Usability Notes - by Chris Baker

Sorry, no hard and fast rules in UX

"People want me to give hard and fast rules: don't show more than X menu items; don't write more than Y words per page; nothing should be more than Z clicks from the homepage. Sadly, UI design doesn't work that way. Usability questions seldom have a single answer. Rather, they are qualitative issues that specify the direction and nature of inevitable design tradeoffs."

Jakob Nielsen, as part of a post about the additional challenges of usability for mobile devices (my italics).

How long will users stay on your web page?

The received wisdom is that users don't hang around long on a web page, so you'd better get it to load quickly and then capture their attention immediately.

Some recent research by Liu et al, and discussed in an article by Jakob Nielsen, offers some more insight (and a big statistical study to back these up).  As you'd expect, users make a quick decision - in maybe 10 secs or less - and then move on or stay. The longer they stay, the more likely they are to stay some more: the probability of them leaving drops pretty exponentially.

Statistically, the pattern follows The Weibull Hazard Function, a concept from reliability engineering. The pattern follows a "negative aging distribution". You would get the same results by asking "how likely is a given component in a machine to fail" when the quality of the components is highly variable (so that, the longer this particular component has been reliable, the more likely that it is one of the good ones off the line and will keep functioning). If the manufacturer had better QA in this hardware example, then the componets would begin to follow a "positive aging function" instead - they are all as well made as each other, and so the probability of failure simply rises over time due to wear and tear.

 

Facebook "friends" and what to call computing concepts

I've recently come across a few newspaper and radio items about Facebook "friends" not being friends in any older sense of the word. The usual observations are that you can have many more Facebook friends than you could have conventional friends; that Facebook friends may include people you don't know in any conventional sense; and that your Facebook friends may not behave in a way that friends traditionally ought. (The last point comes up, for example, in reports of tragedies of people posting suicidal messages on Facebook, but no-one responding seriously).

This is not another one of those articles. Let's take it as settled that Facebook has coined a new sense of the word "friend". Computing often does that  - "mouse", "menu", "password" are examples. When co-opting any word from the real for your interface, the existing resonances are a two-edged sword -  from the name, users may "get" what this function is for, or they may (like the journalists decrying "friends") "get" something else. But it's that or invent new terms ("dongle"), or use old words in a bizarre way ("tweet" in Twitter).

There are a number of usability issues too (and "friends" does well when you think about it in these ways):

• If the term is going to appear on interface buttons, breadcrumb trails etc. it is useful if it is short (so "friend" is better than "aquantaince" - whcih in any case sounds stuffy and posh, so should probably already be rejected on resonance grounds)
• Helpful if the word is easy to spell and to say, so that customers can re-use it easily (so, again, "friend" is better than "aquantaince")
• Use words that will be understood internationally, if you seek an interntaional audience ("Mate" instead of "Friend" might work in the UK or Australia, but perhaps not in the US. "Buddy" the converse, perhaps).
• Avoid words that already have any confusing senses ("Mate" instead of "Friend" might alarm non-native speakers looking it up in a dictionary)

I don't recall other adopted terms ("contacts" in Linked in, "followers" in Twitter) causing as many column inches as "friends" though. Perhaps "friends" is particularly redolent a term, or just particularly useful for "we-are-all-going -to-hell-in-a-bucket" journalism ("Young people today, their "friends" are not friends - In my day...."). Well, in the words of the Grateful Dead, "I may be going to hell in a bucket, babe / But at least I'm enjoying the ride"

eBooks second most active smartphone apps category: Flurry

Flurry provide a usage statistics service for smartphone applications, collecting data when the application is downloaded or used. As a result they have interesting data on the state of the smartphone market.

Eyecatching for me is the chart in the "Smartphone industry pulse July 2009" showing that customer use of eBooks is rising quickly and is second only to games:

The data probably underestimate the situation, as far from all eBooks will have Flurry embedded in them.

In another analysis "Mobile apps: Models, Money and Loyalty" Flurry have also looked at how frequently apps are used, and how likely users are to return to them after 90 days. That suggests that books are used intensely (maybe 10 times a week), but are not used much after 90 days. The customer has finished the book by then, presumably.

For the technically minded, Flurry describe the technical workings of their service thus:

Flurry Analytics places a lightweight agent into an application, so that performance data are tracked, logged and reported back for analysis. This information is confidential and available only to the developer to analyze in aggregate. Individual user data is not identifiable. Developers are provided a wealth of metrics around usage behavior, any custom event they choose to track and technical information about the device, firmware version, carrier and more.

Browsers, search engines, it's all the same to most folks

Ask some people what car they drive and they'll answer "A Ford Focus Zetec 1.6" (for example). Ask others and they will say "er...a blue one?". Which is of course an OK answer - you need to know how to drive it, how to recognize it in car park and whether to refuel it with petrol or diesel. And that's probably all you really need to know for daily purposes, even if you use the car a lot.

