Paintings & blog by Chris Gibbins

GPS to open the train doors on Southern

me — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:32:19 +0000

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!

Directional MRT maps inside the trains of Taipei

me — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:46:37 +0000

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.

No fish or crabs aloud?

me — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 22:57:03 +0000

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.

Tesco direct dot net errors

me — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 23:24:54 +0000

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:

Moneysupermarket pop-unders not working as intended

me — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:34:41 +0000

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!

It’s what they do that’s important

me — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 23:59:40 +0000

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.

Google PPC ads misunderstood by users as the most relevant search result

me — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 22:50:13 +0000

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.

What to do with “within-page links”

me — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 01:08:47 +0000

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:
The user clicks the link and is taken down the page. As far as they know the page now looks different having scrolled down the page without noticing the scroll. The user misses the fact that the chosen section is aligned at the top of the page, possibly due to the short length of the sub-section and focusses instead on another sub-section underneath as they expect everything on this page to be related to what they previously clicked on. You can now safely say that they are a little lost.

A few possible solutions:

Avoid long pages and have each sub-section on a new webpage instead
Have a list of sub-sections at the top which are not links (that don’t resemble navigation elements), thus forcing the user to scroll down the page manually
Clearly indicate the intention of these within-page links (in a better way than using downward pointing arrows)
Use clientside scripting to slow the scroll page effect down or animate it so the user knows that they are going down the page after clicking a within-page link
Use clientside scripting to highlight the sub-section in some way to indicate and focus the user’s attention on this area, in an attempt to show them that this is the bit they were after.

On the subject of the last two above, there have been a number of attempts at achieving these effects. The best example I have found is discussed in this article: Improving the usability of within-page links and the can be seen working in the smooth scrolling demo.

Will anyone notice if my webpages link to themselves

me — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 21:51:25 +0000

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.

At best, if there is a clear page heading, good navigation and if they are already at the top of the page then the unfortunate user might realise that nothing has happened and that they would be better off trying another link. However, if they are already scrolled down the page a little when they click the offending link, the affect of the page reload moving the page to the top may hide the fact that they haven’t actually gone anywhere. It’s only when they start reading again that they realise that site has wasted their time. If indicators of the users’ current position in the website are poor e.g. unclear headers/navigational elements then this may also have a similar adverse effect on their experience. We have seen this confusion on many an occasion during our usability testing at optimum.web.

Despite this clear usability issue and the fact that it can have a more serious affect on users of assistive technologies like screen readers, very few sites have tackled the problem. I think thie consequenses of this usability issue are one of the least understood and lowest on the list of things to put right. But actually this issue should be the easiest for developers of the CMS’s to resolve through a few global changes to the code.

Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to find anything on the subject for solving the problem in your CMS’s or blogs. There was only one reference I could find in trying to resolve the issue in the blogging/CMS application, Wordpress: Removing Menu Links to the Current Page

A better panoramic experience?

me — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:12:23 +0000

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.