USiT blog

We're a bit light on this week, we must be busy :)

These are your users, read and be horrified

(contributed by Melissa)

Over on UX Magazine, Jonathan Anderson tells the story of the "RWW Facebook login" debacle...

ReadWriteWeb recently published an article titled Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login. Being an interesting, timely article, it rose to the top of Google searches for "Facebook login." Then: chaos and confusion. Lots and lots of the people who use Google instead of their browser's address bar to access sites began confusing the ReadWriteWeb link with a link to Facebook itself, and began posting angry comments wondering why Facebook had been redesigned and asking when they'd be allowed to log in again.

...and then makes the link to the vox-pops video showing "users" don't really know what browsers or search engines are, nor the difference between them. It's like Funniest Home Videos for UX professionals! (Part of me thinks UX vox-pops are genius, the rest of me recognises they are cruel and embarrassing. Watch the video and enjoy lulz.)

Capturing storytelling on video (like Clint Eastwood!)

(contributed by Pat)

Shawn Callahan from Anecdote shares some tips for capturing stories on video:

A few nights ago I watch Changeling starring Angelina Jolie. It's directed by Clint Eastwood (has he ever directed a dud movie?) and I was fascinated by a short documentary we found in the DVD extras where Clint explained why he never calls out 'Action' when directing a scene. As an actor Clint found a director's call to 'Action' off putting. He was immediately reminded that he was an actor, acting and his performance suffered. Instead Clint calmly and quietly says things like, "OK, in your own time ..." or "when you are ready ..."

Simple but useful tips from a guy who knows a lot about getting stories out of people. It's an increasingly popular method of getting under the skin of an issue (the storytelling...or technically story listening) but getting candid video of the story is also being used more and more. It's a great form or emotive/persuasive communication and I'd really like to start producing more little video snippets to share with our internal clients.

John Timmer over at ars technica reports that Fake popup study sadly confirms most users are idiots. Here's a taste:

Some researchers have tested how college students respond to fake dialog boxes in browser popup windows and found that the students are so anxious to get the dialog out of the way, they click right through obvious warning signs...

...Follow-up questions revealed that the students seemed to find any dialog box a distraction from their assigned task; nearly half said that all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs. The results suggest that a familiarity with Windows dialogs have bred a degree of contempt and that users simply don't care what the boxes say anymore.

This is interesting, though not that unexpected. We know that when performing specific tasks on a website, users are focused on this to be point of not noticing or ignoring things that would normally be obvious.

There are two take-aways I can think of from this. Firstly if you need to present users with important information in the midst of a task, you'll need to go to great lengths to properly get their attention, and secondly that things like ads and 'promotional features' are unlikely to be noticed let alone comprehended when users are in this task mode.