Usability refers to how well people can use something. It can be anything from a sign on a door letting you know which direction the door opens (making it more likely you’ll be able to open it on the first try) to arranging the navigation on a website in a logical fashion.

Recently Jakob Nielsen posted about Progress in Usability, specifically with regard to websites. He comes to several interesting conculsions, and states that it will take us 74 years to reach six-sigma quality.

I have a couple of problems with his logic and data. First, he uses data from 262 websites that his company has collect formal usability metrics for. He doesn’t state at what phase those metrics were collected. It’s not clear if the data is collected before or after the sites have been tested or if there was any work done to improve usability prior to collecting these metrics. I’m assuming that these metrics are being collected prior to optimizing these sites. What I’d like to know is how much improvement was able to be made across these sites. Just because the default out of the box design wasn’t 100% usable doesn’t mean that subsequent generations were only improved by 6%.

Another area that Nielsen ignores is that users are getting smarter. We know that users learn and adapt over time. Are websites getting more complex and staying “un-usable” to users that are more advanced? I doubt it. So Nielsen’s number could actually be a lot worse since most of us have been using the Internet long enough to figure out a few things along the way and be more likely to successfully accomplish our goal. Or it could be that my next point is causing his data to be wrong.

My final problem with the assumptions Nielsen reaches is that he’s only got 262 data points that he’s comparing. That’s not even remotely close to the number of websites on the internet with Netcraft reporting that it touched 206 billion websites in January 2010. (In 1995 there were 18000 websites, in 2006 we hit 100 million.) The Internet has exploded in it’s size and yet Nielsen’s data covers a mere 26 websites a year. It’s hard for me to believe that we can judge usability progress accurately with such a tiny window into the massive amount of data that is the internet. I have to think that these are skewed numbers without increasing the number of sites measured proportionally each year.

Nielsen even admits that he left out 15 major websites that they conducted recent studies on because he didn’t want to bias the data. While I agree I still believe that his data is too biased to come to the grand statements he’s making.

Perhaps I misunderstand what Nielsen is trying to say but I can’t help but think two things, his slice of the pie is really too tiny to hold up against the whole of the internet and that we’re not seeing the important numbers (how much a site can improve just by working at it). I don’t know of any other six-sigma measured processes that improve with zero effort.

I believe that education is the biggest factor in improving things like this, what do you think? Did I miss something with Neilsen’s data? What tactics do you use to increase usability for your site so you can stand out among 206 billion websites?

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Is Usability Getting Better?

We are all familiar with spam as unwanted email. A cursory viewing of the most recent messages to hit my spam folder shows me that spam is alive and well. For example, Google apparently is hiring (see above).

However, spam takes more forms than just just flagrantly false messages like that. Facebook spam is on the rise because of newbie users thinking that if I send this important message to all my friends, I will be able to influence the masses to join my cause! Or perhaps they just want you to join mafia or Jedis vs. Sith or some other current iteration of a poorly conceived, viral online game.

In the end, the proliferation of mediums to communicate means a proliferation of mediums to spam. Since email, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace are almost completely ubiquitous, thanks to the iPhone and other mobile platforms, we can all have spam delivered right to us in the comfort of the office, my ‘95 Camry, and even camping in the mountains!  Finally, I’ll eat real spam from a can and get the digital version delivered to my Twitter feed by a user who has suddenly decided that this week’s soap opera needs a play-by-play!

As if permeating all the communication mediums wasn’t enough, spam also has been introduced to websites as useless or next-to-useless link farms! Amazingly, spam has recently reached new lows (or highs depending on how you look at it). The image below was grabbed from a marketing website intended to provide extensive links regarding all its products and services. This screen shot of the footer illustrates  how spam has an even newer flavor: internal-linking spam. By the way, the unreadable yellow block is the navigational links list for this company’s graphic design capabilities.

cartoon captions added by Doug

As the internet has matured, apparently spam now receives a decent graphic design package because it is part of the “footer” and carries the title of “navigational links.” The navigational links include everything from CMS training to dating website scripts. The main categories are too numerous to be useful, but hey, it’s spam. When is it supposed to be useful? In fact, this site’s idea of “eMarketing” apparently includes spamming Wordpress comment forms because we found the link to this page twice on the comments from one of our recent blog posts. By the way, what’s with the butterflies?

In the end,  spam is still spam. It’s annoying and will generally be ignored. No matter the medium. However, just like annoying infomercials at 10pm on TNT, spam must be slightly effective otherwise marketers wouldn’t keep using it.  I hope as the internet continues to age spammers will realize that no one is listening. At least, not seriously.

