Web pages and mobile phones

Since the launch of the iPhone, there seems to be an increased buzz amongst the globalinterwebnetsuperhighway fraternity about web pages and mobile phones. A few things have changed (unsurprisingly) since we last wrote an article on this subject in 2005. For example:

• Most devices have an action key that allows you to perform the same function as a mouse click.
• Resolutions are higher and some screens are larger.
• With Wi-Fi phones, you can download large files without the huge expense.
• Many phones can store several gigabytes of information.

Opera 4 and iPhone Safari

Opera Mini 4 and Safari on the iPhone have effectively killed the idea of the handheld stylesheet. They want to behave like proper grown-up browsers and good luck to them.

But this doesn’t stop you sending them a site that is customised for them. Enter CSS3 and media queries, but that’s a whole new blog post that I’ll spare you from.

It doesn’t really make sense to stop supporting a standards compliant approach in favour of a CSS3 recommendation that does the same thing. Especially from Opera who are usually the ‘hair-splitters’ of web standards.

If you want to check out your website on Opera Mini, then try the Opera Mini Simulator. I’ll save you the hassle of trying to get it to look at itself. I tried it and it didn’t work.

I know I know, I should get out more.

Crisis at the cash machine

On our recent company trip to Barcelona for our strategy day meeting, I came to realise something about cash machines (ATMs)- they do not follow an international set of standards when it comes to design. Shortly after arriving in Barcelona, I realised that I would need to get more foreign currency to last the duration of my trip. I finally managed to find a cash machine in the airport after scrutinising it carefully as it looked more like a change machine than the cash machines I am used to. However, when I inserted my card, followed the instructions (in English), and input my PIN number, I was informed that the PIN was incorrect and my card was promptly rejected. This was extremely confusing to me as it was not a new card or a new PIN number. I tried another card which happened to have the same PIN number with the same result. In the end I put it down to a dodgy foreign machine and decided I would wait for another opportunity to get cash since I still had some Euros in my wallet.

The following day, I tried a more traditionally looking cash machine and followed the same procedure, only to be met with the same message. By now I was starting to get pretty irritated by Spanish technology and worried that I would not be able to get any cash. Just when I was about to give up, I happened to look down at the keypad while typing my PIN and realised that the layout of the number keys was different to the UK versions. Instead of starting 1, 2, 3 from the top left corner and working down as is typical with telephone keypads, the numbers started at the bottom left as is the same with keyboards. I suddenly realised I had been typing the wrong PIN; I had memorised where the numbers were on the pad and believing that I was being diligent, had been covering my actions with my other hand as many banks advise. As a result, I did not notice the configuration of the numbers assuming that they were the same worldwide.

So the moral of the story is that ATM interfaces should be standardised to prevent more people like myself from experiencing the same crisis at the cash machine.

The Bold and the Beautiful

In my view, bold text is an under-used tool on the web writer's toolbox. I'm not sure why it isn't used more. Perhaps it's aesthetics?

Many of the websites I test could be dramatically improved with some well chosen emboldening.

Even when a page has a massive wall of text for the user to climb, emboldening a few key words can act as the rope to help them over it.

My favourite example comes from Business Link. The page explains the advantages and disadvantages of buying a franchise. It's very well written but the use of bold text allows you to pick up the main points quickly.

If you want your web writers to use bold text more often, then your design could do a couple of things to encourage it.

1. Hyperlinks should look clearly different to normal bold text. This could be by using a clearly different colour. If your hyperlink colour looks similar to bold text then underline your hyperlinks.
2. Sub-headings should be bigger than normal text. The impact of both paragraph headings and bold text are reduced when they both look the same.
   

If bold text clashes with hyperlinks or headings then content writers are less-inlcined to use them.

Firefox 3. Takes a bit of getting used to.

Let's face it, the majority of the thousands of improvements bundled into the latest version of Firefox will be pretty much transparent to the average user. Most of these changes involve honing the engine under the bonnet to make Firefox faster or closing security loopholes, many of which we were unaware of in the first place.

As an avid Firefox fan over the years, I've seen many UI changes come and go. In fact, I have known Firefox since it was originally called Phoenix (and subsequently Firebird) so it would take a dramatic change in the interface to get me overly excited.

In fact, the interface looks disappointingly similar to that of previous releases. Some users may argue that consistency is key, however when I download a new release of software, I want to be in no doubt that I am using the new version. Firefox 3 is perhaps slightly too subtle in that respect (compare it to the complete UI overhaul of Opera 9.5 and you'll see what I mean).

