Paintings & blog by Chris Gibbins

Most mornings just before I arrive at Victoria station the driver kindly warns us that there will be a slight delay before the doors will open - usually around 30 seconds. However, two days ago we had to wait for around 3 minutes which was really annoying as I was standing. So feeling determined to get an answer I went to the Southern office and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The reason for the delay was that the train doors could only open once a clear GPS signal had confirmed that the train was at the correct station, and unfortunately the signal was always quite weak at Victoria!

Inside the supremely efficient MRT train on the right hand side was a map showing the stations along this route (blue line), and also the interconnecting red and green lines. All seemed straightforward until I turned around to face the left side of the train where I was puzzled by a somewhat different looking map. Was it the same map? Was it a mirror image or rotated 180 degrees? Actually, it was something quite different.

The confusion was caused by the fact that the both maps faced each other and yet still showed the direction that each line crossed. E.g. travelling along the blue line from Shandao Temple, when the train crossed the red line the map correctly showed that the Zhongshan would be found if you headed right. For the maps to work, each had to show this correctly. Unfortunately this didn’t do much for my mental map of the Taipei MRT system.

What a fun sign I came across in Kenting, Taiwan. It looks like a road sign but in fact doesn’t relate to cars at all. It’s a no fishing sign.

I have just come across a really annoying error whilst looking for a sat nav on Direct.Tesco.com. After clicking on several of the product page and category links instead of the expected webpage all I got was a dialogue box prompting me to download the actual ASPX files:

In an attempt to help improve the performance of some “within-page links” on our wireframes, I styled the bullet points to look like downward pointing arrows.
With my designers hat on, even though I shouldn’t have been adding much style at this “wireframe” stage, this seemed like an unobtrusive and helpful way of indicating to the user that these links would take them to a sub-section on that same page, down below. I was so wrong. None of the 7 users saw the arrows in that way. All expected the links to take them to another page.
We have now decided to be more literal and label these links “what’s on this page”.

A typical user experience I have seen on many a usability tests: Continue Reading »

One of Jakob Nielson’s “Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines” written back in 2003 was that a webpage should “never have a link that points to the current page”. Many users have a simple mental model of the web, and why shouldn’t they? When they click a hypertext link they expect to go somewhere else. When they don’t go anywhere at all, this simple expectation is boken and the user gets confused.
Continue Reading »

Having recently bought 3 books from the Amazon website, two of which were from other suppliers and delivered 10 or so days late, I logged in to check why they were late. Using my usual username and what I thought was the correct password, discovered that I couldn’t see the latest books that I had ordered, only my last batch of books bought before Christmas. What was going on? I tried again and again without success until I entered another password that I also use sometimes. This time I could see my latest three books but not my pre-Christmas orders!

Somehow I now have two Amazon accounts that share the same username but which have two different passwords. How can this be? Surely usernames should be unique!

It seemed as if the only ones managing to get a bite to eat on Sunday in China Town were the Chinese dragons; swaying, crouching and then devouring the cabbages hung from the shop entrances.

For the past 2 months I have been designing a multi-lingual web site using Drupal. Working with such a popular open source cms has been so refreshing after spending so much time with another cms called ObTree. With ObTree you feel alone in a place where nobody can hear your frustrations, while in total contrast the Drupal community is thriving and always willing to help. The reason can simply be attributed to the number of individuals involved with such open source projects.

ObTree isn’t totally bad. In terms of it’s object oriented approach it is a very powerful system. It just needs more input and consequently so much more development in resolving bugs and its many usability issues.

The company I am currently working for has been battling now for some time to improve it’s web sites look and level of accessibility. And the main reason for this “battle” as far as I can see, is because they have got tied into using a very expensive Content Management System, which they cannot afford to upgrade.

This is one of the biggest dangers of such a solution. CMS’s can be really expensive. Why do Consultants advise them to buy expensive cms’s when there are so many great open source equivalents out there like Drupal and Plone? It makes me wonder whether consultants get commission to promote such systems.