasts a whole new range of sexy features like video calling or multitasking and, like its previous versions, is meant to take the mobile world to a new age. But despite all the hype a closer look at the device shows that the iPhone4 is far from perfect. Some important aspects of the phones technical specs have clearly been overlooked by the general public and even though it remains a state-of-the-art device, the iPhone4, I have to say is not as good as you may think. Read more about: The iPhone4 not as good as you think

I took the  iPad home for a few days and carried out some basic usability testing and below are some of my findings:

• Connect to my wireless network. All fine, except main CTA (after writing password) was amongst letters and looked equally grey)
• Watch YouTube videos – Eddie Izzard – great experience with the iPad sitting on my legs, picking it up every so often to show my husband who could also participate at a distance.

Read more about: Tasks with the iPad

On May 28th in the UK, the iPad makes its long awaited release into the market.

Foviance has been user tesitng the iPad for the past month and made some interesting findings – notably that if you’re using it out in the sunshine, it’ll take only two minutes before it overheats! Great battery length though, and the most common problem is with the reflection on the screen.

I posted a ‘photoblog’ in April and clearly I loved the iPad, but what of it’s usability and overall customer experience?

Our experts take a closer look…

A glass or two glasses of wine into a networking dinner recently, I found myself in a debate about whether the iPad would be game changing or not. I have some history of this subject as when we first started the company in 2001, we travelled the world testing Microsoft’s tablet PC to help understand how and where people would use it and what usability issues were apparent between device and software. Read more about: The iPad — will it change the game or is it just Star Wars monopoly?