Quick mockups

I’m happy to show you a project that won the DevWorld Award the other day. The project is an Interactive Wireframes and Software Prototypes app. The soft is pretty neat, it’s a very good tool for wireframing and UI mockup. Here’s what i’ve done in 2 minutes:

You can find it at http://www.flairbuilder.com/, give it a spin. You’ll like it.

Eyetracking & ux simple test

Here’s a trick to review your site’s focus areas, call to action buttons, spotlights and so on:

- Make a screenshot of your website/homepage/page, shrink it to the size of a thumbnail and see what it’s still visible.

Does your yellow button catches enough attention? Can you see the login form? Can you spot the logo in an instance?

If you know the layout by hart you probably will find all those things, so here’s the second step:

- Give the thumbnail to someone else, ask the person to tell you what he/she sees.

Links vs. buttons

When dealing with webpages, some usability experts say we should use links when the user is gonna get on a different page and buttons when the user makes an action.

I don’t really care. I don’t care because users don’t care.

Let’s get things a little further, what’s a button? Does it have to have borders? Different color?

Is a icon followed by a link really a link or a button? I see those things like buttons, others see it like “fancy links” or “descriptive links” or “visual links”.

One thing i agree with, though: forms should have “hard to miss” primary action button, you cannot put a link there mainly because it will not be a “primary action”, there are other links on a page so the weight of a “submit link” won’t be so different.

Perfection

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Edit in place

Since the AJAX and web 2.0 madness a new edit option appeared on the web (used for many years in desktop software though): “edit in place” or “inline editing”. It’s basically used to edit a thing and one thing only, a “one field form” if you like.

It’s not for computer naive users and it’s better to avoid it for simple applications if it’s not really obvious how to use it.

There are two distinct parts of this action: triggering the apparition of the field and the submitting of the action.

Triggering the field can be done in a few ways:
- holding the mouse cursor on the text to be edited (the same as the desktop way) – simple but not obvious, you can’t know about this feature without reading the help or a proper training. (For example see the IPB (invision power board)). I don’t recommend this method for the web, it’s not intuitive enough.

- clicking the text – hovering the text, the background of the text becomes yellow – a convention that nowadays seems to mean “click me, something will happen”. Used by Yahoo, Google, Wordpress etc it’s a convention that is becoming a standard. Though it’s better than the previous one, it can be done better.

- right click on element shows a menu with edit/rename option. Again, the user is not used to right click on things on the web, maybe on pictures to download them but that’s about it. Cool but not usable enough. See the Google Docs example:

- just showing an edit button is the best solution i ever saw, straight forward. If the aesthetics don’t allow that, show the edit button/link only when hovering, but keep the yellow background on the text all the time. Wordpress admin does a good job with the post slug editing:

The field must appear in the same place the text is before triggering the edit. Jenifer Tidwell says in her book “Designing Interfaces” that the field must be set only as a border on the text to be edited, the position/font/color of the text should not be changed. Although it’s a very good point, it’s hardly possible to achieve this technically when working with dynamic text and user generated content.

Some people choose to select all the text inside (like in windows explorer) to make the text replacing faster, but it’s very easy to delete the text and many users won’t know how to recover from this (it’s important that on click outside the field the action is canceled and the initial text restored).

Submitting the form is easy, either you insert a “save” button, or let the user hit “enter” (IPB for example). I prefer and recommend the first one, but make sure it works with “enter” too. A very good idea is to provide a “Cancel” button, it gives the user self confidence.

UPDATE: a few examples on quince.

How to name your files

I was reading an article on Useful Usability and opened all 15 links to save the PDF files on my computer. I don’t have the time to read them now but i hope to find some in the near future. (It’s basically like writing things on a CD, you’ll never insert that in the optical unit ever again ).

Anyway, I saved almost all of them in a directory on my computer. Looking at them later I realized many of them have names which don’t say anything about the content of the file, one of them is named “johnny.pdf”. The title of that particular article/study is “Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0″. While “johnny” is part of the title, left alone it doesn’t say anything about the usability evaluation in the file.

