Raised By Turtles» usability

Bizrate Interface is Broken

Tom — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:22:05 +0000

What’s wrong with this picture? It always surprises me when major sites with huge traffic and stable of full-time developers have features that are fundamentally broken. Check out this screenshot from Bizrate.com (click picture to see full sized image)

How many characters left?

What’s wrong?

It only gives me 255 characters. This is probably because they have chosen to store the text in a fixed-length database field for rapid retrieval. That’s what happens when the usability people and the marketing people get overrruled by some engineer who thinks that this minor efficiency improvement is sufficient reason to cripple the interface.
It doesn’t tell me anywhere how many characters I’m allowed. It wasn’t until I submitted my original version that it rejected it and came back and told me there was a 255 character limit.
It has no running count of characters used. This has become a standard feature everywhere else. We’re used to it on Twitter and most places that have low character limitations.

So what? Well, it took me three tries to get my feedback accepted. And by the time I did, the glowing testimonial I had for the merchant was gone. No room left.

All the merchant got out of this was my comment that I think they should make their free shipping offer appear more prominently on the page.

What the merchant did not get was my comment that when I factored in free shipping, their price was significantly better than the competitor’s price.

Okay, I just placed the order, so I can’t comment on speed of delivery and all that, but I would say that the shopping experience on US-Mattress.com was close to ideal. It’s easy to navigate, there are no real surprises (except why did they offer to let me upgrade to “standard front door” delivery for $49? What is the delivery I’m getting for free?).

Anyway, the bad part is that I agreed to do the Bizrate survey because I like to reward e-commerce merchants who do it “right”. I arrived at the survey with a good feeling, wanting to leave a great testimonial. But the frustrations of using Bizrate’s system left me feeling, well… frustrated. Of course, I don’t hold US-Mattress responsible, at least not consciously, but that’s the thing about usability problems — often they operate on a sub-conscious level. The good feeling I had upon completing the purchase is now forever associated with the stupid Bizrate survey.

And then, there’s Bizrate’s enticements to get you to take the survey, promising all sorts of free stuff. Obviously, everyone who spends a lot of time on the net knows by now that these are not “rewards”, but affiliate offers from which Bizrate makes additional income, but that’s a whole other story.

Apple’s Genius Interface Genius

Tom — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:30:22 +0000

No, that title isn’t a typo. It’s a sarcastic comment on the “genius” of the login screen for the iTunes Genius feature which, as it turns out, is the same as the iTunes store login. It took me four tries to figure out how to log in. Can any usability expert tell me what’s wrong with this login screen?

AOL or Apple customer? Click for full size

[caption id="attachment_177" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="AOL or Apple Customer - fill in the right blank. Click image to view full size"][/caption]

Especially with the AOL triangle thing looking like an arrow, to me this looks like one blank for AOL customers and one for Apple customers. It’s even worse when your login fails, because then it draws an arrow between the AOL logo and the blank, which just emphasizes the connection between AOL and the bottom blank. One has to wonder, has Apple tested the usability on this at all? I thought it was just me, but I showed it to Theresa and she had the same reaction as me.

By the way, one blank is for username and the other for password. Of course, this is a pretty standard interface, but as more sites (like my banks and credit cards) now have two or three-step logins, so you enter your username, then you get a verification image, then you enter your password. I assumed it was like that here.

Gmail delete and go to next message issue

Tom — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:12:38 +0000

I would say the thing that drives me nuts the most about Gmail, is the fact that every time you delete a message, you’re kicked back out to the message list. Google, taking a page from Microsoft, has decided to do your thinking for you and take this option off the table because you really shouldn’t delete emails. But if I know I will never want that message again, I delete it. And am stuck back out at the message list. This, more than anything has stopped me from adopting Gmail.

It turns out there is a ‘Delete’ and go to next conversation Greasemonkey script that will do just what I’m looking for, but recent Gmail upgrades broke that script. So out of luck again. [Update, June 22, 2009: this script has been fixed. Check it out.]

Over at JimsTips.com, Jim suggests using Gmail Keyboard shortcuts (Gmail Help article) deleting with the # key, which does kick you back to the message list and then using the ‘k’ key to move to the next message and the ‘o’ or key to open the message. The thing I dislike about that is that it is three page loads when it should be two (in other words, why do I have to see that damn message list?).

