Human Factors

I spent my afternoon surfing for blogs on usability and putting them into my Bloglines. I hope that at least a few of them bring me up to speed with what’s going on in the community, currently I’m feeling that I need to learn faster…

These are the ones I picked for my first round of follow ups (quite a few of them are in German, that’s probably because my google toolbar is connected to google.de and therefore gives out country specific links first):

Benutzerfreundlichkeit und Usability Blog
Interface Design and Usability Blog
nutzbar.ch – der Zeix-Usability Weblog
usabilityblog
Usability Inside
User Interface Blog
Webkrauts
Forum One: user experience and design

Additionally I subscribed to Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, a bi-weekly newsletter on Web Usability.

Currently I’m inquesting websites on roses for an article in the German IT magazine iX. While some very few sites are somehow professional and easy to use, most of them are absolutely shocking when it comes to usability. Examples? You don’t even have to understand German to find out that this is highly frustrating for users:

1. On a links overview you can’t tell if a click on a link will open a new browser window or not, so most people who want it to open in a new window would use a right mouse click, right? If you try this on www.rosen-romantik.de the only result this will cause is the opening of a popup saying “Have much fun while surfing!” with the option to press an ok-button. After agreeing the small window vanishes and nothing else happens. If you want to click through a couple of these links and try the right mouse click out of habit for a few times, you’ll become really aggressive after a while, believe me!
2. A less frustrating but absolutely useless website is the one of the Europa Rosarium, which is the largest rose museum of the world in a small German village called Sangerhausen. Apparently they do have an existing Website but if you click on the link above you’ll simply get a note saying “Future home of www.europa-rosarium.de”. It can’t be that hard to forward the user to the existing website, can it?

I really appreciate that different people have different talents and while I have no idea about rose processing I don’t expect a rose lover to know how to build a website. But for user’s sake they should rather not having a website at all, then testing people’s patience by running poorly designed websites…

I did a usability test myself. A friend of mine is working for a company launching a new portal soon and they asked me to comment on their site. Without having much of an usibility testing background I just pretended being a new user to their web page. Two guys were sitting next to me and taking notes of my comments during my journey through what they offer. I spottet a couple of things that I as a user would prefer in a different way, but two main things really made me curious:
1) I liked the color scheme – and I was the only one to mention that. Is this gender related? Do girls notice colors while boys don’t care? That’s definitely something I need to find out more about!
2) I use too many websites with advertisements. I didn’t even have a single look at the places I would expect ads in – so my main focus laid in the centre of the web performance and I totally irgnored the important information in the left and right columns. I’m really interested if it’s just me who has an ruined view on websites due to over-advertisement. This will definitely be one of the next steps I’ll be looking into…

… that’s the title of a book by Steven Krug which seems to be quite popular amongst people who deal with usability. Fortunately it was sitting on Kai’s book shelf anyway, so I didn’t have to stroll book shops for the ultimate beginners guide to usability. It always scares me a little bit when an author knows his readers even before they know that they will be reading this particular book one day. On one of the first pages Steven mentions that this short book is more or less designed to be read on a plane ride – huh, how did he know that I was going to read in on the way from Wellington to Rotorua, which happens to be a plane ride of roughly one hour? That scared me a little bit, to be honest. But regardless the fact that I felt watched I started working through the first chapters. So far I read the first six chapters; I like the style, the structure and the samples very much. It didn’t tell me anything new yet, but it covers the “Guiding Principles” which should be common sense but are still ignored by most webdesigners, at least if I compare a couple of websites I recently used. But there are still six more chapters to go, which are headlined “Things you need to get right”, “Making sure you got them right” and “Larger concerns and outside influence”. That sounds very promising and I’m looking forward to read on.

Why would a Social Worker who works with a small trade union in New Zealand have a blog about usibility? There is a simple answer to this question: I want to be an active part of our family business ;-) By the end of 2006 my husband Kai started his own company and I became co-partner. But being a Social Worker who did an apprenticeship in a German bank ten years ago, there is not much to contribute to a company offering consulting, training and development. So far I’m dealing with filing, accounting and taxes and send out invoices from time to time – but I want to deliver more.

I tried to learn programming. Using computer and internet for several years now, I have a rough understanding how things work. Someone recommended starting my “developer’s career” with html and php, so I bought a book called “PHP for kids” which picked me up on the right level. It’s a really good book, where a little rabbit explains how programming works. Whenever there is something really important, a carrot on the page alerts you for more attention. Unfortunately I could no longer stick with it when the coding became more complicated and every little distraction meant that I had to start from the beginning. I just can’t concentrate on numbers and letters for an extrem long period of time. That was the end of my developer’s career.

But what else could I do to make my contribution to our company and to support Kai with the incredible amount of work he’s doing at the moment? It must be something that has to do with people. With interaction, community, making things easier. And so the idea was born to take a deep dive into the secrets of usability! This blog is here to document my journey to explore the topic from the scratch. I have no idea where it will lead to – maybe I will give up on this like I gave up on programming, maybe I will become a world known expert on usability, or maybe just something in-between with the ability to use my knowledge for Ventego Creative. Who knows? We will see… Tips and hints to bring me closer to the mysteries of usability are always welcome!