Unsought Input

A couple of weeks ago the esteemed Mr. Wallz mentioned that Radiohead was giving their next album away for free - sort of. The deal is that you can pay any amount you want for the MP3 version, from $0 on up. They are not going through iTunes or Amazon or anyone else and are selling direct from the album’s website.

I went, I bought, I listened. The verdict? Good album, incredibly terrible website. Seriously, the site looks and acts like something that crawled from the depths of 1998, escaping some doomed graphic artist’s college portfolio and wreaking havok on unsuspecting downloaders everywhere.

Here’s a screenshot of the registration screen. Too many fields, and too many required fields. Do they really need my mobile phone number?

Yes, the entire web site looks like that. It’s like someone asked their 4-year old to draw a rainbow in Microsoft Paint and then saved and re-saved it as a jpeg 100 times.

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A few months ago I was looking at blood sugar meters and cholesterol testers for family members.  I have had my blood tested for various things throughout my life and I’ve seen the standard drugstore-issue glucose monitors in action, so I had a very basic idea of what I was looking for.  But I wasn’t exactly an expert, so I went online.

Now one of the benefits of living in the Internet age is that if you need to learn about any technological device, from MP3 players to video cards to application servers, you can quickly and easily find out all about it online.  Making a major purchase?  Some skillful Googling will lead you to novice-level tutorials, product comparisons, recommendations from normal users, and jargon-laden details from experts.

Unless you want to buy a glucose meter.  I found virtually nothing except for short blurbs on retailers’ sites.  I even had a hard time finding product info from manufacturers!

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Today Apple finally released details about their new iPhone. There have been rumors and speculation about how Apple could bring it’s iPod design skills to the mobile phone world for years now. Lots of web sites have posted predictions, feature wish lists, insider information and supposed leaks, including this one.

Does the iPhone live up to the hype? We’ll take a look at it by going down the list of our 10 predictions about the Apple iPhone.

1. Simple controls. - Apple has struck a blow against the proliferation of buttons by creating a phone with only a few buttons and a large touchscreen. This is a welcome change from smartphones and PDA-phones which have a whole QUERTY keyboard. The keyboard is nice the 5 percent of the time I’m taking notes to texting, but 95 percent of the time they just make it harder to hit the button I do want.

2. Consistent controls - This is a little bit harder to judge without having an iPhone in hand to play with, but from the demos and the fact that the iPhone runs OSX it seems likely you won’t have to learn totally different ways to navigate your voicemail, songs, and photos any more. At the very least Apple has solved the mystery of the Green “dialâ€? button and the OK button.

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Have you ever gone to a web site and had a hard time navigating around the site? Ever try to purchase something online only to find the steps so confusing and unintuitive you give up and buy somewhere else?

Web sites that suffer from poor usability almost invariably also suffer from poor readership and sales. That’s why a small, but growing number of companies are starting to put some time and money into usability testing. They are, quite shockingly, actually watching their users try to use their web site.

People age 60 and up are the fastest-growing user group on the web, and a large number of sites will want them as customers. In this post, I want to talk about a test I ran with an older user where the web site was actually not at fault – at least not primarily at fault – for a severe lack of usability. We will cover the three major challenges you need to address when doing usability testing with older adults.

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