So my similarly kludgey, but somewhat more elegant solution (or maybe not) is to:

Turn on keyboard shortcuts (in Settings -> General).
Create a label named ‘Delete’ (or ‘aaDelete’ if you want to be sure it is at the top of your label list).
When reading a message, type ‘l’ (that’s a lower-case L) to bring up the label list.
Hit the downarrow key once to select my top aaDelete label at the top of my list
Hit the ‘k’ key to move to the next message.
When I’m all done, I can view the messages deleted aaDelete and select and delete them all.

Yeah, stupid, crappy, cumbersome way to do it. I know. Tell Google.

Now if only they would come up with a proper way to view all unlabeled messages, but my solution to that is reasonably workable, if a bit cumbersome.

Take Control of Popups in Firefox

Tom — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:57:03 +0000

By default Firefox comes with a popup blocker enabled that prevents popups from automatically opening, that is the ones that you don’t specifically request, but that open just because you visit a page. So that’s fine. That problem is solved. What is more annoying is legitimate popups that are actually useful, but which are very unfriendly. Heres how to tame them in Firefox.
Okay, so lots of sites make good use of popups to improve your user experience, such as showing a large version of a product picture without making you navigate away from the page with product information. That’s nice of them. Unfortunately, quite often lazy or stupid developers inadvertently make these popups incredibly annoying as well. You end up with a window open that is not resizeable, has no navigation, and is missing all sorts of information. In the least objectionable case, this means an image that is slightly cropped. More commonly, it means a page that is incomprehensible because you can’t read what’s there, can’t see even the important part of the image all at once, or worst of all, that has necessary links which then take you away to pages intended to be viewed in the full browser, but now you’re stuck in that little window. That has always annoyed me beyond reason, but I’m sort of a curmudgeon.
Another incredibly annoying behavior is when developers resize the window. This is not really their fault, but if you are using advanced tab management in Firefox with the excellent Tab Mix Plus extension, you have tremendous control over where popups open. Sometimes I have them open in a new tab. If the develop expects her popup to be standalone, it makes sense to size it just large enough to fit an image of known size, for example. That’s a nice feature. It just has a nasty effect on my browser when opened in a new tab, rather than a new window.

So I went hunting for Firefox extensions that would save me from this aggravation and found that you can strike back at these miscreant web developers using built-in settings in Firefox. Hooray!

First, let’s just stop this nonsense of letting other people decide how big my main browser window should be. They can still set windows to open at a certain size, but resizing an existing window will not work with this simple tip. In Firefox, in the top menu bar, go to Tools » Options.. » Content and click on the first Advanced button, not the Advanced tab or the second Advanced button in that panel (talk about good UI design).

Now you’re in the Advanced Javascript Settings window. Just uncheck them all. I don’t see any reason to let a script on a web page do anything for me. If I really need to resize my window, for example, I’ll do it myself thank you very much.

Now we come to the case, though, where the developer has not created a resizable popup window, so I can’t resize it and, as often as not, can’t use that page at all. Nice design buddy. But, again, Firefox comes to the rescue. Up on the address bar (i.e. where you normally type http://raisedbyturtles.com, or would if you didn’t already get updates via the RSS feed or email), you enter the Firefox configuration screen by entering about:config and hitting the enter key (in other words, no http or anything like that, just about:config). This will bring up thousands of options. To pare down the list to what we want, down where it says “Filter” type in dom.disable_window_open_feature. Now you have a list of just the features you want. Double-click on any line to toggle that feature between true and false.

You can have your pick of which options you want to change and which you don’t. This is working pretty well for me:

You can see a full write-up on those features on the Firefox tips page, but these are the ones we care about:

dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable

Set this to true to make sure all pop-up windows are resizable.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.minimizable

Set this to true to make sure all pop-up windows are minimizable.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.menubar

Set this to true to always display the menu in pop-up windows.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.location

Set this to true to always display the Navigation Toolbar in pop-up windows.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.scrollbars

Set this to true to prevent sites from disabling scrollbars.

Enjoy better surfing without those annoyances!