Professional PHP » Usability

Watchng my Grandmother use Software

Jeff — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 00:44:18 +0000

I just got back from helping my grandmother with her computer. We got her an iMac and she uses Apple’s Mail program pretty effectively. Watching her use Mail is a real education in software usability. I’ve written before about some problems she had with mail. Apple has pretty much fixed every problem except one.

If you start composing an Email message and your dialup connection is disconnected while composing, even if you reconnect before hitting send, that email can not be sent. Somehow Mail associates it with the wrong status, caches some sort of stale DNS or status information. The email goes into your outbox and Mail refuses to deliver it, ever. It does bring up a cryptic message when it tries, even though there is no reason Mail could not deliver the message. The solution is to go into your outbox, double click on the email and manually hit send again.

Unfortunately, this is too much for my grandmother. She can never quite remember how to fix this problem. It happens frequently enough to be really annoying, but not frequently enough to learn the work around.

So I went over again today and unconstipated her outbox. She said “Let me write down how to do that.” However, sitting next to the computer were the instructions for doing it from the last time this happened and she wrote it down. I really hope Apple fixes this usability issue in the next OS release.

Even the Big Guys Get Validation Wrong

Jeff — Thu, 13 May 2004 12:46:17 +0000

I ordered a computer for someone from Dell last night. When I got to the end of the order, I mistyped a digit on the credit card number and the form was redisplayed with an “invalid credit card number” error. I added spaces between the digits (as they appear on the card) to check the number. Sure enough, one digit was wrong. I re-submitted, but the “invalid card number” error remained. I was sure the card was valid and that I typed in the correct number. After a little experimenting, it turns out that the order form could not handle the spaces that I added. The person I was ordering the computer for was looking over my shoulder and said that he would have never figured out to remove the spaces. I wonder how many people enter their credit card numbers as XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX, just as it appears on the card.

(P.S. Dell seems to be a master at “Do you want fries with that?”)

Sometimes Plain Text is Best

Jeff — Wed, 05 May 2004 02:20:45 +0000

Boing Boing featured a drop down from hell last week. Is a mega enumeration like this really necessary? Why not use a simple text field?

I find drop down boxes with years to be one of the saddest examples of enumeration overkill. I can type my birth date far faster than I can select it from a scrolling drop down crammed full of a hundred years. States are almost as bad. I’ll take a two letter MI in a text field against a fifty element select tag any day. I can type USA pretty fast, too. I bet most people can type their address elements pretty quickly if their browser autofill doesn’t beat them to it.

Don Norman includes Microsoft Outlook date handling in his cavalcade of good design for its ability to parse dates from arbitrary text.

In the comments to Building the Recipe Web, Troy Hakala talks about their efforts to natural language parse recipes for the recipezar site:

We (Recipezaar) wrote a natural language recipe parser to make this possible and it?s a difficult job. It took us 3 years to write it! Recipes are far more complicated than you might think, believe it or not. And a natural language recipe parser is not trivial software, which is why no other recipe web site has done this except for Recipezaar.

Text field parsing: harder to program, better for users?