Usability Notes - by Chris Baker

Twitter usability - how newbie users get on without the #TwitterBook to explain jargon and conventions

The Software Usability Research Laboratory (Wichita State University) has done a study of how usable Twitter is for first time users. The trial showed up some interesting problems that the new users had, one problem area being Twitter jargon.  And there certainly is a lot of jargon (tweet, RT, follow, follower, via, @Chris_JB, DM, hashtags...).

Personally, my impression is that Twitter delights in jargon and strange conventions. Maybe that is not surprising for a product that has emerged rapidly from being a bit of a subculture with its own house rules and terms. I would not have got far enough with Twitter to use it much without the TwitterBook (or #TwitterBook if I'm going to "hashtag it" - i.e. add a # so that Twitter sees it as a search term.). So the "in-crowd" nature of Twitter means well-deserved sales for O'Reilly and Milstein, at least (it's an excellent book - both from the information point of view, and a very cool and usable design).

The combination of Jargon and good books makes me unable to resist this quote :

"My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I was going by w1n5t0n. Pronounced "Winston."

Not pronounced "Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn"— unless you’re a clueless disciplinary officer who’s far enough behind the curve that you still call the Internet "the information superhighway."

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Pronounced...Oh, never mind).

See the same effect of jargon to be different from the mainstream?)

A hazard for fashionable and cool new products then - do you go exclusive or usable? [Assuming here that I'm not exposing myself as a clueless project manager who's far enough behind the curve that I still call Twitter fashionable and cool :-) ]

So, will Twitter abandon its jargon in favour of more usability as it (or its successors or competitors) become more mainstream? Or will things go the other way? I've now seen several forum posts where a contributor wants to comment specifically on an earlier contribution (say by me Chris _JB) and uses the @ sign to indicate this (as in "@Chris_JB - I couldn't disagree more...") A convention that has come from Twitter, I think.

Pains of moving online from print - What went wrong at Rocky Mountain News

The Rocky Mountain News was Colorado’s oldest newspaper, founded in 1859. It published its last edition in February 2009. John Temple, the last Editor, has a fascinating article on what he thinks went wrong and what lessons publishers can learn from the paper's demise, especially in Rocky Mountain News' attempts to move online. In a nutshell, he thinks that the web operation suffered from being though of as something that had to serve and make revenue for the old "core" (print) product, and which got saddled by practices, rules and mindsets of the print publication. Fascinating and sometimes painful reading for print publishers trying to manage an online product as well.

Really Simple Syndication - best kept really simple?

What is the best way to present your RSS feed in a place like iGoogle?  For those unfamiliar with iGoogle, it allows me to have some panels on my browser home page. Several of them bear news stories from news sites. I can either click these links to go to the site and read a news story that interests me, or I can click an expand (+) button to see some information from an RSS feed. As it happens, my iGoogle page today has examples of several differnt things the publisher can do when I click the expand link.

1. The BBC (top left in the screenshot) gives me a one-sentence summary of the article when click expand. I think I like that best: I presumably clicked expand because I found the headline intriguing to an extent, but either want to check what the link  it means, or I want a quick summary of the story, perhaps without going to the news site. Either way, this works for me.
2. ZDNet (top right in the screenshot offers me a one sentence standfirst that then leads into the rest of the article. That works for me too, though I find it a little harder to scan than the BBCs
3. The Guardian (bottom left in the screenshot) gives me the entire story. I don't like that much - it is hard to scan, I might as well have gone straight to the Guardian's site to read it properly formatted there. Worse, Internet Explorer used to collapse the link after a short time (it seems to have stopped doing this now) so that the story would vanish while I was part-way through reading it.
4. The Register (bottom right the screenshot) does something else I don't like - the expanded story ends with a link to an advert. It looks like it is part of the story, or the next story in the feed, but it isn't. It isn't anything to do with the story at all.

These are, of course just my opinions and reactions - were I to do a usability test I might find I'm in the minority and most folks like The Guardian's style (say). Comments welcome on what you think!

Tabs, used right

Jakob Nielsen has a good post about how the Yahoo Finance site uses tabs (the site uses tabs in a way that Nielsen thinks is good). There are some good points to consider if you are about to try a tabbed design.

