Summer Reading - Usability Articles

We've been doing some summer reading on usability, in particular checking out User Interface Engineering. Their articles on the Three-Click Rule, the usefulness of an advanced search, and whether there are users who always search are all interesting.

A quick summary of the articles ...

Testing the Three-Click Rule

The most interesting bit for me was:

"Users weren't any more satisfied with shorter clickstreams than they were with longer clickstreams. The satisfaction of users doesn't depend on the number of clicks."

Read the Article >

Are There Users Who Always Search?

What we say and what we do being completely different things...

"we found that there wasn't a single user out of 30 who always used the search engine first when looking for product information. None of the users in our study were search dominant. However, we did uncover some link-dominant users. About 20% of our participants chose links exclusively."

And:

"We also noticed that users often gravitated to the search engine when the links on the page didn't satisfy them in some way. For a long time, we've observed that users seem to use the search engine as a fallback after failing to pick up "scent" on the home page. Our recent study gave us more evidence to support this behavior. We observed many home-page link failures that forced users into the search engine. "

Read the Article >

Evolution Trumps Usability Guidelines

Most interesting for me ...

"Following Untested Guidelines Possibly Harmful Unfortunately, three outcomes result from testing uidelines. The guideline, when followed, either predicts success, doesn't have any effect on success, or, (the worst case scenario) makes the site harder to use."

"For example, one published Search guideline is "Provide a clearly marked link to Advanced Search". From this guideline, we hypothesized that users who found Advanced Search would succeed more often than those who didn't. However, in our data, we found that users who utilized advanced search rarely found their desired content. Use of advanced search functionality actually predicts failure of the task."

Read the Article >

If you'd like any help with usability issues, or would benefit from some usability testing on your website please don't hesitate to ask - contact russ -at- katipo.co.nz -
04-934 1285

Posted by: Rachel -at- katipo.co.nz