Usability Notes - by Chris Baker

Facebook - the problem of the customer being the product

Have been reading a good review of Facebook's prospects, in the Financial Times.Several interesting points (and data about the company here), but I particularly liked the following:

Facebook aims to harvest information about users and use that as a basis for ever more targeted advertising: "But the issue is whether what Facebook does to increase the value of the data it collects makes users enjoy Facebook less and use it less. Users might start to think they are the product not the customer. Not a fun feeling." [my italics]

The article points out a contrast between Facebook and Google here: if I Google for "catering services for weddings" or "Ford body repairs", its reasonably likely that I have an immediate commercial intention, and some adverts along with the search results may not be too creepy. Whereas someone posting to Facebook that they just got engaged,  or that some idiot just rear-ended their car is spreading news to friends: quite a different situation.

Google, Facebook, the mixed blessings of better-organized data

Google is consolidating it's Policies, and Facebook is continuing to roll out the new Timeline. Both developments could be seen as aiming to organize data better and so make things more convenient. Which sounds great, until you read things like:

"If you haven’t been keeping up with how Timeline will change your Facebook experience, then you are in for one heck of a surprise. As ReadWriteWeb so aptly states, “Timeline turns the profile into an illustrated, browsable history of a user’s entire life, with major milestones and little moments smartly chosen by Facebook’s algorithm.”

Prior to timeline, Facebook stalkers would have to manually sort through pages and pages of wall postings to find out the personal details of your Facebook activity. Timeline drastically simplifies this process."

From Facecrooks (a blog which monitors scams and nuisances that appear on Facebook)

And:

"By combining the wealth of personal data it already holds, Google is enhancing its ability to run targeted ads which allows it to compete with Facebook, which already shows ads based on a users’ interaction with brands.

For example, the blog post says Google will now be able to “provide reminders that you’re going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day.”

Not all users will be comfortable letting Google take such control over their lives, despite its claims that it is trying to “help you by sharing more of your information.”

Econsultancy; "New Google privacy policy shares user data across multiple products"

The theme is that better-organized data might not be "better" from the customers' point of view. Or at least might have a downside.

Apart from worrying about stalkers or Big Brother watching you, another hazard is the way that joining up the information can accidentally break down the Chinese walls that many people like to have in their lives. For example, Chris Nuttall, writing the in Financial Times, tasks of finding that his daughter is accidentally sending him a live feed of a photo shoot she was doing for a class project. Meanwhile, he's listening to Spotify and accidentally streaming a list of music he is hearing to his Facebook profile. ("Happily, I had been displaying my usual good taste in tunes, rather than indulging in the occasional guilty pleasures of 1970s prog rock."). Similarly, you could have your feed trumpeting "I just bought [insert item chosen for wife's birthday here] at Amazon". She might no longer be surprized. 

An important thing here is that the need for privacy is contextual in a subtle way - you might usually be fine with Amazon boasting of your custom, but not for presents. You might be usually fine with your network knowing what music you are listening to, but not if you're kindly allowing your kid sister to use your computer and she's on a Hannah Montana binge. You might be fine with Facebook "knowing" you're gay (i.e. this being pretty easily inferred from your "likes" and posts) but you might prefer that to be none of your work colleagues' business.

Note added 29 Jan 2012: The Onion just covered much the same ground, but satirically: "Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology"

Nice usability ideas - Glooo contact form

So here's the opposite to the "Pet Hates" series - ideas that I see in use and think are neat.

Glooo.co.uk  would be happy if you filled their contact form (assuming you want to contact them about something sensible, I suppose). But people don't like filling out contact forms. So Glooo head their form with a  big bold statement "Less than 2% of visitors will fill in the form below". We all would like to be in the top 2% (ideally in the Wall Street sense, perhaps, but you've got to start somewhere....). My guess is that it works, and in any case it is amusing...

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....