When dealing with files on the web, name them according to the content. You don’t know where they may end up, you want exposure after all, help that exposure with a content descriptive name.

Another important reason: SEO. It’s one thing when Google Bot crawls a picture of a blue book named “blue_book.jpg”, and another when it crawls “ds7d6s9ad99s9s76d6s.jpg”. Your picture will end up higher on the Google Images Index and generate you more traffic.

The main reason though, has to be the user. To a human being “ds7d6s9ad99s9s76d6s” doesn’t say anything about the content, “blue_book” does.

Developer note:
For huge applications dealing with many files it’s quite hard to avoid duplicates (that’s why developers use hash strings like “ds7d6s9ad99s9s76d6s”), take flickr.com for example, all their image names look like that. For the rest of the applications developers can use some kind of hybrid naming like “blue_book_7d7s8767.jpg”. It’s much better than to use only the hash string.

You know…

… you have a problem when the user reaches your help pages. Usability fail.

Overview on login forms

We discussed the other day about the login with email vs. username and I came to the conclusion that it depends on the type of the application, if it’s social, you’ll want username, if not, it’s better to only ask for the email.

Today we’ll take a look at login forms as a whole. We’ll see the good practices, the “dos” and “donts” with examples from a few major sites on the internet. I’m not saying there’s a right formula for all the sites but there are some things that need to be on every one of those login forms.

So, let’s cut the crap and get this going (because some of you only look at pictures and read bold text, and i know that).

Examples:

Amazon.com get’s it simple. Two fields, a button and a “forgot password” link. That is all there is mandatory on a login form and that is what the guys at amazon put there, no more, no less. Authentication is made by email and password.

The next example is from cnet.com. They have a few more options: a register/join link (if you don’t have an account), a remember me checkbox and a feature i started to see on many websites, connect with facebook. I didn’t try but i guess you can use your facebook account which is great.

Digg adopts a different way to show the form, a modal window. I personally hate modals, i think they require useless clicks. They have also a “create new account” as an alternative and offer a recover username option. Looks nice and clean.

Ebay.com has 4 links in the login form, a bit too much if you ask me. They also have a “keep me signed in for today” option and some advices to avoid others entering your account or phishing attacks. They have a history there, it’s normal.

Elance.com adds a radio button option because there are 2 types of accounts, there is one checked by default so it’s quite ok. There is a locked icon with no title on the link so a user does not know what it does until it clicks. Does it lock your account?

Facebook login is also simple: remember me, forgot password and login. I think they could do better than a blue button on a blue background.

Google accounts it’s also quite simple, they have a “remember me on this computer” checkbox, a “create account” alternative and a rather unusual link for password recovery named “i cannot access my account“. I think the title is quite natural.

IMDB has the ugliest login form i have ever seen, no CSS whatsoever, but, it gets the job done, i think. IMDB also lets you login with either username or email. Interesting, they let the user choose, or they switched a while back from username to email and that’s how they support the old accounts.

Live.com (msn, hotmail etc) has some rather confusing login: they ask for a “live ID” and give an email as a example (if it weren’t for the example the users were doomed) and two “remember me” options: one for this computer and one for the password. This cant be good for a naive user. They also have a link for “using advanced security” whatever that is.

Myspace has a really nice idea for offering an alternative to login, they made two tabs with login and signup, the login is the default (used more). I like it. Also like the contrast of the login button, well done.

Newegg is hustling as little the customers, it offers a “subscribe” checkbox on login, that can be frustrating when you log in often. They also offer the option to create a new account and they describe a little the benefits of doing that. I dont like the fact the buttons have the same weight. Which is more important, the login or the signin?

NYTimes.com moves the focus on new members (see the background, position, colors), i guess we know who’s more important for them. I don’t say it’s wrong, growing the userbase is the most important thing for a content website, so they act like it.

Twitter has a pretty weird login if you ask me, it has a confusing name (”sign in”) which sounds a lot like “sign up” and it has a big red “watch a video” button. C’mooon, if I have a twitter account I kind of know what it does, don’t I?

