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Built For Use
Built for Use is the kind of book that can be slipped under a door or surreptitiously dropped into a mailbox to make a point without wasting time on yet another useless conversation.
The book is filled with tidbits like:
- The best Web sites don't necessarily come from the best designers.
- Frustrated artists with nose rings and black turtlenecks should not be allowed to turn a company's Web site into a piece of experimental non-performance art.
- Flashing lights are great for Las Vegas, but who wants to work in Las Vegas?
Usability is not, and never has been, sexy. Grayscale sites like Yahoo! deliver value to their users because they load almost instantly and provide access to the things that people want.
This is basic, logical, intuitively obvious stuff. Yet it seems like a lot of this material is completely foreign to many of the people who make the final decisions about what corporate Web sites are going to look like.
As we move forward into a world where EZ-Passes will be used to finance fast-food purchases and where nanotechnologies will be woven into the threads of our jeans, it's important to learn -- and learn quickly -- that sexier is not always better.
Before companies sink millions of dollars into the development of yet another annoying and impossible-to-use Web site, they need to ask themselves:
- Can the site be used by its intended audience?
- Do the customers understand the language on the site?
- Are the customers' computers fast enough to download all of the relevant material?
- Are the customers savvy enough to find their way to the cash register?
- Will the cash register accept the customers' money?
- Is the system completely integrated with the company's back-end software?
- If you call the company on the phone, will you get the same experience that you get when you visit the corporate Web site?
If you say that you have sold me something, and you charge my credit card, then you had better deliver that thing to my door, and soon, or you will lose my trust.
Slapping a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval type "trust" sticker on some Web site does not build customer loyalty. Customer loyalty needs to be earned, one transaction at a time.
Could you imagine how annoying the world would be if retail clothing chains like The Gap put invisible trip-wires in front of their clothing racks, so that whenever you reached for a pair of khakis you crashed to the ground?
Could you imagine how annoying the world would be if retail stores covered all of their cash registers with a layer of Saran Wrap?
That's basically what some Web sites are doing now. If a retail site looks great but you can't use it to buy anything, or to access interesting content, then the site stinks.
If you work with marketers who desperately need to know a thing or two about user-experience strategy -- or maybe all nine -- hand them a copy of Built for Use. It will save time, and they'll praise you for allowing them to discover the truth on their own.
This book has a website, located at http://www.humanlogic.com/. You can purchase Built for Use from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to submit yours, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Unlike certain people railing against pop-up ads, THESE guys practice what they preach. Total time starting from www.humanlogic.com to end of purchase at Barnes and Nobles was less than a minute.
Never confuse volume with power.
More to the point, is the cash register findable? And can you use it without doing stupid stuff? (If you're selling me something, all you need is a method of payment, a billing address, and a shipping address. I shouldn't need an account or a password, though you're welcome to offer me one if you show me the benefits -- to *ME* -- of having one.)
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
that you should be able to get to any point in a web site with only three clicks from the front page.
There are a few exceptions to this overall rule but 3 clicks is more than enough to get where you want to go. If it takes longer, people get frustrated and give up.
So far, everyone I have said this to, web designers and others, all agree and have tried to implement this policy wherever they have control.
I think the point was that the site shouldn't be so gagged up with 'art' that it loads slowly or not at all. Just because someone sees themselves as an artist (as I do) doesn't mean that their client's or company's web site should become their personal statement or portfolio.
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As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
The software co I work for went from an elegent and simple website, to an over-designed monstrosity. Helplessly I sat by and watch the crime occur. Despite being the interface desinger for the software, the marketing guys would not even consider my perspective.
From simple text based links, we got dropped down dhtml menus. From a simple logo graphic, we got business people high-fiving on the home page.
Marketing believed that our site was not about giving information to users, and potential users of our software. Rather our site's purpose was to create an image of company(a false one)relating to our size and prior successes. Unfortunatly a book like this will not convince them otherwise.
Art is a part of culture. A valuable one too, and I don't think anyone is denying that. But the discussion here is whether cutting edge art is appropriate for interactive service.