One comment startled me though - Nielsen approves of the Yahoo Finance site in part because:

"It uses tabs to alternate between views within the same context (not to navigate to different areas — a common mistake introduced by Amazon.com)."

I do wonder, however, whether many people are confused nowadays by Amazon-style tabs? The "mistake" of using tabs to navigate different areas may have become so widespread that it is no longer a mistake, but a new convention.

WinZip trial version

The trial version of WinZip does something odd. It opens with a dialog box that has 2 buttons, inviting you either to continue with the trial, or to buy. The oddity is that it switches unpredictably between having the buy button on the left and having it on the right (phew it is not just me imagining it).

Presumably, the idea is to prompt me to click the Buy button by mistake. If all is well for WinZip, I think "Ah yes, I have been meaning to do that..." and buy before my 45 days maximum trial is up. But it seems petty and irritating and (I'm afraid) has got me to be petty and decide only to make my decision after 45 days. Or perhaps I will stay with 7-zip after all...

Shopping cart abandonment benchmarks

In this article I review some choice statistics about shopping cart abandonment rates from a talk by Anne Holland of MakretingSherpa, Etail Speech Take II: Three Ways to Lower Shopping Cart Abandons Based on MarketingSherpa Research.

Anne's talk is data from the  Ecommerce Benchmark Survey, January 2007 – a survey with 1,923 respondents. Across all those respondents, average shopping cart abandonment rates were 52.1% in 2006 (i.e. 52.1% of customers who entered the shopping cart system never made it to the checkout). This was an improvement on 59.8% in 2005. As usual, the average of these things is not much of a benchmark in itself - the results for 2006 fell into a normal curve where the high end of the normal range was 80% abandoned carts and the low end was 12.5%. This presumably reflects the fact that we are not always in the industry of "businesses who sell things using the Internet"  - sometimes we are, but there are a lot of concerns specific to a particular sector: buying a car or a computer from a website may not be the same thing as buying a book or CD. To give a practical example, if you are concerned with a site that has a 50% abandonment rate, you don't necessarily know whether you are doing well against your competitors with their 80% rate, or are a real slouch against their 12% rate.

The survey respondents were asked what new improvements they were trying and what worked best. A top tactic for big sites was to introduce a "bill me later" feature - 17% of big ecommerce sites had done this in 2006. MarketingSherpa have a case study with Newegg which in various "bill me later" features were taken up by 10% of customers. But these customers were the big spenders, with much bigger shopping carts than average.

The next way to improve was (once again, as in the 2006 report) by testing the shopping cart. Once again, this was the thing that most respondents reported as being most effective to get a return on ROI. Apparently small or subtle changes, such as changes to the text on buttons could turn out to be important. Coming second and third (again as in 2005) were improving internal search, and improving site copy. So these look like good areas to review in a shopping cart improvement project.

Tactic number 3 was to send email(s) to customers who had abandoned carts (of course you can only do this if you have their email addresses and the relevant permission to use it). 73% of respondents said this was an effective   improvement. A case study with Limoges Jewelry showed that the technique could be effective even if the emails were a simple generic one (rather than a customized text): Limoges found this got a 28.77% conversion  (though this was only reached after a few months)

Do customers desert a site if it takes longer than 4 seconds to load?

In this post, a closer look at a memorable and alarming statistic leads to a more general discussion of things that annoy website customers, and a bit about the questionnaire versus user trials controversy...

Sometimes I see a statistic that I know I'm going to see quoted a lot. An example is one from eMarketer in an article called Online Retailers Face Four-Second Barrier

Now, as the all-important online holiday shopping season nears, and the competition for online shoppers increases, a new report from Akamai Technologies advises e-tailers to be on their toes — because a few heartbeats can make the difference between a sale and a lost customer.

The research shows that four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to load before abandoning one retail site and moving on to another.

"The critical takeaway from this research is that online shoppers not only demand quality site performance, they expect it," said Brad Rinklin of Akamai. "Four seconds is the new benchmark by which a retail site will be judged, which leaves little room for error for retailers to maintain a loyal online customer base."