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

The Many Flavors of Spam

Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and…

Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?

Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.

Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it’s louder? Is it any louder?

Nigel Tufnel: Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You’re on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you’re on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don’t know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.

Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

Marty DiBergi: Why don’t you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?

Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.

– from Spinal Tap, the greatest rock-and-roll movie ever

Thanks to the above scene, eleven is my favorite number. It also represents the Spinal Tap-level thinking still perpetrated by too many webmasters here in 2008. Here are 11 of my biggest beefs. I put them in order of what you’re likely to encounter when you call up a certain website.

1. Works on I.E. Only: Having a website that works only on Internet Explorer is so 2003. That’s when I.E. had 95% market share. At the time, I thought it was a good thing, since developers had been putting up with AOL’s lousy browser for too long, and Netscape’s last gasp was truly awful. But since then, I.E.’s share of the marketplace has dropped to about 80% (this site’s visitors are about 80% Firefox) — and will probably drop even lower now that Microsoft no longer makes I.E. for the Mac, whose market share is growing. In addition, more PC users are switching to browsers like Firefox and Opera for various reasons (such as speed and protection against malware). Consequently, we developers need to take other browsers into consideration again — particularly if we’re targeting people who are likely Mac users (such as designers and students). Some webmasters have refused to diversify, and are still quoting that 95% figure. Keep up with the trends, comrades! Other webmasters have responded by coding their entire sites in Flash, which is generally browser agnostic, but Flash has its own set of problems — serious problems. And that leads me to my second beef…

2. Flash Intro Movies: Flash intro animations were cute — once upon a time. But these days, they’re just annoying. You have to sit and wait for them to load, then they’re moderately entertaining at best. It takes a lot of creativity to give a Flash intro animation a “wow” factor anymore. From a development point of view, they’re expensive to create, expensive to edit, and most people I know click that “skip intro” button anyway — particularly when they’re surfing at the office and don’t want all that Flash noise to attract the boss. The only sites that should have Flash intro animations are movie sites, whose purpose (and forte) is entertainment. Want to spice up your site? Put a movie on the homepage — not QuickTime (see next beef) — and hire a professional designer and a professional writer.

3. Plug-In Required: I hate having to download a plug-in to use a website. Flash — OK, that’s fairly common, and most experienced surfers will download it early in their web-browsing. (Why Flash doesn’t come pre-installed on all computers is beyond me. Must be an issue with those greedheads over at Adobe.) What bugs me is QuickTime, which is Apple’s video player. If your audience has to download a plug-in before they can watch your movie, it better be a never-before-released scene from The Dark Knight.

4. Illegibility: I mentioned hiring a professional designer, but you have to keep an eye on them, too. Many of them see words as a “design element” rather than conveyors of important information. Consequently, you’ll find lots of sites with blocks of text that look spiffy, but are impossible to read: the text is too small — you shouldn’t have to lean into your monitor to read something if you’re younger than 50 — or the color combination is absurd (black text on gray, or white text on yellow). A common color combo these days is white text on black — which is great for short blocks of large text, like headlines. But entire paragraphs of white on black is definite headache material. What’s wrong with black on white? Another beef I have is text that consists of an image, which search engines can’t read, and which requires a designer to update. I know reading is anathema to the digital generation, but let’s give words a fighting chance on our websites.

5. Bad Writing: Sometimes the words might as well be illegible — hence, my suggestion to hire a professional writer. Obviously, you want correct grammar and spelling, but good communication goes beyond that. Many companies have their marketing executives do the writing, forgetting that many of them are MBA’s and prone to sentences like, “X Corporation is a leading provider of seamless end-to-end solutions and value-added best practices for your enterprise-level mission-critical initiatives.” Don’t believe me? Check out this site on business communications, Fight The Bull — Why Business People Speak Like Idiots by some guys from Deloitte Consulting. Ironically, Deloitte’s website is a jargonized mess. I just found this beast on their homepage: “Innovations tend to follow two routes: assimilation into the status quo or dissipation due to the lack of a sustainable business case. But disruptive innovations such as retail clinics and medical tourism veer off the beaten path, with sticking power that has the potential to change the way services are sought and delivered.” Scary, huh?

