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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.
Read on for the rest of her below.
/. reputation I'm not sure if I should have been looking for the rest of her below or the rest of her elbow.
I read on but didn't see either Karen or Teresa. Given the
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
Someone at mozilla.org could make some use of that book, methinks. Their website is not made for the average joe. Granted it has gotten better but it's still chock full of unexplained keywords and high expectations of the customer's tech-savvy. I can just see sending my mom to download Mozilla and telling her 'just look for links that say "downloads for windows", don't get sidetracked by trying to figure out what Mozilla is. Just download it and find out later.' It would be nice if someone went through with a user-friendly stick and beat every page, at least a little bit.
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.
One day our previous webmaster, in a fit of god-knows-what, decided to replace our old site with an unholy conglomeration of geometric shapes that constituted the links to other sections of the site. The orange square, for instance, linked to the personnel page, while the yellow circle linked to the upcoming events, et cetera. As if that wasn't bad enough, they actually floated around the page w/ flash! He thought this was very cutting edge and would impress people.
He resigned shortly thereafter.
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
Will not replace HTML is simply put: The old era of _BLINKING_ text and hideous flash intros (should be) is dead. Many a "net savvy" site has reverted to the early days of the web -- white backgrounds and simple fast loading text. Layers are dead -- tables are back and frames are less overbearing. Thank god.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
As an ad hoc web designer who is really a network engineer I agree with the comments about websites.
99% of web designers I know will take a companpies site and turn it into some wonder of Flash, css, java, and while it looks great is unsuable to the regular Joe due to bandwidth issues, plug-ins, are un navigable. Can we say frames anyone? echh.
I do websites with sidebar menus, no frames, and flash sparingly, and you can choose to see the flash or not.
Also site with musical intros without volume controls, intros without a skip button...
I also preview in Opera, Netscape, IE, and Mozilla.
I am not the most creative or knowledable designer. But I am finding my side web business is growing because of the no frills sites I do.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Other usefull books on the subject:
Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen
Information architecture for the world wide web by Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville
I think I got the titles and authors correct. I had to read them for a class and they were pretty good, especially for text books.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
"Yahoo-style" design is great for a directory, where the volume of information is such that speed and "cleanliness" are paramount: nobody expects the White Pages (or the Yellow Pages) to evoke oohs and aahs for their design: we expect them to be efficient, no-nonsense directories. But the design of other types of sites (or other software, or hardware for that matter) can be more complex, especially if one is creating a new interaction model and has precious few (if any) precedents on which to base one's design.
it destroys sites, reduces the intuitiveness of the web experience, and allows web designers to do "because they can."
not to say that the program is bad, ive seen some really cool art exhibitions of flash demos, but they are just not cool on the net. they remind me of tags.
I want 2D games back.
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.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
Does this book cover, in any detail at all, the restrictions that policies (such as Section 508, security policies, etc.) put on the development of a user-friendly government website? I'm working on such a website and have found that user-friendly and compliant are often mutually exclusive.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
No DTD, no alt text for images, uses depracated FONT tags...
One of the main problems I've come across (in all sorts of jobs) is that the people who make the decisions often aren't fit to. as an example
A traditional ass kissing contest may go something like.
Ass kisser:
"Hey boss look at this "sexy" pie I've made, everyone sure to buy it."
Boss:
"That looks great, and the wax coating sure makes it shine, why hasn't anyone else though of this."
Block who does all the work (not me!):
"Yea but it's made of dog food, tastes like shit, and falls apart in you hand making a mess everywhere"
Boss:
"I'm sure we can sort those minor problems out, and it looks so good. make me 1000"
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
This article presents "7 simple things most web-users don't know exist." Everything from editing the URL bar manually to produce desired results to new browser windows.
"In one study, a site provided links to related books on Amazon.com, which opened in a second browser window. Using Amazon wasn't relevant to our test, so as soon as the page came up the users tried to back out. One pair of users, upon discovering the grayed-out 'Back' button, looked at each other with something akin to horror. "
Granted these people might be techno-shmucks, but I think we geeks seem to forget that too easily. I found a lady just last year still using win 3.11 as her OS and was *irate* to find out that she was being forced to upgrade to a brand new PC. I had to spend hours with her explaining the new OS and even then she was *not* happy with the situation. These people do exist! ;)
"In my values, freedom is more important than 'serving users' in a mere practical sense." -- RMS
Around 1915/1930, an artistic movement arose in France called 'Purism'. The central tenant of Purism is that the 'masses' know better than the experts when it comes to design.