The article is quoting a new report by Akami and Jupiter Research (registration is needed to view the report). It looks like a good enough piece of work the methodology section of the paper explains:

"In April 2006, JupiterResearch designed and fielded a survey to online consumers selected randomly from the Ipsos US online consumer panel. A total of 1,058 individuals responded to the survey. Respondents were asked approximately 15 closed-ended questions about their behaviors, attitudes, and preferences as they relate to buying and researching products and services online. Respondents received an e-mail invitation to participate in the survey with an attached URL linked to the Web-based survey form. The samples were carefully balanced by a series of demographic and behavioral characteristics to ensure that they were representative of the online population. Demographic weighting variables included age, gender, household income, household education, household type, region, market size, race, and Hispanic ethnicity. Additionally, JupiterResearch took the unconventional step of weighting the data by AOL usage, online tenure, and connection speed (broadband versus dial-up), three key determinants of online behavior. Balancing quotas are derived from JupiterResearch’s Internet Population Model, which relies on US Census Bureau data and a rich foundation of primary consumer survey research to determine the size, demographics, and ethnographics of the US online population. The survey data are fully applicable to the US online population within a confidence interval of plus or minus three percent."

When I hear the "new 4-second rule" being quoted at me, though I will try to remember the following bits from the actual report:

1. "Thirty-three percent of consumers shopping via a broadband connection will wait no more than four seconds for a Web page to render."  (From Fig 3 of the report:30% of broadband customers said they would would wait 5-6 seconds, and a further 38% would wait more than 6 seconds. Only 19% of dial-up customers said they would leave if a single page took longer than 4 seconds to render).
2. From Fig 2 of the report, in which respondents were asked to remember what annoyed them about their last unsatisfactory e-tail experience, slow pages was the third biggest annoyance (quoted by 33%) compared with high prices (44%) and shipping/handling issues (39%). Annoyance at the need to register, or "website was frustrating/confusing" came joint fourth.
3. In Fig 5, customers are asked how they would react to their bad experience, and this was correlated with what they complained about - interestingly, there isn't much difference in the reaction of people who remember a crash from those who found the site too slow or confusing (or who found the checkout process too slow). The most likely reaction was to visit the site less often, "purchase from another online retailer" comes third. I'd have thought that a crash was worse than slow pages, but maybe not.

Slow-loading pages is of course not a new "annoyance" the eMarketer article quotes a 2005 study (Taylor Nelson Sofres) in which slow pages came out as the 5th most popular thing to be ranked by customers as "extremely annoying" (the top 4 were pop-up ads (84%); requiring installation of extra software to view the site (72%); Dead links (66%) and requirement to register  before viewing site (61%). I can't think of anyone who says slow pages are good per se. As usual there's a trade-off some sites continue to have slow pages because they reckon the page will work so well when you do see it. 

So while having slow pages is not good, it is not quite the stark 4 seconds and you are dead! But I'm going to hear this figure a lot because while it may not be completely right it is very memorable enough for a sort of e-marketer's 1066 And All That. At best I guess it is a rule of a thumb that has been dipped in a pinch of salt.

Actually what seems more realistic to me is an idea from Steve Krug's book "Don't Make me Think" - imagine the customer arrives at your website with a reservoir of patience and good will to you and your business. The initial size of this reservoir depends on a lot of factors, including their previous experiences with you, their overall mood and to-do list that day, how motivated they are to do stuff on your site and so on. Their "good will level" goes up or down according to how the site treats them - but the point at which goodwill=0 and they say "aw the heck with it!" is going to vary.

This is probably the point at least to mention that old grip that some usability study folks have with questionnaire data - that "self-reported claims are unreliable" (sometimes this is said to be "Nielsen's first rule").  That is - what people say they thought or happened is not always how it seems if you watch them. This is one of the interesting objections raised on a discussion at cre8asite about whether it was worth putting questionnaires on a website. The "don't bother" camp seemed to win that debate on that site, a bit to my surprise - I'd have thought that what customers perceive as reality is as interesting as what someone else perceives their reality is....

Internet Explorer 7

Internet Explorer 7 is now with us, 5 years after IE 6 was launched. Cynics claim that we would have had IE6 for even longer if a decent rival to Internet Explorer, in the shape of Firefox, had not turned up. IE7 does make use of some innovations (e.g. tabbed browsing, a choice of search engines availble from a pull-down menu) that Firefox users have enjoyed for some time.

