Mint Usability

Note: Also includes a reply to PC Magazine’s article “The Google vs. Apple War Begins“

It’s always sad how the big players don’t seem to realize that user experience and usability matters. Specially when you want to have user created content on your website. I just spent some minutes reading an article from PC Magazine and decided to comment about the speculations in the post. After scrolling some time downwards I eventually found the (quite easy to miss) “Add Your Comment” box:

Like the picture above would lead you to believe that you don’t actually need to register to post a comment, like in any clever web platform (there are other, better, ways of getting rid of the spam), so I happily typed down my reply and pressed post, only to bounce back from this:

Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot?! I still need to register, even though the form clearly said “Post”. So I let out a deep sigh, let my shoulders slump a bit and press “Create an Account”, here we go. And what do I find? A form long & complex enough (PC Magazine – Member Registration), and full of Dreaded Red Dots *, that it could be a registration form for a bank loan. Needless to say that all it took was few quick glances up and down the form, decide it’s not worth the effort and then just forget the whole thing.

One can only wonder how much more content and discussions there would be if the posting wouldn’t require a process equal to launching a nuclear missile (… Note to self: I hope that it’s not THAT easy, or rather more complicated than that), thus bringing more traffic and revenue for the magazine. Take heed PC Magazine. Take heed.

* Dreaded Red Dot means a field that is required for the registration. Usually not a good thing if you want to have a fluid user experience.

To those who still are interested, here is the reply I wanted to post

“I personally don’t think that this whole FCC commotion is specifically about the Google Voice app being pulled, rather than the fact that Apple just yanked a “random app” from the store and is making the developer to pay all of the refunds for the app, even the 30% part that they are taking from the transactions. In my books, FCC just wants to make clear what are the rules of the app store, so that developers might defend themselves when next time Apple decides to pull apps from the App Store and make the developer pay the refunds.

-Mikko Tikkanen”

Welcome to another installment of the Small Things series. This time the tale is about news aggregation giant, Digg.com, who for some reason seems to be shooting itself to the leg by introducing CAPTCHA to the login process.

The sole reason of existence for CATPCHA is to shoot down non-human users, since the computer supposedly can’t figure out the actual letters/words in CAPTCHA field, thus it’s usually used in user registration forms. Though, I’m not sure how long this feature has been in the login form since I really haven’t logged in to Digg for a while.

Now, while I’m sure there is some sort of reason to this kind of use (one being bot(s) using “fake” accounts to login and digg up certain stories) I’m not so sure if the end result is right on this occasion. The immediate effect on myself was that after several attempts to trying to remember my password I eventually gave up and moved on without ever logging in. Why? One of the reasons was clearly the habit of logging in generally includes entering your username and password and pressing enter, first I didn’t even see the whole field completely. When I noticed the CATPCHA test I practically gave up after trying two times. Why? Because even though the process of trying couple of different mutations of the password is not that complicated and tedious, the CATPCHA instantly morphed the whole task into something that really demands my immediate attention to get through the simplest of tasks in online world.

Could this be avoided? Why not just use the massive statistics that is the backend of Digg and just start forming patterns? At some scale this is already done, confirmed by Kevin Rose at Diggnation (in some random episode), then apply that data and try to force diggers who always end up digging the same stories to do the CATPCHA before digging. If they fail repeatedly that would identify them as bot accounts, which could lead to suspension. It’s hardly a perfect solution but it’s something that wouldn’t punish the regular users.

Rule of Mint: If you have to start complicating the user experience because of a small group of users, and thus penalizing the larger part of the audience, there’s inherent problems within the system itself.

Welcome to the small things, covering the small things in the area of user interfaces that without no apparent reason (at least usually), one way or another hinder the user experience.

Todays receipe: Google Chrome + lots of open tabs + missing title bar

I’m a power user of tabs (like everyone who has seen any of my browser windows open knows), which means that many times in a day, all of my tabs are so small that only the first letter of the page title is shown, like so:

Now, you would get the same kind problem with any browser, but that is not the problem I’m referring to. The problem becomes evident when you are say, reading a longer article and you want to check what was the title of the article, or have lots of pages open from the same site and have to distinguish the difference between them. Normally (Firefox, IE and whatnot) you would just glance the title bar of the window and be done with it, this method however doesn’t work with Google Chrome since it’s lacking the title bar. What you have to do in Chrome is you either look around the page, to find a clue about the title of the page or hover the mouse pointer over the tab for few seconds, until the title appears as a tooltip.

Continue reading “Small things: Google Chrome page titles”

A fellow blogger, called Contentconsumer, has made nifty little usability test with her girlfriend and with latest Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Test included using disributed software, installing new ones, customizing Ubuntu desktop and such, all in all rather mundane tasks.

When staring down the results one can clearly see the problem, Linux/Ubuntu still has. When arguing of system usability 99 out of 100 would claim that things do not need to be dumbed down, as “Linux users are not Windows users“, or other as creative arguments. Now, test like this clearly shows, even underlines, that for the basic desktop user needs the user interface that is “dumbed down“, the user interface needs to guide the user, not just slap things to hers/his face and just hope for the best.

Windows ain’t the golden system either, I give you that, but at least Vista has less of them everyday usability problems. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Ubuntu, but desktop ready it ain’t.

Read more at
The Content Consumer – Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment