Category: usability

Usability Comparison: Sears.com vs. Dell

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

Via the WebWord mailing list is this comparison of Sears.com and Dell.

The focus of the article is on “seducuble moments&rdquo, which the author describes as opportunities for offering the customer additional products. There are no big surprises, but I found it interesting nonetheless:

If someone were coming to the site interested in buying a refrigerator, what would they [sic] most likely want to do first: (1) apply for credit or (2) find the right refrigerator? It struck us as odd that there was a way to apply for the financing, but no way to explore if the right refrigerator was on the site. […]

KDE User Interface Guidelines

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As mentioned in the KDE 3.1 Beta accouncement, KDE apparently has a set of User Interface Guidelines (à la Apple’s now-famous user-interface guidelines).

I’m pleased to see such a development in the Unix world. After all, it's not that I really need yet-another utility to parse text files ;), but I think that a healthy dose of UI rediscovery could do wonders towards the acceptance of Linux and other Unices.

Usability with Contingency Design

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New Architect Magazine has an article that they call “Making Mistakes Well” on offering contingency plans to increase revenue:

LandsEnd.com decided it could do more than just display the typical “out of stock” message for unavailable items. Instead, the site now presents an inventory alert feature that tells shoppers when an item will be available, offers to send email notification when the item arrives, and shows shoppers similar items that are available immediately. The conversion rate at LandsEnd.com is 11 percent, one of the highest among online apparel retailers. Site creators say that this sort of dedication to the customer is a major reason why.

37 Signals also has a white paper on contingency design.

Usability Applied to Life

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From the WebWord mailing list, usability guy Chad Lundgren writes about usability principles appled to real life. For instance:

3. For a long time, I keep my wallet and keys in my back pockets. This added to pick-pocket paranoid in crowded places,and made fast food drive-thrus arduous.

I read an article mentioning that European men tend not to use their back pockets, more for vanity than practicality, but I started using my front pockets only, and I’ve never looked back. So to speak.

I’ve considered that approach (wallet in front pocket), but I just don’t have the pockets to spare :(. With my mobile phone and my keys in my front-right pocket, and my Palm V and my uni-ball in my front-left pocket, I have no where but my back pockets for my wallet :-/.

And, I disagree with Chad’s #8, where he advocates absolute paths for web pages. The problem with using absolute paths is that it makes changing the “elevation” of the site (as a whole) impossible. For instance, relative paths would allow for the change from “sitename.com” to “sitename.com/directory/” without much trouble (but absolute paths would not).

And, for what it’s worth, my favorite line was “ […] they are keys, from one point of view”. ;)

UI Suggestions for KDE 3

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

Via the WebWord mailing list, I discovered the article “Bringing KDE Closer to Joe User’s Desktop”. It offers many suggestions on improving KDE’s UI, and I found it to be fascinating. For instance:

As for the “Configure Desktop...” itself, it should have been called “Desktop Properties” or “Desktop Settings”. “Configure” is a verb. Configure implies that the user knows how to “configure” something. Believe me, for a Unix newcomer, “configure” is a dreadful verb. It is a scary command. It might sound funny to you, but never underestimate the psychology of the user. UI is all about psychology. It is all about shapes, colors, pictures, words... Picking the right elements each time is the right way of creating a comfortable desktop environment. […]

It reminds me in some ways of this usability report on GNOME by the Sun GNOME Human Computer Interaction staff. And, man, Linux sure is pretty. I’ll have to give that another try once I have lesser things to worry about.