Not Waving But Drowning

Stevie Smith’s poem “Not Waving But Drowning” is a brilliant example of how perception completely changes a situation.  You see someone far out in the water waving; you wave back.  In reality, that someone is really trying to get your attention because they are drowning.  That is a colossal misunderstanding.

What could have helped eliminate the confusion in this situation?  Being close enough to hear the person would have helped you interpret the gesturing.  Addressing more than one of your senses is a good approach when trying to communicate. 

This same axiom can be applied to user interface design.  Sometimes the placement and presentation of a feature isn’t enough to convey how it is to be used.  Sometimes including some well-place text can help explain how to do something. 

What do you do if that is not enough?  What if the feature is really complex and users need more help?  You can assume that they will read the documentation, but that requires knowing where to find the doc and wading through documents to find what they need.  Unless finding that information is critical to the job at hand, people aren’t going to do that.

What other options do you have?  How about some field-level help?  An icon near the feature which serves as a link to more detail could address the use of that more complex feature.  That link could also take a user to a recorded simulation which demonstrates how to use the feature.

You always have options.  You just have to invest some time to make things clear for your users and keep them from misinterpreting your signals. 

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The Power of User Feedback

Even if you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard someone complaining about the recent changes to the Facebook interface.  Imagine what the outcry would be like if people actually paid to use Facebook?!?!

When you are developing or modifying the user interface of your application or site, you want to make sure that the majority of your users/customers will embrace the new design and effortlessly adapt to a new way of doing something.   

So, how do you please all the people all the time?  You don’t.  However, you can please some of the people.  To do that, you need to give up some control and show your users or potential users what you’ve done and where you are headed.  Sounds kind of scary, but it’s even scarier to waste time and resources going in one direction only to find that the people who ultimately pay the bills don’t even want to go there.

Most software companies have some sort of user acceptance testing phase in their plan.  This does add time to the development cycle, but spending the time is crucial if you want to win and retain customers.

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Everyone Lives a Minimum of Three Lives

Chuck Palahniuk opens his book Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon, with this sentence:

"EVERYONE IN PORTLAND is living a minimum of three lives, says Katherine Dunn, the author of Geek Love."

I think, regardless of location, most people are many things to many contexts.  You may be a truck driver who is a writer who also likes to paint.  You may be a mother who is a gamer who also likes Renaissance fairs. 

This many lives concept inspired my Twitter profile – Artist, Writer, Adventurer.  This week, however, I feel like I’m more Technical Writer, Blog Reader, Software User.  Within the span of two days, the topic of error messages has crossed my radar while working with a team to improve error messages, while reading Seth Godin’s blog, and while getting an error message as a user.  In all three instances, it was apparent that no part of me liked the feedback that software was giving me. 

So what do I/we want from our error messages?  I want an explanation with a clue to the resolution.  Telling me that there is an error is fine, but what am I supposed to do with that information?  The error I was getting this week as a user was missing that clue to resolution.  The message read, “An error has occurred. Blahbity blah is checking for errors.”  Then the program restarted.  It was quite apparent that an error had occurred because the program froze and stopped working.  The error message served no purpose other than telling me what I already knew.  Annoying!

The focus of the developers writing the code isn’t to help the user resolve the issue.  They are concerned with ensuring that the application stops whatever process isn’t working and to alert the user that things have halted.  To Seth’s point in his blog, an error message should not be cryptic.  We’ve all seen errors which only contain numbers.  Those numbers must map to something somewhere, but are meaningful only in the development group.  So to get away from the cryptic, many developers have opted for the vague.  This is as helpful as “Error 641 has occurred.”

How do companies appease the three people living in my head?  Get someone outside of Development to review all the error messages in an application and don’t bother telling people things they already know unless you are going to help them resolve their problem.

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Making a Good First Impression

A website or application is like a restaurant kitchen that is visible to its diners.  If the kitchen and its staff aren’t clean and kept that way, it won’t matter how good the food is; people won’t eat there.

Nothing turns a site user off more than paragraphs of text, misspelled words, and poor grammar.  These are all signs that the people running the place don’t really care about you and your experience.  They are just trying to fulfill orders and collect money from customers.

While the consequences of not having time to clean equipment in a kitchen are obviously more dire than misspelled words and poor grammar on a website, the result is similar; your customers won’t trust you to do complex things if you can’t do the basic ones.

Here is a quick list to ensure that your site text is ready for guests:

• Spell check…spell check….spell check.  Did I mention spell check?
  This seems like a no brainer, but it is so simple that it’s often overlooked.
• Get rid of unnecessary words, like Please and Simply.
  Pretend that you are paying per word or tweeting. 
• Try to avoid words or phrases which reference location, like “in the fields below”, “on the form below”.  Explanatory text should be visually grouped with the stuff it references.
• Avoid acronyms, abbreviations, and contractions.
• Think about where sentences or lines of text break and what that does to readability.  If a few words are forced to a second line of text, think about rewriting to keep everything on one line.

Doing these things won’t instantly make your site the best in the land, but your users will stick around long enough to let your site be judged on its own merit.


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Decisions...Decisions

Applying the principals of user-centered design to your application or website is just another of those things you know you SHOULD do, but you don’t always make the time or spend any resources to do it.  You know what I’m talking about, oil changes every 3,000 miles, going to the gym, eating at home instead of going out to eat.  

These are the kinds of things that people with unlimited resources and loads of free time don’t really have to think about.  They don’t have to prioritize their day and scrutinize their budgets to include those things in their lives.

You SHOULD be able to think about how and why users will thoroughly embrace your app or site and come back time and time again, but that isn’t the most important thing on your list.  You have deadlines to manage and functionality to implement and test.  If things don’t work and they aren’t delivered on time, it won’t matter if it’s easy to use or easy on the eyes, right?  Well, yeah, if you want to be technical about it.  But what if it were possible to deliver the features on time AND have users stick around without requiring training and interaction with your support team?  Sound too good to be true?

It’s not really that far-fetched.  Just like most solutions, you just have to know where to look.  The need for the service that Site Blink provides is becoming more and more apparent to companies who want to set themselves apart from the pack.  As the user community has become more savvy, the bar has been raised, and companies have to deliver functionality on time and do it better than everyone else.

So the question becomes, can you afford to ignore the needs of your users when designing your app or site?

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More Than Just a Pretty Face

Even though you can survive eating candy and pretty pastries, your brain and body needs more sustenance to thrive and flourish.  The same can be said for the interface needs of your customers.  Flashy graphics and a cool logo only go so far.  At some point, your website or application needs meaningful content and thoughtful design to help your customers get the job done.

Nothing turns people off more quickly than misspelled words, bad grammar, or confusing directions.  When this happens, you lose the trust of your audience.  If you cannot even get those things right, how could anything else be accurate?

Regardless of the size of your company, you probably have a few people who are confident enough to proofread and edit the content in a website or application.  When deadlines loom and code reviews monopolize calendars, the last thing on the collective mind is whether the directions and field labels on a particular page are accurate and concise.   

How do you get around this?  You can either hire dedicated resources to handle this part of the development process or contract the work out to someone else.  If your company had the resources to hire everyone you needed, you probably would already have on staff a Human Factors Engineer, a Content Specialist, and a User Interface Designer, right?  So, that leaves you with the option of handing off these tasks to someone else.

Finding that someone could be a bit daunting.  Site Blink is that someone.  You tell us how much help you need, and we will figure out how to best help you create the sustenance your customers need while building and retaining their trust.  It is a tall order but one that Site Blink is confident in helping you fill.


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