Be that as it may, IE7 was released on October 18th, and the IE team's blog says that there were 3 million downloads in the first 4 days.  So  IE7 is now a reality for customers who want to download it, and Microsoft have announced that they are starting to distribute IE7 via the  automatic updates system of windows - However, the IE blog says that IE7 will not be installed without a customer's consent That is, automatic updates will ask customers whether they want to upgrade, rather than just assuming the customer wants to. Organizations can also configure automatic update so that it does not distribute IE7 to staff until the organization is ready. So hard to say how quickly IE7 use will take off.

At the start of October, the IE blog published some "getting ready" tips for web site developers. (of course, now you can do the real test of also looking at sites with the real thing). More recently, usability, accessibility and "findability" (Search Engine optimization) folks Etre recently ran a test of FTSE100 companies' websites to see how they did with IE7. Of the 100 sites they tested, they found 13 with (mostly minor ) problems. Among the interesting bits is this (my italics):

It's worth pointing out however that the general lack of adherence to web standards amongst the FTSE 100 companies may have insulated them somewhat from IE7's various bugs and glitches (IE7 tends to struggle most with standards-compliant sites - particularly those using hacks and filters to achieve decent presentation in IE6). Given that most sites aren't standards-compliant however, we think our results are pretty representative.

Generalising our findings to the internet as a whole - which is admittedly of dubious meaning and therefore should be taken with a pinch of salt - suggests that there are around 12.7 million websites in need of a little TLC as a result of the introduction of IE7.

...which is all a bit frustrating, if you've struggled to be both standards-compliant and IE6 compliant!

Taking a quick look at my recent sites, I notice that things do look a bit different - colours look a bit lighter than IE6, I think, and while IE7 makes better use of my 17" screen, compression in graphics is more apparent.

Of course, I now have to remember to keep one machine that does not have IE7 for a while, so that I can still see the world through my old IE6 glasses when testing sites - at least until most folks have IE7.

User generated content, Zipf curves, Marketing funnels, long tails... and the volunteer group committee

A recent Jakob Nielsen Alertbox post on Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute (October 9, 2006) led me to an odd and unexpected smile of recognition. It seems that User Generated Content (UGC) sites like YouTube or Wikipedia or my favourite web design forums have something in common with the Parent teacher Association at my local school, the local football team, or other such real-life volunteer efforts.

Nielsen's article on participation inequality says that in the sites he has studied, a few contributors (maybe 1% or less of the membership) do nearly all the work, with a somewhat larger group (maybe 10%) contributing sometimes and the remaining (say 90% or more) not contributing very much. Mathematically, this distribution of effort is what is called a Zipf curve (of which more later). My smile of recognition is that when I have been involved in real-life volunteer groups, there is a tendency for me to wind up on the committee, and then typically we spend some time musing about exactly this pattern - how great things would be if we could only find a way of energizing the least energetic members of the community to do more!  Talking to other groups, it always seemed that there was the same problem - whether the group was sporting, religious, charitable, political, trades union or whatever. Shortly after huffing about this, I got my comeuppance and an insight when I moved onto more demanding assignments at work and had two small children, and found that there was much less left in the tank for volunteer work than before life had these complications.

Therein, I think lie two reasons for the uneven contribution to user generated content sites - first I think that some people are contributors by personality; and second, most folks have other priorities. Not much can be done about this. Nielsen's article has some ideas about whether this skewed participation is a bad thing and what to try to level things up, and I have some more.

Clearly the behaviour of the heavyweight participants is a key thing - you want to be blessed with a few key contributors who are knowledgeable, write well enough, and are polite and tolerant of occasional or new contributors (including those who ask for quite basic information). This is, I think what makes my favourite formus my favourite ones. If you have had the bad luck to be kidnapped by a special interest group, or a clique that excludes others, then you are in trouble. Moderation of the group is the traditional way of preventing bad behaviour.

Other barriers to entry are also worth examining. Many user generated content operations require you to go through a sequence of steps e.g. to become a member in some way. Some potential contributors will fall at each step in the process - either they can't work out what to do next (a usability problem), can't be bothered to do it (a problem with the product or its marketing) or a mixture of both. You can draw a funnel-shaped chart of  number of customers you see at each stage. So E-marketers talk of a "marketing funnel" (or "customer life cycle funnel" or "sales funnel", and many of the software packages that analyse web statistics can draw these funnels for you). The diagram shows a possible funnel for joining a forum - at each stage , some potential customers fall away, until most potential contributors have given up before they become heavyweight presences on the site. Clearly it makes sense to do what you can to make it as easy as possible for people to proceed down the funnel. However, this will not be a cure-all: Wikipedia has one of the easiest funnels - you can just start making changes to articles without any login etc. and still only a tiny proportion of visitors actually do any editing or writing (according to Nielsen's article). This ought to leave you with the potential that more people can contribute as soon as they want, and an inequality based on what people can be bothered to do - probably one of the less harmful inequalities in a world that has many.

