Bob Browning's blog

This month we have an outstanding useability column from Jakob Neilsen. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designer-user-differences.html

There are two important insights

• Designers are not users
• Users are not designers

Like a japanese haiku these two statements can be used for lengthy meditation and should be burned on the heart of every designer. Too many sites are built for the designer, not the user; an exotic, barely understood being. A person who doesn’t know how to run a search on Google, let alone manipulate a strange scroll bar or fly-out menu.

Read

Learn.

If you want a good laugh at other people’s expense go take a look at http://www.telebid.com/. It looks like a very cool auction site with some real bargains. There is a 32″ flat screen with 49 minutes to go for £197. What is the catch? Continue Reading »

This from the Google website

“Unfortunately, we’re unable to interpret the meaning of changes in our legal documents for you. If you have questions or you need legal advice on interpreting the terms, please don’t hesitate to contact an attorney.”

Uh!

Jeremiah Owyang in his blog, asks the following question: “What if they leave negative comments on my site/blog/forum? “. The answer is that it has to be handled well, not covered up or removed.

I have always believe that a customer complaint can be a huge opportunity if handled well.

You routinely buy something from (say) a web site and next day it turns up regular as clockwork. Then something goes wrong. If handled badly you will never go back to that store. If handled really well you will not only go back, but you will tell your friends about it. Why? Because now you know that if something goes wrong in the future these guys will deal with it. It has actually made you happier because before you maybe always had a nagging doubt.

Of course repeated mistakes or mistakes on the first order cannot be recovered from. You just plain need to get your act together.

Firefox has been incredibly successful in digging into Microsoft’s market share. But many believe every thing they hear that’s bad about Microsoft and everything they hear thats good about Firefox. I know a few people who are like that about the USA. This site is devoted to expolding those Firefox myths.

Someone has figured out the ten most common passwords. How? I thought they were supposed to be secret. Maybe the ten most common among people who will tell you there password if you ask. Who knows.

Anyway – few surprises. After ‘123’ and ‘password’ the third was ‘liverpool’. Number 9 was ‘arsenal’. So if you want to guess a password try some football teams.

You may have got a mail from someone in ‘the contactthem’ network. It is nicely worded and invites you to make up to $4,800/month (c £2500)to place an ad on your web site.

It turns out that this is not pay per click but an affiliate marketing scheme. You get a commisssion on sales made by people who click on the ad. My experience of such schemes is that you rarely make that sort of money from them. Simple math.

The merchant is selling something for say £20 and you get 5% commission. Assuming a very generous 10% conversion rate and a very generous 10% click through rate and you can easily see that you need 250,000 visitors to generate that much money. So they only work for very high traffic sites.

So how can they make such claims? The answer is pyramid selling. Some of the ads are for the contactthem scheme and you get a percentage of any income from affiliates recruited via that link.

Will it work as advertised? You be the judge.

Jabob Nielsen’s regular useability column is always an interesting read. I like the analogy he gives for his number one rule – stick to standard checkboxes, radio buttons and so on.

“If you change the appearance or behavior of these units, it’s like suddenly injecting foreign words into a natural-language communication. Det vil gøre læserne forvirrede (or, to revert to English: Doing so will confuse readers). “

I have noticed (like Neilsen) that the most common victim is the humble scrollbar. I have no idea why, but every designer seems to think that scrollbars are really ugly and need reworking. Neilsen observes that these “almost always cause users to overlook some of their options.”

He continues:
“If Jakob’s Law is “users spend most of their time on other websites,” then Jakob’s Second Law is even more critical: “Users have several thousand times more experience with standard GUI controls than with any individual new design.” “

I have just received (second time this week) a ‘survey’ form from a charity. Both ‘surveys’ are similar. They start out like a regular market research survey. The last few questions are along the lines:

Do you think this is worthwhile work (Y/N)
Do you realise we are reliant on donations (Y/N)
Are you willing to donate (Y/N)

The moment I see one of these so-called surveys any sympathy I might have for the charity goes straight out of the window. These things are dishonest and sorry – I am not interested.

There is a planning document issued by the land registry aimed at solicitors preparing for e-conveyancing. Section 3 goes like this

Our preparatory research has identified that there are five possible stages in the development of IT systems in organisations.

1. You have PCs on desks which are not yet linked to each other
2. The PCs on your desks are networked to each other
3. Your business processes have been redesigned to benefit from
   networked PCs
4. Your system plugs into a network external to your organisation
5. You have redesigned your business to reflect the interaction of networks

The “Realisation of potential benefits” is identified as going from low to high as you progress from 1 to 5.

This is not the first time I have seen nonsense like this coming out of government. It is misleading on so many levels. Primarily however the assumption that connecting your internal systems to an external network (i.e. the Internet) is a ‘good thing’. Actually it is something to be done only if there are business benefits that over-ride the huge risks – which are not mentioned anywhere in this document. As this is aimed at conveyancers whose systems control millions of pounds of their customer’s money this becomes a far from trivial issue.

The document comes from a web site where for example we see this phrase

The central service will provide for automatic exchange of contracts relating to all transactions in a property chain. For this and other purposes, conveyancers will need to have electronic signatures.

As we all know an electronic signature is something attached to a document and is unique to that document. What conveyancers will been is a certificate. In security terms this is a schoolboy howler that has been repeated in various documents since 2002. It indicates to me that the people over there have only the slimmest grasp of security theory. A truly frightening prospect when it seems that they are controlling the most valuable asset that any of us owns.