'Has nothing happened yet?' - or, how changes in system status have to be made bleeding obvious
Saturday, 9 August 2008
So - user experience is all about understanding how real people 'experience' a product, right? In web terms, the important thing is interaction with an interface. That's an onscreen design of 'signs' that tell the users what they must do in the site to achieve their goals.
I've been thinking about this recently in relation to what the textbooks call 'system status'. This, in layman's terms, is what happens when you click something, and the paradigm changes - all the rules that applied in the previous screen are different. The example I'm thinking of is 'logging in'.
I was reviewing a B2B catalogue site. In the first 'status situation' users could view all the products in the catalogue, but they couldn't see prices, or make orders - no cart function, in other words. Once logged in, you're in the second 'status situation' - and all the rules have changed, users can now not only view products, they can buy them.
That's a big change in status, and intuitively I expected a big change to the interface. In fact, when I logged in the first time, I thought I'd made a mistake, and nothing had changed. Actually, the log in 'lozenge' up in the top right of the screen had changed: the words 'Log in' now read 'Logged in'. That was the ONLY change in the visible interface. I was still on the same page in the site, and everything else was the same. I realised that if I then navigated to the product catalogue, and drilled right down to an individual product detail screen, there was a price, and an 'add to cart' button.
But who would go that far, if they thought they were not successfully logged-in, and is that enough of a signal that the entire status of the site had changed, I hear you ask? No, Veronica, it is not.
Those involved in web design must always remember Krug's first law of usability - 'don't make me think'. If logging in changes everything - make this obvious to the people logging in, don't make them nut it out, because that will only make them angry.
My recommendation in this case was that when users logged in, they should be moved to a 'logged in landing page' - a magical kingdom where they had never been before, wherein simple and clear pictorial images made clear to them what new options were now open to them in the 'operable' part of this B2B e-commerce site.
Great stuff! Good result for the user experience evaluation. But not really enough - it turned out I'd missed a trick. Luckily I got to conduct usability testing with real users in the workplace. Then I found that although this global change in system status was clear, when real users went the next step and ordered a product, they struck the same problem again.
One of my participants ordered a product, then answered the phone, passed on a message, and - surprise! - came back to their computer and ordered the same product again: because the interface had not changed to reflect the new system status of the product page: ordered. The result of this 'eureka' moment was a recommendation that the 'add to cart' button change its appearance to show: 'added to cart'.
This was a simple, clear and predictable issue that did not appear until user testing happened in a real environment - and a real user had a chance to forget what the current system status was.
Which just goes to show how even simple heuristic rules for good design can fail to be implemented if you don't test your design in actual use. It was a salutary reminder for this so-called 'expert': that the only sure-fire way to know if real people can use your product - is to ask them to use it while you watch.
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Bruce Russell |
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