So...lets take an example. A chair. A chair typically has four legs and and back. Totally unremarkable. You can, if you so desire, buy unusual chairs such as this Egg chair, but they are the exception rather than the norm.
According to Purism, the four-legged chair wins. It has been accepted by the masses as functional and fit for purpose, whereas the Egg chair has been banished to the fringes.
So how to apply to web design? Well, take everybody's favourite search engine - Google. Look at the interface. It's obvious where you type, it's obvious what you do with the results. The interface is quick and clean, without being flashy. It is a four-legged chair - functional, useful and ubiquitous.
Now let's compare with the various graph-based graphical search engines. These have a slightly different purpose, but perform essentially the same job as Google. They are the Egg chair of the search engine world - esoteric, and banished to the fringes. Purism would eschew such designs.
Now Purism has its faults - stick with, err..., 'pure' Purism and you'll never make any progress. New designs would be thin on the ground. However, there are some very useful lessons to be learned from the movement in my opinion - changing things for change's sake is bad, keep things clean, make things recognisable...you get the idea.
Cheers,
Ian
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.
Better here than in the People's Republic of California. :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I'd say Yahoo! is less of a good example nowadays than Google is. Yahoo!, with all its extra stuff now, has become somewhat confusing - yes, you can generally get where you need to go after a few clicks, but there's about a thousand other things you have to read to get there.
Google on the other hand - log in, type a word, press enter, boom you're done. It's a pretty minimalist site and it works because of that.
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.
Furthermore: what should each of the above screens look like? How will people expect it to work? We've got no "prior art" to look at and say "well, the market leader does it this way, so we'll ape that." There IS no market leader, yet -- we're trying to create the market for this software; that's the whole point.
This is just a very simple example of the kinds of interface questions we have been dealing with. A new interaction model doesn't necessarily mean you're trying to create a confusing website.
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.
BUT - from the majority of users point of view it does what it needs to do - it conveys information about the book. So it fulfils most logical criteria of a successful website.
You don't need all your DTDs etc for that!
I'll agree that the image alts are a serious limitation for the blind - but hey! they can't read books anyway!
That my site loads in under 5 seconds on most dial up connection, and that I soon plan on vastly enlarging it, but keeping the load times the same.
(Every page is also run though TidyHTML before I upload it, ensuring that every last little byte is cut off of it.)
I have entire image galleries smaller then single images on some websites. ^_^
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I'd think the author would agree with you; it's just the extreme (Everything on the page is clever blinking rotating graphics) that she's against.
Other good non-web examples can be found in Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things
LOL, You've got to be kidding me. Exactly who is moderating in here!?
A self-motivated link to it on Amazon:
Built for Use: Driving Profitability.... The price is $19.57, and will qualify for shipping of the order is over $50.
Winton
Thank you. Fifty years from now, when school children are reading about the worldwide holocaust perpetrated by the Land of the Free® in the early 2000s, your post may give some insight into how the peaceful words of Yeshua ben David were perverted into this sort of sicko nationalism.
Mod me down now. Put me in a concentration camp when you reach power, Hitler.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
A good test is whether the site remains at least minimally usable with JavaScript turned off. If your site comes up blank with JavaScript off, there are probably users at corporate sites that see it that way.
Considering that I am the webmaster for a powertool company .. AND I happen to be owned by the marketing department.
..
.. just happened that at the time .. it payed very well to be able to do stuff on the web.)
.. because the current one keeps dying.
.. when IT suggested we just write our own.
.. or generate dynamic images to 'save work'
.. we have TWO guys with MBA's from Kellog's .. and *THEY* know what they are doing .. These are the guys who have cd's full of end consumer data and churn through it to find out what folks want.
.. who just come up with ideas of what they think we should do - with very little actual research.
.. the rest said it wasn't worth the $$.
