Web Usability Blog

I have been had! I have just been stung for a 52% increase in my business electricity bill and I missed it! After getting over the annoyance at both the electricity company and myself, the lessons to be learnt are about how we all process information whether on paper or screen.

Donald Rumsfeld famously received a lot of stick for his “Unknown Unknowns” speech about the lack of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of WMD. However, the Intelligence services have long used the Johari Window approach, an idea created in 1955 by two American psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham: ‘unknown unknowns’ is one of the quadrants.

I recall being taught about features & benefits in the marketing part of my MBA. We were told nobody wants a drill - they want a hole. The drill is just a means to an end, so you have to talk about the benefits of the hole not the features of the drill.

Supplier portals must rate as one of the worst areas for UX experiences. Have you been unfortunate enough to have to use the Bravo portal or the ProContract service – horrid, yes? I can only assume they think we will jump through any number of hoops to get their business so they don’t have to care, but it is indicative of a certain mindset.

Like many commentators we think the increasing trend of using hamburgers at desktop screen resolutions is a triumph of bad design over good usability. Primarily because it hides the links. Hamburgers give off no scent for users’ goals, it makes them think – not a good idea – rather than just word match.

I don’t know about you but I found the Brexit vote quite a shock, I did not believe for a moment that the UK would vote to leave. On reflection, one of reasons for this is that I move in circles where most people were remainers. I know few leavers, or people who will admit to it, and this clearly coloured my view of the likely outcome. I noticed a similar problem recently when undertaking some user testing for a grocery client looking at some wine pages: I was surprised to see that 4 out of 6 testers had no idea what a magnum was. They all thought it was part of the name of the wine. How could anyone not know what a magnum was? Both examples are a timely reminders that our own experiences are not a good guide to how others think or behave. Because we tend to mix with ‘people like us’ we see a very narrow slice of the totality of human attitudes. Relying on our own experiences to draw conclusions about how others will behave can, as these examples show, mean we are very wrong. Undertaking research with users means you are much less likely to make these sorts of mistakes.

We are often asked to produce personas for websites, and will diligently research and craft these, but how can you use these effectively rather than let them gather dust in the bowels of the organisation. Here are our top tips for making sure they get used and add value:

Martha Lane Fox wrote a thoughtful (as ever) piece in The Sunday Times last weekend in which she talks about spreading "digital skills to unite the nation". In the wake of the Brexit vote she argues for an inclusion agenda in which the 12.6 million adults in the UK with no digital skills must have access to high quality and affordable internet infrastructure. She concludes by saying that "tech used well can unite everyone – not just the metropolitan elite".

Recently we have been working with a start-up business developing a new website. They were working on tight timescales and budgets so it was essential that the research delivered added-value: it went well beyond ‘usability testing’ and significantly informed the strategic USP and brand proposition.

I was talking to one of our clients the other day who said that he was seeing a 94% task completion success on his site – needless to say, he was delighted! This was better than I recalled from testing, so I thought I’d dig back into the reports to see what was happening.