If you’re in the field of IA, UXA or usability, go take this quiz. I realize it’s over four years old, but everyone should know the answers to these questions. (Oh, and incidentally – if you get all these questions right and the extra credit as well, call me. My company is hiring people like you.)
(Note: I don’t intend to keep posting about my car, but Fate seems to have decided that my automobile will figure prominently in my thoughts these last few weeks.)
So this morning, I head outside on my way to work… my car is parked down the street from my apartment, perhaps a block away. As I’m approaching the car, I notice smashed glass bits, a mysteriously clear view into the front passenger side of the car, and a step or two later the rumaged contents of my glove box and arm-rest storage compartment tossed about the front seat, the steps leading into a nearby building, and the car parked behind me. I can’t ever really recall being vandalized before, but the feeling is a mixture of fear, anger, disappointment, dread and weariness… all in about 4 seconds.
Less than four hours later the front passenger-side window had been replaced, and I was merrily on my way. The “experience” has generally been a good one, considering. Which brings me to my point.
The folks at Progressive (my auto insurance co.) have got the “user experience” nailed down pat. The first thing I did when I got back into the house was call the Philadelphia Police. The next thing I did was call Progressive to report a claim. I’ve been through this process recently (busted an oil pan, my third, on a city pothole three weeks ago), so I kind of knew what to expect. But I was pretty rattled this morning, and the service rep on the phone handled things beautifully. In less than 30 minutes, the following had happened:
And 4 hours after that, I was merrily on my way, as if nothing had happened.
I’ve learned a couple of things from this experience:
I guess there are just some things in this world that I will never understand.
“There are 127 different things that can trigger that light.”
While waiting for my car to be inspected this morning, I overheard one of the service representatives telling someone on the phone that this is why she had to pay $75/hour just to have a mechanic figure out what was wrong with her car. This might seem excessive, but so does the alternative (in my mind) of placing 127 different indicator lights on the dashboard. But there has to be a middle ground.
What irks me most about my car and its system of warning lights is that they aren’t consistently helpful to me. When the Fuel Empty indicator comes on, I might reasonably be expected to pull over and get gas immediately. But I know from experience that I can, in fact, safely drive another 20-30 miles before my gas tank is actually empty. In that regard the system works well from a usability perspective: Inform users of errors, offer instructions on how to correct the error. “You’re almost out of gas, get some” the car is telling me. “Almost” is helpful here because experience has allowed me to learn what it means. Certainly I could stop and fill the tank right away, but I know that I don’t have to.
Compare this to the Check Engine light. When it comes on, there’s absolutely no information immediately available to help tell me what might actually be wrong. Checking in the owner’s manual as to its meaning, I find that the its illumination on my dashboard indicates that I should “take the car to the nearest service station” and have the problem checked out.
That’s just great. Prudence demands that I do so, but it would be FAR more helpful if the car offered me some context. The Check Engine is yellow, like the Fuel Empty, but there’s no indication of what it might mean to “almost have some engine trouble, get it checked.” Is my engine almost about to explode? Or is it just that my fuel-air mixture is a little high, and I might be using gas a little inefficiently? No context, no clue – no help.
Now I know that diagnosing engine trouble is no easy task, and I can appreciate the skill it takes to do so. I don’t expect the job to be automated such that my car will tell me “the engine seems to be misfiring, perhaps you need new sparkplugs.” But a little contextual information, beyond the simple red-yellow color coding (red usually means “pull the car over and have it towed”) seems appropriate.
Does anyone know of a car that currently does this? Does anyone have sufficient experience with automotive diagnostic tools to offer an opinion as to whether or not I’m asking too much? Really, all I want my car to say is something like “based on what’s indicated, there’s a 5/50/90% chance that your car will stop running if you don’t have this fixed right now”. Given even that small, and relatively imprecise estimate of the severity of the situation, I’d be much better equipped to make the call on my own.
Past personal experience has led me to the somewhat unoriginal conclusion that, although they are sometimes very elegant and useful, drop-down menus (or cascading menus) on web pages are problematic, for three reasons:
And so now comes this study suggesting that users prefer an all-text, always-visible “index” style menu system, despite the fact that it takes up an order of magnitude more screen real estate.
But I have my doubts about the study. First of all, even though task participants were able to complete their objective quicker using an index-style layout than either of the cascading layouts, I find the assertion that a 8.5 second difference in task completion time (over the course of a 3-4 minute total completion time) is significant to be somewhat misleading. Yes, statistically this is a significant difference in raw task completion time, and yes, combined with a higher perceived ease of use index among participants this is important.
But in trying to leverage this kind of research when making a case for one type of navigation over the other, this is a weak leg to stand on. We’re talking about an improvement in task efficiency of about 3%. (Unless I’m reading their results wrong.) If this were the last 3% of efficiency improvements I was going to be able to extract out of a software system, I would be more inclied to make the argument that drop-down menus are verbotten. But given that they can, in my experience, be implemented elegantly, I’d rather make the effort to get them to work better than to discard them completely.
“But after all the careful planning, the masterminds were undone, the authorities claim, when they threw bags with compromising material into a ditch alongside the highway.”
- THEFT OF THE CENTURY, The Straits Times
Why, pray-tell, would a thief meticulous enough to spend two years planning a jewel heist leave “compromising materials” in a bag by the side of the road? I can think of only two reasons: 1) to taunt the police or 2) to frame someone else.
