Archive for the 'Usability' Category

An MIT and Harvard study (via Slashdot) unveils that the SiteKey system employed by Bank of America, ING Direct and Yahoo!, among others are likely ineffective at protecting users against fraudulent sites. The SiteKey system is based on assigning an image to a user’s account and presenting it prior to the user entering a password. If the SiteKey does not match the user’s account image, he/she should deduce that the site is not authentic, and thus not safe to enter private information. The results of the study (based on Bank of America site and users) shows that a vast majority of people ignore the SiteKey clues along with the often-overlooked HTTPS indicators. In fact, only 2 of the 25 (8%) participants using their own account, and none of the other 42, chose not to enter their passwords when the site-authentication image was replaced by an upgrade message.

Another interesting finding in the study was the contrast between behaviors of participants that were role playing for the study and those that were actually inputting sensitive information. Definitely worth a read and the final paper is set to appear at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy from May 20-27, 2007 in Oakland, California.

The latest issue of Usability News from the Software Usability and Research Lab (SURL), has a very interesting study—‘Eye Gaze Patterns while Searching vs. Browsing a Website’—on web users’ eye gaze patterns while browsing and searching web sites. Findings from the study show that the ‘F’ pattern as described by Jakob Nielson does not hold true for some kinds of web sites.

Results show that users follow a fairly uniform scan path when browsing through pictures, and a more random path while specifically searching through them.

In fact, not only does the study suggest that users’ viewing patterns depend on the nature of the web page (text-rich versus image-rich) but also by the users’ tasks (browsing versus searching).

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In a previous article, ‘4 Principles of Effective Navigation on the Web‘, one of the stated keys is letting users know where they can go. One of the most effective ways to let users know what paths are available to them is to expose subsequent destination points. In other words, bubbling up subsections and pages found within top-level sections helps users gain context as well as unearths particular destinations within those sections. Let’s start with an example to illustrate what I mean.

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Imagine that you are in a supermarket buying groceries for dinner. Imagine also that this supermarket does not label what kinds of items can be found in each aisle making it impossible for you to know where to go for the next item on your list. To make things worse, the aisles in the store shift around without warning and you never know quite where you are with respect to the last place you’ve been.

This painfully frustrating scenario seems outlandish, yet many websites put their users in this precise situation. (more…)

On Monday, Techdirt writes about the concerns that BitTorrent creator, Bram Cohen has regarding the integration of Digital Rights Management (DRM) into his widely popular “peer distributed” product. As the company approaches launch of a store which will controlled by Windows DRM, the issue of the DRM usability has been called into question.

This is a case in point of businessmen demanding that steps be taken to ensure revenue increases without paying due dilligence to the end-user and the ramifications of a poor user experience. Time will only tell how this negligence will play out, but it’s great to see an executive stepping forward to admit these failures and concerns. With formidable competition in the media download space such as Guba and DRM-free emusic.com the race to provide affordable download services with usable rights protection and platform compatability is at full force. Another player, Spiral Frog is set to enter the space this month.
From the original interview on BitTorrent’s future, Cohen is quoted:

We’re rolling out with some content DRM’d, using Windows DRM, at the insistence of our content partners. We’re very concerned about the usability problems DRM introduces, and are educating our content partners about the lost commercial opportunity.

Recently, the BayCHI mailing list had an interesting discussion regarding a very common input mechanism with which many of us have grown accustomed: selecting from a group of available items and adding to a congruent set of chosen items. The polemical issue that arises with this selection tool is in its implementation, specifically “should we collect items from left-to-right or from right-to-left?” The easy answer that many will throw out is that for the Western world, we read from left to right and therefore this is the correct way to present it for us Westerners. True, but there is more than meets the eye and by investigating this aspect further, we can reveal other supporting arguments for this presentation.

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In the first installment of this series, we examined how we can enhance search tools by allowing users to set the context of searches. In this article we will examine another key feature that aids users in completing a task within a site: the help link. Particularly, we will examine providing contextual help globally on sites: allowing users to access information pertaining to the specific task at hand.

Contextual help is an integrated means of accessing supplementary information and instructions about a feature or content. Common manifestations of contextual help are:

• “What’s this?” or “help?” or “[?]” links located near the item of interest that open as a pop-up or more preferable an accessible overlay tooltip
• Walkthrough tutorials that demonstrate interactions directly on the interface for example, “Show me” help links

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John Battelle reported Thursday on Marissa Mayer’s talk at the Web 2.0 conference held in San Francisco this week. Mayer shared some very fascinating findings regarding the usability and user experience design of Google’s search results pages. In short, the study found that users preferred speedy page loads to a greater number of results per page and to ‘highly interactive ajax features’. Although users reported that they preferred more results per page, their expressed desires diverged from their actual interactions. Google’s analysts found that search results pages with 30 results per page rather than the standard 10 per page resulted in lower search traffic and decreased ad revenue by 20 percent.

This is significant in three ways. (more…)

At Paradyme, we often think of ‘users’ as ‘patrons’ to stress the fact that users of most web sites are either active or prospective customers or contribute to the web site’s financial state in some way. It is critical to acknowledge this fact, because unlike users of desktop applications or physical products, web site users tend to be more immediately tied to revenue and costs, and as such, optimizing web sites means much more than making them usable; it also means increasing their value through optimizing things such as marketing strategy, acquisition and retention rates, and user participation as well as reducing costs.

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User experience design can sometimes be a slippery term. With all the other often used terms that float around in its realm in the technology and web space: interaction design, information architecture, human computer interaction, human factors engineering, usability, and user interface design. People often end up asking “what is the difference between all these fields and which one do I need?” This article examines the term and field of user experience to plainly extrapolate its meaning and connect the dots with these other fields.

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