sinéad's lifestream

I seem to be in a minority group that sees the potential that the new twitter re-tweet function brings. For someone that has worked on a method of highlighting Irish tweets for the benefit of non-twitter users and anyone offline for a long period of time, it’s possible that I’m able to see the potential a little more clearly.

The biggest benefit of the new retweet function is how it adds a method of highlighting localised trends. If 20 of your twitter friends retweet the same message you won’t see it 20 times, but you’ll see 20 “likes” beneath it instead, giving weight to the content of the message. It also stops your stream being diluted by the same message over and over again, which can be frustrating. And at the end of the day, if you’ve not had much time to use twitter you’ve got the “retweets” section to conveniently show you the highlights you’ve missed from your own personal stream that day.

The retweet feature also takes into consideration attribution; the original composer of the tweet appears in your stream and this is a wonderful way of discovering new twitter users. In essence it’s a solution to the fix @replies issue twitter had, everyone was so angry that they wouldn’t have an organic method of discovering new users to follow, now you do.

The other great thing about retweets is that it adds an extra dimension to keeping track of the tweets YOU find most interesting. If like me you use the favorite feature in twitter for something else entirely than the ability to view “retweets by you” will help keep track of the tweets you found important enough to share.

Overall I’ve enjoyed watching the evolution of the service and will continue to do so. I find it most interesting how, just like with Facebook users, change is scary and new but after awhile everyone gets used to it and moves on to being mad about something else entirely.

I posted my initial thoughts about blog navigation here and from it came a survey that asked some simple questions such as “On a scale of 1 to 5 how easy do you think navigating a blog is?”. In total there were 47 respondents, directed to the survey via my blog, Twitter and Facebook (the sample could be considered an experienced group of Internet users).

Obviously from the results above none of the survey respondents indicated that navigating a blog was very difficult. However I would consider the most interesting statistic from the survey that 30% think it’s neither difficult OR easy, and 9% think it’s difficult. It would have been quite easy to assume that a majority would consider navigating a blog to be very easy, which isn’t the case. It’s surprising considering the high possibility that the survey respondants were experienced users.

The other 4 question results, and comments from bloggers/readers are discussed below. Continue Reading

This is a follow-up to my previous post regarding how easy or how hard it might be for internet users to navigate standard blog designs.

To help answer the question I’ve created a short 5 question survey, which I’d be delighted if you would fill out. I’ll keep it open for a week and post the results here and provided some commentary. If you have anything you’d like to add on the topic of blog navigation and design, please add your comments here.

I’d never known anyone to keep chickens out their back garden, until a good friend of mine did just that. She’s now the proud owner of 6 gorgeous little characters who don’t seem to want to lay any eggs. I had suggested to her that she should blog her experience, a challenge that she quickly undertook.

The first few blog posts came faster than I expected and even included photos of the girls. Though she has always been slightly more technical than most, she did manage to bork the blog as soon as I took my eye of it. For some reason she went and turned all of her blog posts into pages, in the process breaking the theme she was using, as it could only handle 3 short page names/links in the navigation.

The next time I visited I offered to show her how to fix the blog (let’s just say she’s still in the process of fixing it). I asked her about changing the posts to pages and she explained “My blog posts we’re appearing in the menu” and when I explained to her about the linear nature of blogging she asked “How would anyone know that my other blog posts were there?” It was then my task to explain how categories and tagging worked, but this surprised me because I knew that she was an avid blog reader and internet user.

It was then that I began truly questioning the usability of blog navigation. We assume that readers are using tags and categories as navigational tools, but what if they’re really stumbling through the content, using the awkward archives and calendar tools? Or simply reading from finish to start? If a user enters a blog via a google search can they successfully navigate back to the home page? If every blog has its own list of different categories, how do users know where to look? Is your blog taxonomy even understood?

I recently read, on the iQcontent blog, about how visually impaired users must listen to every piece of navigation on a webpage with their screen-readers. This immediately made me wonder about the persistent nature of blogrolls, how they feature on the majority of blogs and on every single page. Are they successful at getting hits for other members of your blogosphere? Or are they just social badges, worn to show off your affiliations?

Blogs make it easier for everyone to publish to the net, but does this, in turn, make navigating the web harder for everyone else? This is something that requires further investigation, especially considering that there is a shift occurring online where entire websites are being replaced by blogs. But are they in fact borking the entire web?