In an interesting post on the Google blog, Jason Toff did a straw poll of his friends, asking them "what is a browser?" Some interesting results (90% of his poll knew which car they drove c.f. 50% knowing which browser they use, even though most of the sample spent more time online than driving):

Linked from Jason's post is an interesting (and entertaining) video in which someone from Google does a vox pop in Times Square New York asking people what a browser is, which one they use and whether they know the difference between a browser and a search engine. OK, if the interviewees had just been told they were speaking to Google this might have muddled them up a bit, but <8% of interviewees (not even Santa Claus) knew what a browser was. You get a strong impression that for a lot of folks Windows/Internet Explorer/Google is all part of "the blue one". Something which I (with 4 browsers on my system for work purposes) need to remember!

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Below the fold might not be below the salt

I received a useful comment from reader  "Arium" on my post "Tabs, used right".  Arium  was helpfully pointing me to some interesting research from ClickTale on whether people scroll down past "the fold" (the point where a long web page runs off the bottom of the screen).

ClickTale is a service that uses JavaScript to monitor customers' use of web pages. Among the data gathered is whether people scroll, and the ClickTale blog has some research based on scrolling behaviour (on vertical scroll bars) during 120,000 page views that happened late in 2006.  The summary:

• 91% of the page-views had a scroll-bar.
• 76% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled to some extent.
• 22% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled all the way to the bottom.

If this sample is representative, there's a one-in-five (roughly) chance of stuff down the bottom gets read. Not great, but maybe not-so-dissimilar from the chances of lesser information if it were put on a succession of short pages rather than one long scrolling one. This is interesting given the  received wisdom that stuff below the fold won't get read.

How people find a blog

eMarketer have an interesting survey "Blog Reading is a Free Floating Affair" studying how people discover blogs. The study (survey of about 200 respondents) showed that 67% followed links from other blogs. Recommendations came second at 23%, then search engines 20% then blog search engines at 5% (multiple responses were allowed).

One hypothesis from this might be that blogs are read by blog people who search them out in blog-ish fashion. This is also a possible conclusion from the data about the popularity of the Dilbert blog and newsletter that I reported a while ago. If so this would be something you'd want to consider before making a business blog - do you /do you not want to appeal to blog readers?

But I'm not convinced that the data justify eMarketer's subheading "Thinking of promoting a blog through search? Don't bother. ". Most of the respondents in the survey were finding blogs for entertainment (66%) and for personal interests (43%); with only 33% finding blogs for education/information and 12% for work or business (multiple responses were allowed to this question). It may be that they were looking at a lot of blogs that were run by individuals. And getting links from other blogs is probably the easiest way for individuals to spread the word about their blogs. There are several factors to this:

• Comment and trackback features allow a blog owner to make their own inbound links from other blogs (to an extent, at least)
• There is often an easy-to-find person behind the blog - in my experience at least, emailing that person (I liked your blog and have written about it/linked to it) is quite likely to get an interested response, and perhaps a link  (like this link to me, one of my first, I think). Getting a link from other kinds of websites can be much more of an effort ("when the webmaster gets around to it")
• Blogging seems easily to lead to posts along the lines that "I read this on the web and I think it is very true/complete tosh because..."

By contrast, you have to bother to register for search engines, or be kindly linked to from a page that already gets visits from robots. I wonder how many individual bloggers would find it useful to run paid ads on the engines?

So the survey data may reflect the ways in which many blogs find it easy or convenient to form links (or what happens when someone concentrates on writing their blog and doesn't make any real effort to market it). I'm not at all sure it shows that search doesn't work. My own blog typically gets more referrals from organic Google listings than from any single other source (that is Google is less that 50%  of referrals, but is the biggest single slice of the pie. I should say that I do not expend much effort and no money at all in marketing my blog, it being mostly for my own professional development.

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....

Dilber't Newsletter versus Blog

No, Dilbert is not a recommended usabilty resource, but is the source of an interesting snippet today.
Scott Adams publishes a Dilbert  email newsletter, and claims a circulation of 476,000. He also publishes a Dilbert blog.Today's Dilbert newsletter has this interesting observation:

In the last newsletter I asked if anyone was actually reading The Dilbert Newsletter, partly because I was considering folding its content into The Dilbert Blog. About a trillion splendsmartiful people e-mailed to say that they are too lazy to go to the blog. They want their Dilbert Newsletter sent directly to them. An alarming number of people requested that I visit them at home and whisper the True Tales of Induhviduals as bedtime stories. I plan to do just that, so leave your doors unlocked tonight. And if you happen to dream about Brokeback Mountain, I swear it isn’t my fault.
For now, the Newsletter and blog will be separate but equal.

Next time I'm in a long speculative conversation about whcih is better, I'll say they are seperate but equal :-)

Some other points of view on this:

5 Reasons why a blog is better than an email newsletter ( and 3 reasons why it is not) (from flyte media)

Email newsletters versus blogs from WebMarketCentral