Wordpress has a nice simple form, and they have a tooltip with “This is a secure form” on the damn icon. Nicely done. They don’t offer a register alternative in the form but there’s no need, there’s a HUGE blue “sign up” button on the page.

Wallstreet Journal has a sliding form when you click login, nice and very space saving… buuut…. when you click login and the form slides down, it disables the register link, so you’ll have to wait until it slides back up or you click login again to toggle the form.

Yahoo dealt with so much problems in the past (account stealing, phishing etc) that they made up a “seal” system to protect you, you upload a picture which will be saved and will set a cookie on your browser so when you come back to login you’ll see the picture and know it’s not a phishing site. I dont know how many people actually use this, I don’t.

Conclusions:

- keep it simple, the more options you add, the more confused your users will be
- I strongly suggest you keep a login form on every page of your website, if the site requires users to login often. One click away forms are … one click away.
- the button must be a button, a “call to action”, use colors, contrast, spacing
- make sure the form can be used from the keyboard and submitted with Enter
- password recovery option is mandatory
- offer a register alternative for users who don’t have accounts
- make it visible, look at the ebay page below, it took me a while to find the link with all teh red things there. I’m not saying the user will leave without finding it, but it grows in frustration, and there is a limit for that.

Product filters

I was talking the other day about pagination and David Hamill had a point there, those tiny numbers don’t send any message to the user, so what’s the alternative?

Well, a nice solution is the one used in Google Reader, when you scroll down to see the last feeds, if there are more, Google loads a few more and so on. Although this is a very nice idea, it’s not without disadvantages:

- you might not scroll all the way down and the feeds will not load
- it requires AJAX and that is not really SEO friendly, you want your products to be indexed by search engines
- it doesn’t work on browsers without javascript capabilities or with js disabled.

The most common alternative remains product filters. Just about everyone understands them and they are really easy to use. As I found some nice ones on getelastic and I knew a few other, I decided to show you the visual side of filters.

The first one is from like.com (one very very nice site btw) and it shows a shoe filter by style, you can see the visual icons on the left, not everyone knows all the names of the shoe styles, so that’s really helpful. The next one near it is from like.com also (you can see the resemblance) and it’s the most easier to make visual filter: showing the actual color near the color name. For the human brain it’s much faster to see colors than to read words (if you paid attention in science, color is a wavelength variation of light and we distinguish light very fast).

I saw the next one on getelastic too, I really liked it and it’s found on actionenvelope.com. It shows an envelope filter by type/shape. Again, visual clues make the choosing much more effective.

This one is my personal favorite, it’s from Ebay and it shows a little car illustration for every type of car, because some people don’t know what’s a “hatchback” or a “coupe”, i’m guessing. Although I like this very much, I see a flaw, you can’t choose two of them if, let’s say, you want a sedan but you have nothing against hatchbacks too.

The next one is a color filter with a twist: size. It’s from eastbay and it works like this: you find a shoe, hover the color variations and see below the available sizes highlighted. Pretty neat.

Here’s another one, from preciousglow.com, it’s a filter of diamonds by size, if you don’t know how marquise diamonds look like.

The last one from this list is another shape/style filter from sony-ericsson, for the users more phone-naive, if i can call them like that.

Friendly URLs

Friendly URLs are are usability patterns if you want. Let me explain myself for a moment here.

When a user sees in his browser example.com?index.aspx?action=art&id=7799&cat=52&p=2#a22 he simply ignores that. That URL doesn’t give him any information at all. It’s a bunch of numbers, parameters, crazy signs.

When he sees example.com/kitchens/a-article-about-nice-kitchen-furniture.html#comment-no-22 on the other hand, the user kindda’ guesses that he’s about to read an article about kitchen furniture, part of the kitchen articles category in the site. Hell, some computer-savy guys might know the browser will set on the 22nd comment to that article.

URLs can act like breadcrumbs. It’s a signpost, a “You are here” marker.

Bonus: they are great for SEO, everybody knows that, and they are much more appealing esthetically.