September 2011

Message Can’t Be Blank? Why The Hell Not?, a photo by pjsherman on Flickr.

This screenshot is about a year old, so my apologies to the site if they’ve fixed this UX issue.

The point remains, however, that when someone wishes to unsubscribe from your email list, it is incredibly imperious to *require* them to explain why.

Sure, as a business you might *like* to know, but you have no right to demand an answer.

That’s treating your visitor rudely.

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A Dubious Claim, a photo by pjsherman on Flickr.

Paypal goes a little too far with this login transition screen.

“The world’s most loved way to pay and get paid”?

I don’t think so.

Using marketing-speak in the UI is one thing. It’s come to be expected and (mostly) accepted. Just make sure it doesn’t trigger your users’ BS detectors.

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Whatever You Do…Don’t Search For “ASCII Mr. Burns” Or Google Will Flip Out, a photo by pjsherman on Flickr.

Really Google? I’m on my home network. No one else is using my connection, according to my outbound connection monitoring software.

Nothing but little ol’ me on Firefox.

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One-Try Lockout? That’s BS., a photo by pjsherman on Flickr.

This is a pure customer experience issue: I was just locked out of my AT&T wireless account after a SINGLE INCORRECT PASSWORD ENTRY.

I suppose it’s theoretically feasible that someone was trying to crack my account at the very moment I was trying to legitimately log in, which would explain why I was locked out after a single try. Odds are, probably not.

Thanks the inconvenience, AT&T.

And companies wonder why we call instead of self-service on the web. It’s because the web is basically a brittle support mechanism.

Given that the average support call costs anywhere between 5 and 50 dollars (sorry, no recent reference; going from memory), I’m about to cost AT&T ~ 15 or 20 bucks because someone decided to implement a single-attempt lockout policy.

Whatever. Time to call a CSR and burn some of AT&T’s cash.

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RushLimbaugh.com…Wait For It…Not Enough White Space, a photo by pjsherman on Flickr.

This morning I followed a link from an independent writer’s feed, and found myself for the first time on Rush Limbaugh’s site.

I don’t like the guy or what he stands for. He’s a liar and a bully. But let’s get beyond that and talk about his site.

Clearly there’s too much…stuff. Multiple rows of nav, a riot of highly saturated opposing colors (ouch my eyes), and…not enough white space between elements.

Maybe he did that on purpose. That would be so meta and clever if he meant that. Get it? Not enough white space? Because, uh, that’s what he believes…there’s not enough white space.

Yeah…somehow I doubt it was intentional.

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There’s A Lot Of User Assistance In That There Screen, a photo by pjsherman on Flickr.

My company uses this product to (surprise!) document our expense reports. When I started a few months back, one of the first emails I received from my colleagues was the “Here’s how you create an Expensify report” message. It was that hard.

Last time I logged in I noticed a whole bunch of user assistance in the UI, including a “faux-modal” lightbox that provides links to the two most common actions (“add expenses” and “new expense”). They’re not the most well-crafted sentences in the world, but they get the points across.

Because I was in a user-assistance-y mood, I also noticed the “How do I?” links on the left for the first time. I have no idea whether they’ve been there since I started using the app, or whether they were new as well.

In any case, while Expensify’s main workflow isn’t exactly the most well-designed interaction I’ve seen, at least they’re providing a bit of guidance at the front end.

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