6. No Explanations: Of course, illegibility assumes that there’s text on the homepage to begin with. Lots of websites just assume you know what they are and what they do when you first land on them. Many Web 2.0 sites, such as Plurk.com, ask you to “Sign Up Now” before even telling you what you’re signing up for! These sites bury their explanations in the “About Us” section. Not only is that detour annoying to the prospective user, it also means all that search-engine friendly text is on a sub-page. “About Us” sections should be used for the history of the company and bios of the management — put the company or product description on the homepage! As for repeat users who don’t need the description, use cookies to automatically reroute them to their dedicated pages.

7. Mandatory Registration: It amazes me how many sites expect me to go through the registration rigmarole right off the bat. How about letting me try you out first — or at least let me watch a demo movie? And how about giving me some perks for signing up, such as an entry into a raffle? One of my biggest beefs involves going through a laborious sign-up process to use a site, then realizing it’s nothing I ever want to come back to. A lot of smaller employment sites fall into that category. I want my test drive!

8. No Registration Instructions: This is a minor beef, but it’s unfortunately too common. Ever start registering for a site only to have your registration rejected because you didn’t pick a username or password in the right format? You know, “sorry, your password must include a capital letter, a number, a Greek phrase, and the initials of your first lover, provided that you’ve actually had a lover, otherwise just use zeroes.” I understand the need to make passwords more complex, but how about providing all the registration guidelines before I start registering?

9. Dead Links and Other Errors: One reason I want a test drive before divulging my personal info is that many sites have more flaws and problems than Chinese-made dog food. Nobody’s perfect, but it kills me when I’m on a site that wants me as a customer, but they can’t even bother to make sure that most their links are working. How can I trust them with my email address, not to mention my credit card info?

10. Impossible to Find Anything: Inaccurate site maps. Invisible contact info. Insane search engines. Regardless of the size of your site, smart architecture and simple navigation are utterly imperative — particularly since Google could deposit a user somewhere deep inside of it. How will they find their way out? I picture hordes of users wandering the innards of a site like survivors on The Poseidon Adventure, yelling, “Where’s the Contact page? Where’s the Contact page?” And please don’t cheap out on search functions, particularly if your site contains over 20 pages of content. The search engine over at MySpace should be put out of its misery.

11. Ads That Annoy: Here’s one of the saddest parts about web development. We go to all the trouble of building a site that’s easy to use, easy to read, easy to navigate. It works on all browsers and doesn’t require any fancy plug-ins. It’s been quality checked again and again to root out errors. And then the webmaster hires an ad-serving business that coughs up annoying banner ads that flicker, move, dance around, or even shout at the user. The ads make dubious offers or even intrude upon the site’s usability with pop-ups or overlays — all of which damage the host site’s image and reputation. And when a user clicks on them, the banners take them far away. Lots of sites try to send visitors away before they’ve barely even landed. Now, whether ads are the best way for websites to make money is a whole other debate. But at the least, make sure they give the rest of your site a fighting chance.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to get a burger — all this talk of beef is making me hungry.

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

My 11 Biggest Beefs About Websites

I recently discovered a new tool called SEO Spyglass. This tools allows you to see how competing sites are gaining top Google rankings. It traces backlinks and exaimines them so that you can see how either a specific keyword is top ranked or how a specific site atains its rankings.The company Link-Assistant offers two versions of the product, a free license that allows only the main version of Google, MSN, and Yahoo or an paid license version ($87) that allows the various localized verisons of these search engines to be used. In addition the free version does not allow you to save your projects, access support or get updates. The tool operates pretty efficiently but this will vary by connection speed.

It took about 15 minutes for me to run a search for VoIP. The application is Java based and so it easily runs on almost any operating system. The disadvantage is that it takes a significant amount of system resources.

The 15 minute wait was well worth it. This wait will vary by the number of backlinks a site has. In this case my search returned 1156 backlinks. The first result for this term (besides fcc.gov) was the wikipedia entry covering VoIP. SEO Spyglass returns an amazing level of information about each site linking to the site your examining. It starts with the backlinks page rank, The title of the page, whether or not the pages links back, the anchor text linking it, the URL, the number of outbound links on that page, total of links on that page, the link value, the domains page rank, whether or not the page is listed in DMOZ, listed in Yahoo directory, the Alexa ranking for the site, and the age of the domain.

This level of detail allows you to examine the value of the links that are launching a page into the top of the Google rankings. You can also sort all of the backlinks by any of the above information types.

Overall SEO Spyglass is a very nice addition to a webmasters tool box and if you are targeting more than the main Google and Yahoo sites is definitely worth $87. The company claims that new features are coming for the paid version, I’ll try to review these as they become available.

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Review – SEO Spyglass