User Experience (UX) conjures up notions of surround-sound web surfing, with the users’ senses being stimulated in a luxuriant and fluid way, as they do whatever it is they enjoy doing.

In reality, however, this nirvana of web experience is often one where the user is subjected to a frustrating and trying encounter with a poorly designed website – poorly designed from a usability perspective that is. It can look great, but still be wonky and clunky to use.

Don’t Make Me Think

The title of Steve Krug’s book on the subject sums up the goal of usability in 4 words. This is his First Law of Usability.  A website scores highly in the usability stakes if the users don’t have to think about what they’re trying to do, where they’re supposed to click, how to navigate through, how to get back out again etc.

Web journey

A website shouldn’t be like a Las Vegas casino where users get trapped – shortly after coming in they’re lost and can’t find their way out again. The exit is signed, but is deliberately obscure. It may work for casinos, but your audience probably aren’t there for the weekend and are trying to achieve something. Your mission is to make it as easy as possible to achieve that goal – without having to stop and think about which way to go, or get lost down a cul-de-sac.

A few of the things to put on your web usability checklist include:

• Navigation – keep it clear & consistent throughout the site.
• What’s clickable – Buttons and links should be obvious.
• What’s it about – a clear title for each page should indicate the content.
• Scannable content – users scan text and pick out keywords of interest – make sure the keywords are there.
• Forms – brevity is the good (do you need to know the dog’s name?).
• Search box – help them find what they want, they’ll stay longer.
• Above the fold – keep the ‘call to actions’ on the top half of the page.
• Test in various browsers – which ones are your users likely to use?
• Create online-specific content – a pdf of an offline brochure, which takes ages to load and is hard to read (it’s one of my pet hates).

Sites like Amazon.co.uk have the user in mind all the time. Their web journey from beginning to end is without stumbling blocks. (My only quibble with them is they default the currency to Euro, when it’s often cheaper to purchase in Sterling as the credit card company’s conversion rate is more advantageous than Amazon’s.)

On the other hand, the user experience on the site of car clampers NCPS is less pleasant. The Appeals page is initially easy to find on the top navigation bar and the persistent navigation is good. But then it all falls apart as the user (I can’t really say customer!) is faced with a large message in red telling them to use Internet Explorer. This doesn’t inspire confidence in the technology. Firefox and other browser users have to open up IE to carry on with their web journey.

Then the Buttons ( ‘Email Us’, ‘Fine Details’ and ‘View Evidence’) don’t work. So the user doesn’t know what to do now. If you back to the first Appeals page there’s a link to www.webappeals.ie, but if the user tries this it redirects to the page they’re already on. So they do it again, in case they made a mistake. In the end the user gives up and looks for a Contact heading on the navigation bar and sends them an email.

All in all a poor experience. Though it’s in keeping with the poor NCPS experience of being clamped on the school run outside Monkstown Educate Together National School while picking up my 5 year-old (who cried at the upset).

If you want to see other ‘poor’ experiences of contact with NCPS head on over to Brightspark-Consulting.

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