The Zipf curve turns up elsewhere on the web. For example, it can turn up in:

• The distribution of traffic between different sites on the web as a whole (something that allows you to estimate your competitors' web traffic - or your competitors)
• The distribution of referred traffic to your site (so that a few sites  send nearly all of the traffic to your site).

Should you wish to make a closer acquaintance of the Zipf curve, Nielsen has a friendly introduction to the Zipf curve and Wikipedia has a more mathematical article about Zipf's law.The Zipf curve is also one of the mathematical distributions that gives a "long tail" - with the business consequences originally discussed in "The Long Tail" ,an article in Wired by Chris Andersen (2004); discussed further in this Wikipedia article on the Long Tail, and of course the subject of a book   (which I must get around to reading....) and Chris Andersen's blog . [The basic argument - the Internet has reduced the costs of being very specialist, as it is now easier and cheaper to sell to unusual needs and tastes. For example, Amazon can afford to supply very obscure books, but your local bookstore cannot for lack of shelf space].

Spreading the bad news

It could happen to anyone - something bad happens to your company, and customers are going to be turning up at your website wanting to find out about it. But because it is not good news, you don't want to plaster it all over the website. So what do you do?

There have been two examples of this this summer. In June, A Dell laptop exploded at a conference in Japan. Dell have announced a recall of certain  batteries. Since I own a Dell, I was interested in visiting their site to find out if my laptop might explode at any point. Case study 2 is Cadbury, the British chocolate maker, who have recalled some products because of a salmonella alert. In both cases, the company now has  the task of getting useful information (and their own take on what is happening) out to the world. On the other hand,the bulk of customers are still presumably turning up at the website thinking happy thoughts, and making them think about injury and poisoning instead is not going to be good for business.

You might like to try this yourself before reading what I found. Dell first; either visit  their website  or take a look at this screenshot (which is the Dell home page on September 5th, their site correctly having decided I am in the UK). Imagine that you are looking for information about which batteries might explode. Can you see where to go? (No, please don't answer "You can go anywhere" :-) )

OK Cadbury next - again you might want to visit their website, or have a look at the screenshot of their home page (again as I saw it from the UK on September 5th 06).

It might be useful to know that, I could not find the information I wanted by searching the site (I tried "Explode battery" and "Cadbury salmonella". On Cadbury, I also tried "product recall,and got an unhelpful list of hits (in that it did contain the right page, but this was far from obvious from the search engine results page). Google was not much help either - news reports and comment far outrank what the company wants to say.

The answers can't appear in the back of the book in a weblog, so I'll post them below - though as usual if you skip to the end you'll miss out on how you personally interact with these designs.
enough suspense?
OK then...........

Dell's link is in the page footer - a link called Battery recall leads to a helpful page telling you how to get the battery out of your machine and which part numbers spell trouble. To my surprise I got this pretty quickly - my surprise is because I usually associate footer links with legal yadah yadah and so don't pay them much attention. Looking at the site again for this article, I found that a menu including "Battery recall" pops up if you hover over the Support and Help icon.

Cadbury wasn't much harder, since I guessed I wanted the Information and Careers tab. That opens a page with left-hand navigation  that includes a "Product Recall" option. Click Product recall and you get this (again, this is the page as served to me on 5th September 06):
Which tells me what I want to know from the company. For myself, I might guess that while the company wants to get out the CEO's statement (as featured in the page body), the public wants to see the list of recalled products rather more. But that is a smaller point, since (for me at least) the recall list is easy to find on the left.

Conclusions - both did fairly well (for me, the Dell information was easier to find than Cadbury's, but that could be just me). What was interesting for me is that  the key phrase  in each case is "Product recall" - which I didn't think of looking for at first, going more for phrases to do with what the faulty product might to to me (rather than what the company wants to do with the faulty product).