Last night I was reminded why it’s important for web and software designers to incorporate user testing into the design process. This should even apply to those experienced designers at Google, that seem to have overlooked some basic principles of good design in the Gmail user interface.

Bad Error Messages

A family member was struggling with a basic task in Gmail. Sending an email. Attached to this email were a number of high quality digital photos. When they attempted to send this email the following error message was displayed.

The immediate reaction from the user was to try again, and again, each time the same error message appeared, and again, until finally the task was abandoned all together.

The reason this could be considered a bad error message is because it stranded the user, it told them a problem had occurred but did not explain how to fix it. From an experienced user’s perspective it might seem obvious to us that the email attachments had exceeded the 20mb limit imposed by Gmail. To an inexperienced user this information is not available. Yes, it’s available on one of the Gmail help sections. But as demonstrated by the user, they abandoned the task without even considering that there could be a solution.

By simply creating a link to this troubleshooting page from within the error message it would be one step towards a more usable design. A step further would be to provide the information in the error message itself. If the system can tell you the error code, surely it can advise you on a course of action.

Gmail has been in beta, and in development for many years now. Perhaps they should take a step backwards and resolve its basic usability issues before crowding the interface with even more features.

Journal of CyberPsychology & Behavior, Vol 11, No.4: The current issue of this bimonthly journal offers access to research studies on topics such as public and private self-consciousness on social networking sites, online consumer trust, adolescent behaviour online, interactive movies, product placement in gaming, and cyberbullying.

Psychological Aspects of Cyberspace: Theory, Research, Applications: This blog contains each individual chapter from the newly published book of the same name. Readers are invited to read each chapter and comment or ask questions of the individual writers. Topics covered include privacy and trust online, internet abuse, flow states, cybertheraputic theory and techniques and sexual activities online. It’s wonderful to see an entire book on the topic of Cyberpsychology readily available online and open to discussion. Very much looking forward to reading all of these chapters.

For your eyes only: Custom interfaces make computer clicking faster, easier: University of Washington engineers discuss a new approach to software design. They propose that instead of standard off the shelf user interface designs, that by putting the user through a brief skills test a mathematically-based version of the user interface could be generated that is optimized for the user’s vision and motor abilities. This research is especially important for the disabled, elderly or anyone that has difficulty using a computer mouse.

The Effects of Background Television on the Toy Play Behavior of Very Young Children: This research study found that background television, disrupts very young children’s play behavior even when they pay little overt attention to it and even when tuned to adult themed shows. Background television was found to cause short play episode lengths, which are a marker for poor developmental outcome. These findings are important because play is directly related to healthy cognitive and social development. Related Article: TV Really Might Cause Autism

Internet users refuse to put up with intrusive ads: From 1000+ internet users sampled 59% indicated that they had stopped visiting a website because of irrelevant, annoying and intrusive online ads (including pop-ups that cover web content, loud noises and ads that were difficult to close, minimise or click away from). This study relates back to my own undergraduate research on pop-up advertisements, where I found that the more experienced a user the more likely they are to actively attempt to remove pop-ups from their online experience. Web designers need to start paying attention to research and surveys such as these, or as demonstrated, users will stop visiting certain websites completely.

If anyone has anything they’d like to contribute to the next digest, or related articles for this volume, feel free to drop me a comment or an e-mail – Sinéad.

Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3
Volume 4

The PermanentTSB website won a Golden Spider back in 2005 and since then hasn’t really changed it’s overall site design, infact, it has been virtually the same since 2002. A heuristic evalution of the site (undertaken in the Human Computer Interaction module of the MSc in Cyberpsychology) easily leads me to believe that it is in dire need of a redesign (yet their more recently launched “Yourmortgage.ie” is almost a replica of the main site). Out of a possible 23 heuristics, it only fully complied with 12 of them – meaning the site is littered with design inconsistencies, broken links, very clearly deviates from the current standard web practices (PDF files? really?) etc., etc.

It’s just another fine example of Irish web design firmly stuck in web 1.0. The .ie domain is virtually (no pun intended!) littered with them. I’m sure there are plenty more examples of badly designed Irish sites (not necessarily .ie) and would be thrilled to hear everyone’s own personal “favorites”.

Eircom.net is another firm favorite of mine for its sensational orange menu with white text, and dark grey text on a grey background for its sub-menu. Wonderful stuff.