Rule #1. Don’t frustrate your readers.
Rule #2. Don’t make your users mad.
Rule #3. Make sure stuff works.

Or you can do what two extremely big sites did today that frustrated and angered its users.

Scenario #1: A huge travel site, which shall remain nameless, had a problem with its payment form. Every time I filled out the form, it errored out saying that I had failed to supply the 3-digit security code found on the back of my credit card. However, there was no place on the form to actually type that in. After many failed attempts, a different browser showed the form field - but only if you typed into that field before any other field. If you attempted to fill out any other field first (you know, like the first field you come to), the security code field disappeared. Much hair was pulled out before that was discovered.

Scenario #2: A huge greetings / ecards site caused me a ton of frustration tonight, and it will likewise cause someone else a lot of confusion tomorrow. A good friend of mine has a birthday tomorrow, so I selected an ecard, filled out the form to personalize it, told the site to send it tomorrow, and clicked the Send button. Nothing happened. I did it again. And again. And then pressed Enter. And again. Then hit the tab key a few times until the Send button was highlighted and pressed Enter again. Well, you get the idea. I kept trying and trying and trying. Then I noticed my email inbox lighting up with lots of email messages, so I checked my email. What did I discover? The ecard was sent out with each and every attempt, despite the fact that it looked as though nothing was happening. So, I spent a few minutes of my time getting highly frustrated, and tomorrow, my friend is going to wonder why the heck I sent him the same birthday ecard umpteen times.

Neither of these things should have happened. The travel site has lost several customers now, because neither I nor anyone in my family will use that service again. I may use the ecard service again, but I’ll definitely be looking for another option as well. Either way, it’s not just me that was frustrated. These sites have millions of users. Imagine all the frustrated people encountering the same problems.

Now, neither you nor I are likely to have sites that are as big as those two, so anything we manage to mess up probably won’t frustrate millions of people. But our users, no matter how many there are, are extremely important to us. Our sites are nothing without our users.

Do your best to try your site in a variety of situations, on as many different operating systems as possible, and within the various browsers that will be used. I know how difficult it can be to make sure everything works for everyone, and sometimes sacrifices just have to be made, but at least make the decisions consciously. Don’t just assume things work, when in reality, your users are getting frustrated and angry because your site or one of its features doesn’t work for them.

By the way, there’s a word for all of this. It’s called usability. If you want to know more about making sure your site or blog is usable, you should subscribe to Kim Krause-Berg’s blog. She’s a usability master. Here’s a link to the usability category of her blog. I’ll touch on usability now and then, but you can get much more detailed information about it from her.

(from Smash Mouth. "AllStar" Astro Lounge. Interscope Records, 1999.)

Posted on November 2nd, 2007 by DazzlinDonna
Filed under: Usability