Human Factors

I’m following quite a number of discussion groups on usability and today I read a couple of articles mentioning AttrakDiff. So far I hadn’t heard about it, so I did some investigations on what it is and what it can do.

AttrakDiff is a free tool by User Interface Design GmbH which allows you to have your products evaluated online by users. You may choose between three survey types, namely “Single Evaluation”, “Comparison before-after” and “Comparison between two products”. Simply log in, adjust welcome message and text modules, choose either pre-defined participants or decide to run it as a random survey on you website. Your participants will receive an email with a link to the survey and a passwort, so that each individual can only participate once. They than have to judge your product by choosing between word pairs, and in the end you’ll get a nice overview of the results. It tells you details about the Pragmatic Quality, the Hedonic Quality-Stimulation, the Hedonic Quality-Idendity and the Attractiveness of your product (and it even tell you what all this means ;-)). Additionally you’ll get some statistics on the up to 20 entrants you can have.

This tool definitely doesn’t replace proper testing, especially not as in the basic version you can’t define the word pairs to rate, but it could be a nice in-between-exercise to find out if you’re still on the right track while developing. It’s not much work to produce the survey and it’s free, so there are not many costs involved in using AttrakDiff.

Since BarbieGirls.com is now online for about 2 months, I decided to have a closer look at it. Michael Jung reports in his e-commerce-blog that a mere 3 million girls are already registered users and as a former Barbie fan I wanted to know what had changed in the last 25 years. I knew that there would be a huge difference between the Barbie Club that I belonged to in the 1980s (where you had to send a 10 Deutsche Mark-note to some dubious mailbox to receive a double-A4-Barbie-letter four times a year) and what the girls get today if they belong to the secret circle of insiders.

I expected it to be a nice online community and although I am aware that I am three times the age of the average target group individual, I thought that I would at least understand what this is all about. But I was mistaken. I spent roughly 20 minutes on the website, was able to get a character, get it dressed, changed my “apartment” and that was it. For a couple of things you need to be some kind of a mega-member, but whenever I requested more information about it, they showed me a Barbie mp3-player. There was a little chat window, which gave me the opportunity to type something in, but I couldn’t find out who I would end up talking to, maybe Barbie herself??? Ok, maybe I was not motivated enough to get the real meaning behind this, but I guess that my lack of ability to cope with a before-teenager-girl’s-club really lies in my age. I suppose that a huge company like Mattel did a lost of testing on there website and although it’s still a beta it should be well tested with target group candidates. I am just wondering where that leads us to, once those girls grow out of their teenager status and become the consumers of tomorrow. Will we still be able to feed their needs in approaching the web as well as those of the generations before and after?

This little application is probably most useful to people living in a high risk earth quake area, but it’s a good example on how user friendly a “What if…?”-scenario can be converted. The New Zealands Earth Quake Commision gives everyone the opportunity to check out the possible impact of an earth quake to the family home.

They show an average kiwi house and how to deal with the setting is pretty much self-explanatory: take the slide to the level of shaking you want to watch and chose if you want to see a quake safe or an unsecured house shaking. Then press the start button, watch the earth quake taking place on your screen and read some hints on how to improve the earth quake safeness afterwards. Straight and simple to the point, nothing that could be misunderstood or confusing. I like it!

New Zealand’s Yellow Pages have relaunched their website. The costs involved in the relaunch were a mere NZ$10 Million (approx. EUR5.8 Million orUS$ 7.7 Million!), so I expected something really big. I played around with it a bit and surprisingly the first real challange was finding the page. I expected it to be available under www.yellow-pages.co.nz, but this just referres to a british provider of personalised wines and champagnes (no, I haven’t checked the details on what a personalised wine might be). Maybe it was my mistake – how can I assume that they would write their domain name with a dash? Finally www.yellowpages.co.nz ended in the result I wanted, although the official URL they advertise is simply www.yellow.co.nz. I personally don’t think that this is the obvious domain the average user would try first, especially as the term “Yellow Pages” is a well established brand, but at least you can reach the web presence in two different ways. And if you get frustrated during your first try you could always order a bottle of personalised wine instead – that’s better than nothing ;-)

The website itself doesn’t look too different from the old one on the first sight, but there are a couple of cool new features that are really helpful. Let’s start with the first thing you would do on a Yellow Pages website: searching for something. Although the search box doesn’t deliver auto suggestions when you start typing, it offers a list of recent searches. So in case you want to look up the phone number of the fancy restaurant you’ve been to last week, you can do this pretty quickly without typing the whole name into the search box.

But there some really wicked features, too. They definitely deserve some brownie points for offering an overview of opening hours in addition to the usual data you can get about businesses (eg address, phone number, short summery of what the busines offers), and it is also possible to use the opening hours as a search feature to find out which busines is open now, open late, open 24 hours or open on Sundays. Additionally you can search by distance and exclude places that are too far away from your starting point. You can register with your home and work address to narrow down the radius search, but either that doesn’t work properly or they assume that I will always spend my daytime in the office – as soon as I search for Cafes within 1 km, they show me what’s around my office, not what’s around in my home suburb.

For each serch result they show a little map to visualise where you need to go to find the busines you are looking for. You can enlage the map and for Wellington this works pretty well, but I have no idea how it works for really small places in NZ. I tried to search for Cafes in Tuatakere and Roxburgh, the last-mentiones didn’t show a map. So I reckon that they have covered the bigger places in New Zealand pretty well but if you’re looking for something in a rural area you might be lost.

If you have problems to decide which of the available businesses to chose you can narrow down your choices by comparing all the features of a business in a list. That’s a nice feature, too.

Overall I like the new online-version of the Yellow Pages, but there is one big disadvange: it needs a lot of resources!!! I assume that there won’t be any difficulties on a high-tech machine, but my computer at work (union equipment, therefor not the latest fashion model but usually stable to run and probably comparable or even better than what most New Zealanders have at home) creates a couple of warning and starts shutting down programmes just because I’m running Outlook and Skype at the same time as an IE window with the Yellow Pages website. And although I think that the website is a quite useful one I doubt that the target group really enjoys the hassle that comes with it. And don’t forget about the 10 Million dollars price tag on it – it’s facinating that there are still companies out there who pay so much money for what is becoming web standard and definitely doesn’t cost that much in development. I feel really sorry for all those smaller companies who would have loved to build this page for 2 to 5 Million Dollars.

Trusted Shops, who name themselves the European leader when it comes to boosting consumer confidence in online shopping, offer a free usability quick-check for onlineshops on their website. In just five simple steps with a couple of multiple-choice questions you’ll learn about the user experience in your webshop. Sure, this just delivers a brief outline – but if you want to know more about how user can or cannot navigate through your offer after completing the quick-check, Trusted Shops offers an additional Usability Audit which covers 75 criteria in 9 different topics.
Although the websites offers some pages in English, the free usability check is currently only available in German, so if you want to get your job tested, get your language experts to do it for you…

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…