Something can be beautiful to look at, and if all you ever intend to do is look at it, sure, pull out every stop to make it as awesome in appearance as you can. But sometimes you want to build something that will be used for more than just looking at. A corporate web site is optimally a tool for driving profitability. A good way to drive profitability is to faciliate commercial transactions between the corporation and its customers. A good way to facilitate commerical transactions is to make them quick, easy, inexpensive, and non-frustrating for both parties. Driving those transactions through an interface that is designed solely to look good with little thought on how easy it is to use is not necessarily a good way to accomplish the above.
This is not to say that a functional and easy interface can't look good. Several sites have managed to build easy to use interfaces which are also attractive. But in these cases, designers have carefully planned out the function, and then optimized the form to implement the function in an attractive way.
In order to accomplish this designers may have to constrain their creativity to work within certain parameters. For instance, Putting all the type on your site in a custom font might look great on your screen, but how does it look for someone who doesn't have that font? Forcing customers to download a font in order for a page to look good is a senseless frustration which does nothing to help them give you some money for your goods or services. On the other hand, there are plenty of ways to use fonts that are widely distributed, that can still look pretty good.
Nobody is saying don't use any pictures on your site. Even using sparse graphics in place of ugly grey javascript order buttons isn't a capital sin, but if customers have to load a page full of large-size graphic files to choose an item/service to order, another page full of large-size graphic files to adjust the quantity, another page of large-size graphic files to enter a shipping address, another page of large-size graphic files to enter payment information, and another page of large-size graphic files to confirm the info they have entered and finally place the order, they might not be inclined to complete the whole process, and even if they are, you've paid a web designer a lot of money to waste a lot of people's time (not to mention the extra expense of bandwidth for you as a site owner to serve out all those graphics).
Art doesn't have to be the exclusive realm of museums, but not every store has to be a museum, either. You can design and make things look good, and even a bit artistic, without going completely avant-garde and making your business harder to conduct.
I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on what priciples it's putting forth, but your comment seems to be missing the point which the reviewer, at least, was making. Nobody's saying that art has no role whatsoever in website design. What they seem to be saying - and I agree wholeheartedly - is that art is a secondary concern. It's not wrong to have art, indeed art is often desirable, but art should facilitate the goals of the website, not be a goal per se.
I've done web site design, and I consider myself an artist of sorts, and they are very different activites. Art, as an end in itself, is about beauty and self expression. A corporate web site, like everything else a company does, is about advancing the company's financial position. Usually this means encouraging people to buy something (advertizing), directly enabling them to buy something (on-line sales), or maximizing the value of things they've already bought (customer service).
In none of these cases does the web site work by sitting there and expressing the artist's vision. It works by enabling the customer to do something they want to do - and which the company also wants them to do - using the web site. Art, in a commercial setting, is a fine means unto that end, but should not be the end itself. This isn't to say that art for art's sake isn't a wonderful and necessary part of our society, but a corporate web site is probably not the most suitable canvas.
By the principles put forth in this book, Linux would not exist!
It would be difficult to articulate the full magnitude of how wrong you are.
Linux does not depend on the sort of "frustrated artists with nose rings and black turtlenecks" the book is complaining about. Linux owes it's existence to the sort of hard-core geeks who think that hunting down kernel thread synchronization bugs is fun. Without all the tedious, non-sexy details like a stable kernel and a good compiler suite, there would be nothing to linux for the more traditionally "artistic" types to cover with a candy-coated shell. At best, those artistic types only make an operating system that was already exellent accessable to a wider audience: more often, they are useless parasites that take more credit than they deserve for the fruits of real geek's labor. I consider your post to be an excellent example of the latter case.
Obviously the best sites are easy to use AND pretty.
Yahoo, I have always found to be a monstrosity myself. It is far too 'busy' and complicated. That's the main reason I have never used yahoo. I think yahoo also represents the worst of the old coporate design standards - cram as much as you can into one page... especially ads.
Google, on the other hand, won me over immediately with their simple but functional design. When I first saw google, it was a breath of fresh air. Not only is it HIGHLY functional, but it is also generally regarded as EXCELLENT design.
btw, I have always thought the main slashdot page was too loaded down with crap also (though the ads are handled nicely.) The first thing I did when I finally logged in as a user was turn off everything in the preferences.
"The direction controls are the same in Nethack as they are in vi." "Yeah, I hardly ever die in vi anymore."