Paintings & blog by Chris Gibbins

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.

If I’ve already got a browser window open and then use Moneysupermarket.com, the script they use to load up their annoying pop-under windows often causes their main Moneysupermarket page to disappear behind my already opened browser window. Oh dear, that must lose them a fair few customers!

During a user test the other day a user was asked to find a particular area of the site. They immediately pointed to the correct link but stated that this was far too small and very difficult to see! Whilst it could so easily have been noted that these links were seen as too small, in fact the proper observation was that they had a very good level of visibility.

It was a shock during our usability test with 7 users to see 4 of them select the top sponsored link as the most relevant result when carrying out a Google search. They didn’t notice the difference of styling that distinguished these one or two special results from the organic ones below. The pale yellow shaded box with label in the top right didn’t do it’s job.
In hind sight maybe it wasn’t such a revelation why these users couldn’t see the difference in style. After all they followed quite typical behaviour by focusing on this middle column, the part of the website that everyone knows contains the most useful information. Interestingly these same users did understand the right hand column to contain advertising.

Whilst Google is naughty in the placement and all too subtle styling of these centre column PPC ads, they are no where near as bad as ASK and MSN. I think their SERPs are tantamount to those old pop-up ads that tricked the user into clicking fake window alert boxes. Why would anyone use them? Just hope that Google doesn’t follow suit. Although, hold on, Google started it!

Can you see the difference between paid advertising and organic search results on this Ask.com results page? To make matters worse, there are even more ads at the bottom.

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.
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After having a play on Google’s new street view of San Francisco, I realised that the behaviour of the panoramic imagery was quite different to how virtual tours normally worked. Usually those made for Quicktime or Java applets rotate in the direction you drag the mouse towards. However, Google’s street view works just like Google maps; you drag the picture to where you want it, effectively grabbing and pulling the panormaic image around, which means that you have more control and are not sent in a spin, which can otherwise happen with the traditional interaction.
Can’t wait until it comes to London.

It seems a little ridiculous that 467 local authority web departments are all struggling to resolve many of the same issues. And unfortunately so many of these sites are hard to use and have substantial usability problems. Couldn’t resources be better spent by resolving the issues at a Governmental level instead of repeating the difficult process of developing accessible easy to use web sites over and over again?

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A strange observation I made when carrying out user testing was how some users viewed certain navigation links as unnecessary and even confusing, if they also appeared in the page content. “Which one should I click” they would say. This really surprised me and more recently even a member of a “Web Department” made a similar observation when reviewing a wire-frame for some Intranet pages; “why is that link in two places? Shouldn’t we take out the link from the navigation if it’s already in the main body of content?”.
Continue Reading »

I’ve recently been learning about a document management system called “Hummingbird“, and have been thinking about the reasons why companies wish to go through the painful and very costly process of retraining their staff. What is going wrong with the present system of file management?

In addition to the most obvious benefits of strict version control and better findability through a powerful search facility, provided that meta data is added intelligently, the key difference is the restrictions attached to the creation of folder hierarchies. Individual users cannot create there own logical families of files so easily, unless they have “super user” status. Instead they are encouraged through the interface and many form dialogue boxes with required fields, to fill out meta data and place the files as best they can within a predetermined structure. The system could be described as a strictly controlled form of folksonomic tagging.

I wonder how long it will take the employees to appreciate the benefits of this seemingly laborious method of saving new documents and emails?