[Click to view full-sized]

Poor Flickr Uploadr. It just can’t help itself. It’s hinky as hell.

Fortunately, Flickr is so good at crafting a friendly user experience, they even get me to feel warm fuzzies about them when their app barfs.

Some of y’all might think it’s too precious by half. But it made me feel good, even though I couldn’t accomplish my goal. And that’s not nothing.

‘course, I’d rather that my pics uploaded. Flickr, fix that buggy OS X Uploadr. Pretty please?

Just found out that my presentation about web usability and conversion is on Slideshare’s “Hot on Twitter” front page module. Or was, on Sunday 21 March. (Slow news day?)

Hey, you take it where you can get it, right?

Oh, the preso is here: http://bit.ly/d6NO0l

I’m getting tired of having to bring this up. (See here and here for prior scoldings.)

Software and service providers, listen to me: it’s a bad user experience to prevent the use of “plus” email addressing when capturing visitor emails. But it’s not about us, it’s really about you: preventing plus addressing is almost definitely depressing several of your key performance indicators. Why? Because it lowers conversion, and when conversion falls, your other KPI‘s fall like dominos.

Here’s the latest offender:

The web team at Starbucks needs to understand that when they prevent the visitor from using plus addressing, they not only create a negative user experience, they also increase abandonment, a.k.a the anti-conversion. And isn’t conversion the whole point (OK, a major point) of having a web presence?

So I strongly suggest to Starbucks – and any other organization that captures emails – that you consider changing this policy. Plus addressing is perfectly acceptable according to the RFC gods, and it allows some of your (more organized, meticulous, and/or obsessive-compulsive) potential customers to better manage their email flow.

Don’t prevent us from managing the flood of communications in a manner that makes our lives easier. If you make signing up easier, more people will sign up.

This my friends is how you increase trust and confidence through your UI.

In this case, it’s Travelocity that has done this, with the simple addition of some content about disclosing information before the user makes an irrevocable change.

Good on Travelocity for this one.

Click to view full size

Here’s a server error page that makes you feel good about the company or service.

It humanizes them. By that, I mean that it makes you feel that they have a sense of humor – and humility – and hopefully gets you to realize that there’s people behind the service; it’s not just a faceless corporation.

That’s a good thing.

This is just one of those little details that distinguishes companies who really keep on top of every aspect of the user experience from those that don’t.

Plus, I really like Slideshare.net. I keep all my best slide content there. So there’s that.

Last week I gave a presentation at the Online Marketing Summit 2010 about website usability and conversion. I used the famous Ling’s Cars site as an example of conversion, arguing that “unique” (read: ugly) design coupled with “stealthy” usability can facilitate conversion.

You can check out the preso here, or go to Slideshare to see it in full-screen glory. Bonus points to anyone who reports back with the page number of my “Captain Obvious” reference. I hope you enjoy the presentation. Please feel free to email or comment with questions, refutations, counter-arguments, and the like. -Paul

Web Usability and Conversion (View more presentations from Paul Sherman)

Click to view full size

So I was looking for a good price on a little Honda I’m interested in. I stumbled across a site that pings all the dealers in my vicinity for their best price.

One thing I do when I’m not sure of how trustworthy a site is…is use my initials instead of my first name. And usually I accompany it with “plus” addressing, which is simply a way to identify if an organization is selling your email address to third parties. You put “pjsherman+[something else]@gmail.com”, and Gmail will still deliver it to your base address. If you start receiving spam at that address, then you know that the company sold your address. And, you can easily block it.

So I fill out the form, and enter “PJ” – short for Paul Joseph – into the first name field.

And the form barfs. Plus, it gets all scoldy with its CAPITALIZATION of CONTACT and VALID. In my head it sounds like a smarmy schoolteacher.

Then I got curious and entered in some variations to see if the form would accept certain two-letter first names.

Nope.

So the upshot is…if you’re Bo or Al or Ty or Jo, this company isn’t interested in your business.

Click to view full size

Not parsing phone numbers into area code-exchange-suffix is just plain lazy coding. It makes for hard-to-read numbers.

’nuff said.

OK, I didn’t say enough. This is yet more evidence that the price of usability is eternal vigilance.

Stepping off the soapbox now. Have a good day y’all.

(Click image to view full-sized)

(Note: It must be “beat up on Amazon day” here in Central Texas, because I just noticed that Russell Wilson over at Dexo Design just posted an article about Amazon’s “can’t sign in from home page” problem.)

After all these years, Amazon still hasn’t fixed that wonky “new customer” / “returning customer” interaction.

For those of us who tab their way through form fields, this one bites me in the butt every time. First I enter my email, then I tab to the password field. Then I enter it, tab to the commit button, and get whacked by the “Oops! You forgot to say you’re a returning customer!” gotcha.

