Web users suffer from the fall The web is bad and it's getting worse, says Jack Schofield Thursday March 21, 2002 The Guardian
The web is bad now, and it is getting worse. Every day, the gap between what people want and what the web offers gets wider. Usability experts call it "the customer experience gap". Azeem Azhar, from Go Albert UK, who worked on Online in its early days, explains it this way: "Ten years ago, every web user was a physicist at Cern, and every web site was plain text. Today, sites are much more complicated, and users are much less sophisticated."
Experts tell me that website designers should be making their sites more usable every day, because of the number of inexperienced users still coming on to the web. But are they? Of course not. Everybody who uses the web knows that a lot of sites are actually getting worse. Partly this is because of the increasing use of Macromedia Flash, Java and other effects that mostly get in the way.
Partly it is because so many sites are increasingly catering to their advertisers, at the expense of their users. For example, any sensible designer - a number that must be in double figures - sends users the text as quickly as possible, because the text usually has the information they want. Nowadays, they often hold up the whole page while a useless pop-up advertisement is fetched from some absurdly slow server.
There's 30 years of computer usability research to prove that the user experience is dramatically better if the system responds in less than a second. Given that, by this measure, the web is already too slow, it is insane to make it even slower by making users wait for a pop-up that most will close in less than a second anyway. It just drives users away.
Although some sites have improved slightly by eliminating frames that should not have been there in the first place, many of those same sites have got much worse because their designers do not know how to use cascading style sheets correctly. One common result is blocks of microscopic type that the average user has no way of making larger and, therefore, legible. (If View|Text Size| Larger has no noticeable effect on your site, fire the designer.)
The situation is so bad that I no longer bother with many of the sites I visited regularly last year, and following Hotmail's horrid redesign, I'm dropping it as quickly as possible. I've also stopped using an e-commerce site, because it is badly designed and its search engine is almost useless. Now the novelty has worn off, I can admit it's easier just to phone in my usual order.
This sort of experience suggests that the majority of web designers simply don't have a clue about usability. It is like watching the early days in the development of flying machines. Well, first you design something that looks good - probably something that looks a lot like a bird. Then you try to fly, by jump ing off a cliff. On the web, alas, it is the users, not the designers, who suffer the effects of the fall. Things would obviously be a lot better if companies did usability testing, which means watching and recording what real users do. However, the real secret is to work out the usability issues before you design the site.
If you haven't developed an aerodynamic shape for the wings, there's really not much point in designing the plane, let alone arguing about whether horizontal stripes make the fuselage more attractive, and whether they should be blue or red. Rik Pipe from UserMetrics, a usability company spun off from the University of Warwick, reckons that fewer than 1% of websites get any real usability testing. And as he points out, this is more of a problem on the net than it is with consumer products.
The user interfaces on your mobile phone and VCR may be appalling, but you probably didn't find out until you had already bought them. On the internet, the user experience comes first. "See it, like it, fail to buy it," says Pipe. Web life is measured in abandoned shopping trolleys. And with e-commerce sites, a couple of thousand pounds in usability research can go a long way.
Pipe and his colleague Miles Hunter tell of a building society site where 80% of purchasing attempts failed, and the solution was to change two words on a menu to read "apply here". The research more than paid for itself in one weekend. Designers typically spend hours worrying about the type faces used, the precise colour of the background, and whether a button is one or two pixels too far to the left, but the fact that the site doesn't actually work rarely seems to bother them. And until somebody wakes up to this brutal truth, companies are pouring billions down the drain, and making the web a worse place for all of us.
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