The sorry state of usability
We just finished up a round of usability testing on our site at work. It was incredibly frustrating in many ways. Watching person after person unable to complete the most simple task … I wanted to jump through the 1 way mirror and shake them:Â JUST CLICK ON THE LEFT NAV, dammit! Frustrating because although I wanted to blame the testees, I know that it’s really our problem.
It was also very illuminating. I saw many things that clickpath analysis (even super detailed clickpath like Tealeaf) just wouldn’t and couldn’t show. And many things that really explain what it does show.
But what really struck me as odd was that after struggling with our site for an hour every person said “I like that site, it was pretty easy to use” or something similar. If those were good experiences, I shudder to think what a bad experience is like.
I think usability is something that’s very often overlooked in favour of over-zealous adherence to tickbox web accessibility standards. Too many people fail to realise that “accessibility” in this particular context doesn’t really mean that the site is accessible to the general user as a visitor experience. It’s also surprising how many things can be easily overlooked by the tech savvy developer, things that I think are simple and obvious clearly aren’t when I get a web novice to evaluate the site for me. As a simple example of a wider problem, on my homepage I used to have no “Home” menu button because I thought it was obvious and common practice that one could reach the homepage by clicking on the main logo…but that wasn’t the case when it came to testing it with less experienced web users.