Usability
Posted on April 16, 2002 @ 10:09 in General
Usability Problems Hurt Kids! Adults Too!
A while ago I remarked on good interface design and the horrors of navigating my university's websites. Today I ran across a short article by Jakob Nielsen, of the Nielsen Ratings fame, and he comments on a study done on children using/navigating websites.
Not that the facts found are shocking, but if you take the basic demands for usability, the university websites I'm referring to manage to break all the rules:
A) Unclear navigational confirmation of the user's location confused users both within sites and when leaving them.
B) Inconsistent navigation options, where the same destination was referred to in different ways, caused users to visit the same feature repeatedly, because they didn't know they had already been there.
C) Non-standard interaction techniques caused predictable problems, such as making it impossible for users to select their preferred game using a "games machine."
D) Lack of perceived clickability affordances, such as overly flat graphics, caused users to miss features because they overlooked the links.
E) Fancy wording in interfaces confused users and prevented them from understanding the available choices.
Read a longer analysis of the university sites I'm referring to and you probably agree with me that they're not very kid or adult friendly...
The sites I'm linking here are in Dutch, but you should get the gist, it's about the navigation after all. Check out site #3 (which actually is a subsection of site #2, which again goes under site #1... note the differences in style and changes in navigational elements!).
Okay, so you're looking at site #3, now this is an 'aggregate site' for different departments, so to get to 'Communication Sciences' you need to select if from the drop-down menu. Right?! The navigational elements to the left change and nowhere do they give you any sense of where you are in the hierarchy of the site or how to get back. Some of the navigational links to the left will send you to another page/site altogether, some will simply load some new info on the right side of the page... no difference made in the presentation of the links. Plus (go back to site #3) if you click on "Onderwijs" you get a bunch of new links, but to get to the courses you're looking for, you again have to pull down the right department and go through their pages to find what you're looking for. Again, no visible hierarchy, no clue where you are on/in the site, no clue where you are going when you click a link.
Now for the fun part... suppose you found the Communication Sciences department (hover over link and check out the horrible structure of that link.... not the kind of logic that would allow you to remember it and enter it into the address bar, right?) and now you want to go the the research school that's part of the Communication Sciences department (where we PhD students work and study). Shouldn't be too hard to find it, right? Well... This whole site #3 is only for BA/MA students. If you want to find the research schools, you have to go back to site #2, click "Onderzoek" (Research), click "Onderzoeksscholen" (Research Schools... note the huge difference between "research schools" and "research institutes"!), click "Amsterdam School of Communications Research", click on the highlighted URL of our research school. That was fun, wasn't it?
One more complaint regarding points A, B and C of the usability list: go to site #1 and hover over some links. Links in the text change color, in the navigation some links get a little block displayed on the left of them (doesn't work reliably in Opera) but they don't change appearance, some links in the navigation don't change at all. This bad habit is repeated all over the sites.
Ah, one more gripe... finding the digital expense forms... go to site #2, click on "Diensten", click on "Werk" and note that the navigation keeps changing, so I am primed to find a link to the expense forms there, but no... they appear in the text of that page on the right, "Digitale formulieren", which sends you to a page where you have to click on a link, which sends you to a way different site that doesn't have a proper domain name, just an IP number. (In Opera the italicized text at the bottom doesn't show up properly.) When you have finally picked your expense form from the drop down menu, you'll find yourself on a webform, that you have to fill out, print and send it in like that, because you cannot submit it electronically. Never mind that you can't keep an electronic copy for yourself, because saving that page locally won't save the data you entered.
Although you may not read Dutch, let me assure you that at various points I too have great difficulties in figuring out what the different terms that are presented in the navigation would mean... they're just too vague. Only going through the sites time and again will give you some idea of where to find what, but that's not because there's a logic to it, but simply because you've learned where stuff is, you've memorized the location (or at least the path).
Not a very kid proof site.
Comments and Trackbacks
That was a interesting summary on the influence of web usability on children as well as adults.I beleive that the problems faced by the user while browsing through a site,is potrayed well by the writer.Did enjoy the blog.
Posted by Vidya Gopinath on June 02, 2004 @ 08:56
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