How frustrating do you think THAT is
5-6 years of experience of working on corporate sites (my previous company was Comcast@home)
(and before you scream 'web-weenie' I have the C.S. Degree to back it up
And WHOM do you think they ask first about pretty much anything ? There are folks in the accounting department that are more in touch with what we are going to be putting on our website.
Currently two of our braintrusts in marketing are trying to convince each other how we should start using an *alternate* pre-packaged software to run our website
because every marketer I know is a system anylist.
Totally ignoring the fact that it was a marketing decision to buy it in the first place
This is being closly followed by the idea that we can use flash
because every marketer I know is also a graphic artist/programmer/dba.
To be fair
The others are all people who were promoted internally from TOTALLY non marketing positions
We spent over $3Mil developing a tool, plus the costs of manufactureing it, packageing it, and sending it to market. A month before it went on sale, someone had the bright idea to do customer focus group things about the tool.
2 people out of about 110 said that they would buy it
what a thing to find out after its already done.
but every marketer I know is psychic too.
Im beginning to agree with Douglass Adams, lets put them on a colony ship with the phone sanatizers.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
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."
My favorite usability book is Jakob Neilsen's Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. His basic point is the web should be FAST and easy to navigate. Most people have modems and many have poor monitors. See also his website useit.com.
I'd argue that there is an art to that - putting across the company's vision in an aesthetically pleasing way, without sacrificing functionaliy or straying outside the bounds of good website design (accessibility, download times, cross-browser compatibility, etc...). Our designer has an excellent grasp of these things, and has an ability to capture a companies "feel" that really amazes me. She's a pleasure to work with.
On the other hand, nothing bothers me so much as so-called designers that insist on gratiutous elemements that impede usability and add nothing to the site. Some of our clients have had very bad experiences with previous companies, and it made it very hard to get them to trust us at first. Of course, now they're loyal clients who say nice things about us, so maybe it all works out ;)
Anyway, I'm agreeing with you, just expanding on how I'd define "art" in terms of commercial web development.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
... Considering that nowhere under the user preferences are there links to the Friend/Foe/Fan/Freaks links - you can get to them using http://slashdot.org/~/friend and so on, but there are no links to that.
(Pantomimes flipping visor down, catching keys) "Are we learning yet?"
www.eFax.com are spammers
heh. Excellent comment. Now we just need to convince the rest of the industry...
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
...is how well a visually impaired (read: blind or legally blind) person can access the site. All too often, it seems, site designers think that flash intros and all kinds of graphics bloat will get a stronger message across than simple, easy-to-read (and quick-loading!) text and hyperlinks.
;-)
I've lost count of the number of times my wife, who is legally blind, has mentioned this or that site to me that she couldn't make full use of because it was loaded down with non-meta tagged graphics, FLASH intros, etc. Ticketmaster is one example. She can check for events, but she's never had any success ordering tickets online.
The fancy graphics are useless to her because she literally cannot see them. Worse than useless, in fact, because her screen-reader software (Jaws) won't even try to recognize them.
E-commerce web site designers: If you must design a big flashy site that any Vegas producer would be proud of, fine. Knock yourselves out. HOWEVER -- Would you please also put in a text-only version of the site so that those with limited vision can at least shop around? At the very least, dump the FLASH intros and use meta tags on your graphics, OK?
Thanks. From both of us.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
If it gets rid of the Enya midi's, it would be worth it.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Actually many blind people can read books, with a magnifier. Legally blind means that your eyesight is 1/20 or less of 'normal', but doesn't mean no eyesight at all.
I've always found this article a thoughtful commentary on the role techies have had in shaping the internet.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
While the java-script popups are annoying as hell and they try to lock you into their sites, most porn sites do a good job of actually displaying content on their main page (once you get past the warning section), and they make it very obvious how to buy their services. The consumer spends more time spanking the monkey and less time trying to punch it.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
WebWord Usability Weblog
How to Download YouTube Videos
it's great to have a book like this on your shelf when you're trying to have a discussion with a co-worker who doesn't understand why corporate Web sites need to be user-friendly.
..or having a discussion with a Linux-using co-worker about why an OS needs to be user-friendly.</rant>
± 29 dB
Bugger! That kills ALL my blind jokes!
Next you'll be telling me that paraplegics CAN climb mountains!