Now I love Amazon like crazy, but this one is such an EASY fix. Why is it still around after all these years?

(Click image to view full-sized)

A few days ago I twittered that Facebook now feels like walking through the midway of a second-rate, shady fair, with barkers and carnies shouting at you from every booth, tent and dark corner.

Here is the screenshot that made me feel like this. It was one pop-up piled onto another…and they weren’t ads, this was actual functionality that I as a user was supposed to attend to and act on.

I’ll be honest with you: this isn’t a tightly-reasoned judgment about the usability of Facebook. This is a from-the-gut reaction from an occasional user: Facebook’s user experience is out of control.

I’m not saying that the whole “Facebook-is-a-platform” thing is wrong; in fact I think opening up to third-party apps was a brilliant way to jumpstart the creation of an ecosystem. But there are consequences to this move. And one of them is that, from the perspective of an occasional user who is loathe to annoy or Facespam his friends, Facebook’s user experience makes me feel like I’m always one step away from falling prey to a social virus masquerading as an app, one that is going to spam my friends and make me look like a bonehead.

Which is why I don’t ever, EVER knowingly poke, join a cause, throw a pie, etc. I say knowingly because it’s highly likely that I’ve inadvertently Facespammed my friends through the simple act of responding to another’s entreaty. Bad on me, I know. Honestly, I have no idea if I’ve done this or not…and that’s a big part of the problem. Facebook (or more accurately Facebook’s apps) doesn’t readily inform me of the consequences of my potential or actual actions.

Which leads me to the issuance of a blanket mea culpa: If I’m connected to you on Facebook and you’ve received something stupid from me, please accept my apologies. And know that from now on, my mental default when it comes to Facebook’s carnival of social-viruses-cum-apps is “no thank you, I’ll pass.”

Here’s another guest post from Andreas Bossard, who you may remember did a well-received post last year on the Sony Ericsson PC Suite. Thanks for contributing again Andreas! -Paul

- – - -

How fast things change. I wanted to write about a workflow in LinkedIn, which had annoyed me for months, but they have fixed it in the meantime, before I could publish the article. :) So anyhow, here is the article. -Andreas

One of the most used functions in Linkedin is to add a new user to your own network. If you don’t know the e-mail address of the person or other personal information you can choose “I don’t know xy”.

Then the user can enter a personal message and click the “Send Invitation” button. Which opens the following message:

The only way to proceed is to click “Go back to xy’s profile”. The personal message is lost! You stepped into the Linkedin user trap.

Of course, according to the Linkedin policy you’re supposed to add only contacts you personally know, but since you can bypass this rule anyhow by selecting “Friend”, it’s illusory to educate the user by punishing him to re-enter a personal message.

There are two solutions to avoid this unpleasant interaction:
- A “Close”-Button instead of a “Go back to xy’s profile”-button
- Pop up the message immediately, when the user selects “I don’t know xy”, instead of giving him the feeling, that he now can enter a personal message for that person.

As we can see, they solved it with a “Cancel” link.

(Click picture to see full-sized)

Here’s the thing, Intuit: that *is* a valid email address. Gmail has this really neat feature where you can append “+[foo]” to your email handle, and it’ll still get delivered to your regular gmail address.

Why would I want to do this? It’s a great way to filter email, for one. You can simply set up a filter that searches for the “+” strings, dropping them neatly into different folders on your desktop email client.

More importantly, using the “+” is a great way to figure out who’s selling your email address to spammers. If all of a sudden you find that you’re receiving lots more spam to your “+badcompany” address, you can be sure that Badco has sold your address to spammers and other ne’r-do-wells.

So is that what companies are afraid of? Are they afraid that they’ll be found out as a company that aids and abets spammers?

Or is it simply that their programmers are too lazy to write accurate validation code for their web forms?

Caveat: I’m not calling out Intuit exclusively on this. Intuit’s a great company and I personally use several of their products. This has happened to me at many other sites.

Maybe I should start my own little “accept the plus sign” Internet meme…hey, everybody has their 15 minutes…

I just published part 1 of article at the Online Marketing Connect blog about how UX professionals and online marketers are natural allies.

I was able to attend the Online Marketing Summit last month and was pleasantly surprised to learn how much online marketers and UX folks have in common. Like I claim in the article, I think that there is significant overlap in the two groups’ goals. Online marketers are striving to create good, positive online experiences, as are we. Our methods and techniques differ, but our willingness to experiment and iterate is quite similar.

User Experience and Online Marketing Practitioners As Change Agents (Part 1) :: Paul Sherman

Twitter is so very addictive. Now I get it.

I think it’s lacking in the discoverability department though. I don’t find it very easy to find new people – or topics – to follow.

Follow me at http://twitter.com/pjsherman.