Where Firefox 3 comes into it's own is with the new 'Smart Location Bar'. Initially I am sure this will appear to many users as perhaps being slightly too smart for it's own good. It's certainly confusing in comparison to how the location bar used to function.

Previously the location bar would merely hold details of the URL's you had visited. Now, typing anything into the location bar will create a flurry of activity in a dropdown menu displaying any sites from your history or bookmark list which contain the selected text either in their web address or page content.

Initially this is quite annoying as even entering a few letters creates such a furious, ever changing number of options to pop up but once you start to alter your way of thinking, the benefits of such a tool become really apparent.

Say for instance you saw a pair of Merrill trainers on a page somewhere but can't remember where. Merely typing 'Merrill' into the location bar will bring up a list of sites from your history which contain the term 'Merrill' in the page, hopefully allowing you to find the site you previously visited. It's certainly a radical departure from the norm and time will tell how popular this is. Tellingly, there seems to be no option in the browser settings to disable this.

Much will be written about Firefox 3 in the coming days and weeks and it will take time using the software for any of us to get a true feel for whether it is an improvement. We should all be thankful though that the Mozilla Foundation still seem to be striving for improvement.

New online census must be on good form

BBC Scotland recently reported that for the first time since the census began, people will have the opportunity to complete the questionnaire online. This sounds like a great idea for many reasons, most notably, that it will cut down the volume of paper required and remove the need for people to scan paper questionnaires by hand. However, I hope that this journey into the digital world does not cause more problems than it solves. When I think of the last time the nation was asked to adopt a new way of providing information, the Scottish election in 2007 springs to mind. Although this system was still paper based, it does demonstrate the severe consequences that can occur when people are not given appropriate advice.

If the form is not designed with the users in mind, the results could mean inaccurate or incomplete data. Insufficient help and advice in completing the form could be a major reason for this happening. Good practice suggests that any form should clearly provide format assistance to the left of the field and provide advice throughout the process.
A consequence of not doing this effectively could mean that many people revert back to the old paper method.

The fact that the next census is still 3 years away is encouraging because this is adequate time to design and test the forms with users to pre-empt any possible issues that could arise BEFORE the system is rolled out.

In the article, Registrar General Duncan Macniven stated that the benefits of using such a system were provided by studying the approach of other countries. I just hope that they also study the problems that they encountered in order to avoid any future disasters.

Hilary Lister. Assistive technology in action.

Hilary Lister, a quadriplegic sailor from Kent, today sets out on a 3 month journey round the coastline of Britain and Ireland in her specially adapted sailing boat. Hilary, 36, will control the boat using a specially designed sip and puff mechanism and the journey looks like being a test of the adaptability of the technology and the determination of Hilary herself.

The full story can be found here.

In the accessibility industry we are used to thinking of assistive technology in very limited terms. I know that in my case, I never really considered the power of a simple sip and puff switch much beyond actually navigating a website. We can sometimes become blinkered and end up thinking of assistive technology purely in terms of navigating websites.

The overwhelming irony of Hilary's story is of course that whilst she may be able to navigate a rugged coastline in all weathers using this technology, many disabled people using similar assistive technology struggle to complete basic web forms or purchase goods over the internet. Not because of failings in the technology but failings in the way the site is built.

The creation of Hilary's purpose built boat was quite clearly an expensive project. Implementing basic web accessibility on the other hand is not. Accessibility audits regularly find the same issues across many different sites, with most of these issues requiring only a few simple tweaks to the underlying markup to make a major difference for disabled users and assistive technology.

Common issues include images missing alternative text, form fields without adequate labels and functionality which is lost when scripting is disabled or unavailable in the browser.

It certainly should make us all sit up and think that if something as complex and dangerous as navigating rough coastal waters can be made accessible then there is no excuse at all for providing your customers with an inaccessible web experience.

Who pays the price for poor usability? For air tickets it could be you!

There was an intriguing article I saw the other day in the free Metro newspaper that should sharpen the minds of regular online travel bookers. It seems that customers are being made to pay for their mistakes caused by the poor usability of airline websites.

According to the article “Passengers are being forced to foot the bill for mistakes made during online flight reservations – even if the fault is down to the airline.” It cites examples such as a father who bought four tickets but was told he must pay an extra £340 when it was discovered his name was on all four. He was refused a refund.

It is highly likely that the root cause of this man’s error, and similar ones, was an unusable interface or process that led him to submit such clearly incorrect details. The fact that airlines are not acknowledging mistakes caused by their websites, but rather pushing it back at the customers to pay for their mistakes is a sad state of affairs. Caveat emptor indeed!