I’m not sure exactly how but I ended up at uselog.com, which bills itself as “The Product Usability Weblog.” It’s run by a guy named Jasper van Kuijk, whose posts I think I’ve read on the UX-related lists.

I was in Windows at the time working on a redesign of an enterprise web app that only runs on IE, so I initially perused Uselog in IE. I really liked the posts, particularly the one about how one designer is solving the problem of used teabags.

Then I went over to the Mac side of my machine to view it in Firefox (actually Flock, the Firefox derivative that I love dearly) and save it using my bookmark manager/propagator/sync’er. Unfortunately, Uselog is busted in Firefox. Or at least the homepage is.

Still, recommended for the thoughtful analyses and topical gadget coverage.

An article on Digg caught my eye this morning. Seems some non-profit foundation has given the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization responsible for Wikipedia, almost 900K USD to make Wikipedia “easier to use”.

OK. No problem so far. (Well, I’m a bit shocked that they think it’ll take 900K to fix the entry edit interaction…I could design AND validate a better interaction for less than 1/10th of that amount…)

I’ve edited Wikipedia entries and it’s no picnic. What I take exception to is C|NET columnist Caroline McCarthy referring to folks who have trouble with Wikipedia’s editing tools as “Luddites”.

The problem with this cavalier putdown is that it perpetuates the attitude, held by many technophiles, that anyone who can’t easily use a complex system is stupid, lazy, or both, and that they small-mindedly shun new technology.

C’mon now. People who can’t slog their way through the entry edit flow are *not* Luddites. They’re just regular people. The idea that they’re Ludditical (I just coined that, props to me…) devalues the admirable goal of fixing a poorly designed interaction on an Internet resource that is regularly used by millions of people.

Wikipedia gets $890,000 for the Luddites  ::  The Social  ::  CNET News

Tags: Web, Web 2.0, Design, Usability, Attitudes

I have kept politics off the table during my 3+ years of running this blog. I just think it’s a private thing, and not germaine to the topics I cover here. Suffice it to say I’m a something like a rabidly capitalistic social-liberal-fiscal-conservative-with-a-libertarian-streak. Or a Second Amendment-supporting Democrat (befitting my Texas residency) who believes in states’ rights and a limited Federal government. (In other words, there really is *no* real party for me in the US…but that’s another story and another blog…)

But today I thought I’d point to a really top-notch user experience, and in the process reveal that I am a contributor to the Obama-Biden campaign. After reading about how Sarah Palin’s RNC convention speech raised 1M for the Replicans and 10M for the Democrats, I was reminded that I wanted to contribute. Rather than browse to barackobama.com, I decided to go to www.mybarackobama.com, the social networking site run by the campaign.

I was impressed with how easy it was to not only contribute (it darn well better be), but to quickly and easily increase your level of commitment to the cause. Obviously there’s been some research behind this. They hooked me with the drop-dead simple way to register, and the ease with which they asked me to contribute time, money, or my personal network. They also offered registrants the ability to harness network effects by setting up a personal donations page, where you can ping your friends for donations in your name. Check out my page at http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/pjsherman. The page took no time to set up. My only nit with the site? Why oh why did they make the username/login fields the same color as the background?!? Amateurish mistake, that.

Now I’m sure that the McCain campaign has made it easy to contribute as well, but from my forays onto the McCain site I don’t see the same social networking aspect. And I have to say, I don’t like having a video start up automatically when I visit a site. It’d my choice whether I’d like to watch video content, thank you very much.

Just found a good article at ZDNet that talks about the LinuxHaters site. It’s not really a site for true haters, it’s more a site where people can socialize and discuss particularly egregious usability or functionality issues Linux has…and the community can figure out what to fix.

If it helps drive out usability problems from Linux distros, I’m all for it.

Tough Love: Linux Needs More Haters :: Between The Lines :: ZDNet.com

(Click picture to see full-sized)

I know, it’s not nice to point at somebody’s work and say snarky things. And once you look at this site, it becomes clear that it provides a ton of functionality. But the design seriously detracts from the overall perceived quality of the site. The visual design just doesn’t scan, if you know what I mean. And that hurts discoverability.

If I was ready to put my money where my mouth is, I’d mock up a redesign. It’s easy to point out problems, harder to provide solutions.

Man, it’s a busy week. But I’ll try to put something together this weekend.

Blogged with Flock

From my old friend Pete, via IM this morning:

Why does Firefox make me hit “Continue” every time it updates a plugin? What other options do I have???

Good point Pete.

Just ran across this article about the accessibility of the US Presidential candidates’ sites. Obama gets the A+, good on him. Sad to hear that Ron Paul failed in this respect. I would’ve thought his organization was capable of more, given it’s strong grass-rootsiness.

Making the Grade: The Candidates and Accessibility

Blogged with Flock

(Click picture to see full-sized)

WTF is my webmail client asking me to agree to (or not agree to)?!?I swear, that’s the only thing it shows. There’s no popup message, no other information on the screen other than what you see.And while I’m ranting, what does “Click to Continue” do? Will it perform maintenance operations, skip maintenance, or do something else entirely?Somebody better answer quick, because I’m paralyzed from fear and indecision, unable to do anything, my fingers trembling over the keyboard.

Just playing.

I don’t remember what I clicked; probably “Skip Maintenance”.

Drop what you’re doing right now and go look at the screenshots of Android, Google’s open-source smartphone OS.

It’s…it’s…beautiful.

I want one. Now. Not now. Yesterday.

I know it’s not even a real phone yet, it’s just a reference design. But I want my next phone to run this platform. That’s how neat it looks.

A Visual Tour of Android’s UI – Engadget

Or general availability as we called it in the telecom software world.

Again, go get yourself a copy. It’s the most enjoyable, highly functional web browser out there.

Flock is no longer in pre-release, it’s 1.0bn-ware now.

You really ought to try Flock. It’s that good. Remember that feeling you had when you first loaded Netscape Navigator 1.x? Or Firefox? You’ll get that feeling, a little bit of it anyway, if you give Flock a shot. It’s really usable and very enjoyable.

(Click picture to see full-sized)

I’m in downtown Atlanta in the waiting room at Emory Hospital, waiting for my wife to come out of Lasik surgery. Happy to discover they’ve got wifi here, not happy to discover that the Terms of Use page is a big image of the legalese. Not only is it inaccessible with screen readers and simple assistive tech like text resizing…it’s also damn hard to read for someone like me who’s 20/20.

What a shame. You’d think that hospitals and universities, two organizations used to accommodating people with disabilities, would know enough to make their site accessible.

(Click picture to see full-sized)

Finally, in frustration I scrolled to the bottom of the list. I still didn’t see it. Then I scrolled back up to the top, and looked carefully at each batch of model numbers. I finally found the 640m…it was appended to model E1405 with a slash. At this point, I had spent about 3 or 4 minutes on a task that should take 5 or 10 seconds.

In other words, Dell expected me to know that my model laptop was released with another model number, and that I should look for “E1405″ when I wanted to access support for my 640m.

Give me a break. That’s just laziness. It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to just put “640m” in the product model list, and have it lead to the same page as the E1405′s. Sigh.

A reader (omg I have those?) just pointed out that the Space.com story I critiqued is down. I checked; it’s not down, exactly…it just leads to a blank white page. No 404, no “the page you are trying to find doesn’t exist”, just…blankness.

OK, I guess that qualifies as “down”.

One my regular reads – I think it was /. – pointed to a story on Space.com about the awe-inspiring discoveries made by the Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. The story is in the ever-popular “top 10″ format.

I’ll read anything about the space program, so I clicked on over to the story. And was bummed out to find some usability whoppers that seriously impaired my enjoyment of the story.

Here’s my “top three” list of usability issues I found. Follow this link or the one at bottom and see if you agree (or can find more).

Say it with me now…chromatic aberration and low contrast
The text in the story is rife with term-related hyperlinks. Nice of Space.com to define unfamiliar words, yes. But, the link color is blue and the background is (presumably a Mars-like) brick red. It’s nearly impossible to read the text links because there’s not enough foreground-background contrast.

Plus, the juxtaposition of blue and red causes your eye to attempt to simultaneously focus on short wavelengths (whose focus point falls short of your retina) and long wavelengths (which are most in focus at a point beyond your retina). This fatigues your eye because it’s trying to simultaneously accommodate to two disparate signals. As a result, the blue text appears jumpy or shimmery. Look at those links for a few minutes if you want to give yourself a headache.

Tiny aperture for reading the text
Why oh why did the designer choose to put the text of the story in a (yes I measured it) 440-by-100 pixel scrolling box? Well, I can guess; they were probably slavishly adhering the now-mostly-discredited “below the fold” decree. I wish they hadn’t done this. It’s like trying to read by looking through a keyhole.

Designers, I’m talking to you: it’s MUCH better to give the text room to breathe instead of stuffing it inside a tiny little box. If the content is interesting, people WILL scroll below the fold. Really, they will.

Small pix
This issue is not just about *strict* usability, it’s about enjoyability: the pictures accompanying this story are just too damn small! If we’re being asked to read a story about exciting findings from the Mars Rover missions, a key part of the story is showing us the wonderful pictures snapped by those intrepid little anthropomorphized vehicles. But the pictures are dinky little 240-by-170 thumbnails. Yes, I tried to click on them. It’s a no-op.

Sorry, Space.com, but poor design has put a big hurt on the user experience of this story. But please publish more articles…I just love ‘em.

Mars Rovers’ Top 10 Most Amazing Discoveries

Blogged with Flock