This clearly is not going to help their customer relations and will likely leave the cause of the problem unresolved. To make matters worse, I would bet that in many cases the mistakes caused by the interface do not get reported back to the team maintaining and designing the website. This is the result of ‘silo ‘ effect, common in many businesses, where one team does not communicate potentially important information to another internal team. There are many reasons why this happens, but in my experience breaking down these internal barriers and enabling relevant information to be communicated is one of the most effective ways to institutionalise continuous usability improvement.

I book a lot of air and (preferably) rail travel for my job and can see the risk points in most booking processes. We also perform usability testing for a large global airline and other travel companies and I know that booking travel online can be very tricky especially for the less typical booking scenarios, such as postal and billing addresses being different, using discount vouchers, changing bookings, or booking tickets through air miles. I have made mistakes (such as selecting the wrong travel dates) but fortunately have managed to not be charged for these. I will try to be more careful in the future.

Just about the only way to justify the hardline stance that airlines seem to be taking to user mistakes is if they committed to invest the money they gained this way into improving the usability of their websites. Now that would be a radical approach.

National Express East Coast - online Numberwang

The National Express East Coast website has received a bit of stick recently from us usability folks. It has some nice features in my opinion. Not least the feature that allows you to play Numberwang when trying to make a change to your ticket.

The form for amending a journey asks for a ticket number. This seems like a pretty natural thing to ask for. But like me, a lot of people pick their tickets up from a FastTicket machine just before they travel. So we don't have a ticket number. This is where your Numberwang skills come in to play.

You can't get past the form without entering a ticket number and you can't change your ticket over the phone. So what do you do? I tried to put my booking reference number into the box, but it was too long. I also tried to leave it blank. No such luck.

When I phoned the nice people (and they are very nice) at National Express East Coast I was told to "simply" enter 12345 into the form field for the ticket number.

Now if I'd been a little better at Numberwang, I'd have had little problem. I blame myself.

The penny finally drops for accessible US paper currency

The US treasury is now strongly considering changing the size of paper currency after a sustained appeal and legal action from the blind and partially sighted community in America. A Federal appeals court supported the claims that the same size for $1, $5, $10 and higher denomination bills was a barrier for blind and partially sighted citizens and visitors, and it is likely that the printing presses will eventually be changed.

As an American citizen living in the UK, I can only say “It’s about time.” Even before becoming involved in accessibility & usability, I recall immediately seeing the sense in distinguishing bills with different sizes and colours the first time I saw British and European money. I remain impressed by this system every time I see blind users here or in Europe relatively easily distinguishing the right note for paying at a counter.

Even though blind and partially sighted Americans can employ workarounds with the current system (folding corners of their “greenbacks” or putting different denominations in different pockets are common strategies) it is still highly inconvenient and a con man’s dream.

Although no changes will happen before my next visit to the US (there is understandable inertia in changing the printing systems for the world’s biggest economy, not to mention the preceding legal tussles) I do look forward to seeing the different sizes and colours to the US Bills.

The importance of homepage usability design

After reading statements made by Jakob Neilsen in the BBC article ‘Web users are getting more ruthless’, I was surprised to hear that only 25% of people travel to a website via the homepage. With the power of search engines such as Google becoming ever more prominent, it seems obvious that any activity conducted online will involve a search engine at some point. As a direct result, visitors are empowered to navigate directly to the desired webpage and often bypass the homepage altogether. Following this news I began to wonder, is the usability of the homepage as important as it once was and are we focussing too much attention to this page if many people are unlikely to see it?

My thoughts are that the homepage is still important as it conveys a lot about the company it represents. Those visitors who may not initially see the homepage at the start of their journey will still regard it as the central point of navigation once deep inside the website and will therefore have expectations on how it should look and perform. Although 75% of visitors bypass the homepage, how many of those find what they are looking for on the page provided by the search engine? What do visitors do next when they cannot find what they are looking for? In this situation, navigation and homepage design become particularly important to visitors. Suggesting that more research is required to provide evidence to support or refute Nielsen’s claims.

In tests that User Vision have undertaken in the past, a different approach has been conducted to take into account a user’s journey to a website as well as their journey through the website. In these cases, participants were asked to start a task from a blank page or a search engine of their choice. Conducting usability tests in this way has been extremely beneficial because it increases the realism of the test and provides greater insight into the user journey. Although this method can add time to a test and a proportion of that time will inevitably be spent searching for the pages you are trying to test, overall the benefits make it worthwhile. In addition, the evidence from Neilsen supports the idea that testing in this way is becoming increasingly necessary. Therefore companies commissioning usability testing in the future should seriously consider allowing time to test in this way as it gives greater insights into how people find their site.