Revealed: Why So Many Web Sites Are Lousy

Spend a lot of time on the web, and you begin to wonder: Why are so many sites baffling, annoying, incoherent or in some other way just plain bad?

A new report from Idea, a non-profit group dedicated to using technology effectively in education, is based on a survey of designers, operators and users of websites. [The report, "Finding Information: Factors that improve online experiences," focuses mainly on what it calls "information" sites, including those of non-profit groups, but not shopping or social networking sites.]

The results shine light on a lot of things. But for me, it blasts a particularly harsh kleig lamp on a big source of the bad-site problem: The gap between what web designers and web users think. To me, the results reinforce my suspicion that too many web designers think more about what they like than about what the user needs.

[The blogger here withdraws his head deep between his shoulders, turtle-like, to provide a smaller target for the stylish, colorful projectiles about to be hurled by members of the design profession.]

A few highlights from the Idea report: [I have selected data to expand my theme; the report is more wide-ranging and forgiving than my excerpts suggest.]

Over 80 percent of designers believe that good visual design is important. Only about 50 percent of visitors agree.

As with people, good looks are useful but not sufficient. And as with people, excessive good looks can actually become a liability.

Or as the report authors put it, from the website operator’s viewpoint. “…don’t be overly seduced by fancy graphics and multimedia. Invest in strong, clear design and simple methods to quickly deliver current information to your visitor.”

Basic usability theory? Yes. But much easier to say than do.

Designers don’t realize it, but people get lost in their sites all the time.

According to the survey, about 70 percent of designers believe that visitors are almost always able to maintain orientation, which is defined as knowing “where they are, where they can go next, and which pages are related.” But only about 10 percent of visitors report being able almost always to maintain their orientation.

I don’t know which part of this is more unsettling: The fact that only 10 percent of site users say they usually know where they are, or that 70 percent of designers don’t realize this.

People are so confused by web sites, they often believe a human guide would be helpful.

The report finds 60 percent of site users believe a personal guide would increase the effectiveness of a website. Or as the report states it gently, “Designers tend to overestimate the clarity of their designs.”

There’s a saying in the world of consumer product design: The perfect product does not need instructions. It simply explains itself.

The fact that over half of users think they’d get more from the site if they had someone at their elbow telling them what to do suggests to me what NASA might call “catastrophic system failure.”

I know a lot of this is essentially basic usability, which website operators ignore at their peril. But what’s interesting to me here is the gap between what designers think and what users think. How could this be fixed?

Usability testing is fun. It’s fascinating. It’s pretty cheap. It’s cool to watch people actually interact with a site, blundering around and finding stuff, exposing serious flaws and hidden victories and producing all sorts of insights that can improve the site. Watching users in real life immediately disabuses you of the conclusion that your site is as good as you think it is.

I wonder how often the designers themselves sit in?

[The blogger dons a motorcycle helmet. And hopes designers don't start poking around the blogger's own sites too much.]

p.s. The Idea site itself–as one might hope–is a model of usability. Love the drop-down navigation!

Crowdsourcing a Restaurant

Fascinating story in the Washington Post yesterday [I still get the Sunday "hard copy" of the newspaper] about a Washington, D.C. group that is crowdsourcing a new restaurant.

Web 2.know-it-alls may sniff at calling this project “crowdsourcing” at all. But it’s an effort to harvest the best ideas of a group of enthusiasts and build a restaurant based on all that group input. The article claims it’s the first use of the crowdsourcing technique to build a restaurant. [I did a Google search and by that undependable measure the claim appears to be true.]

Linda Welch, 49, a serial entrepreneur, had gathered 386 Elements community members who have, the article reports, “helped develop the concept (a sustainable vegetarian/raw foods restaurant), the look (a comfortable gathering space with an open kitchen), the logo (a bouquet of colorful leaves) and even the name [Elements].”

“Most businesses are started because you have a great idea, and you take it out to the public to see if they like it,” Welch is quoted in the Post story. “This is the opposite. We’re finding out what people want and doing it.”

As for the genesis: The article continues,

“The Elements project began in February 2007 when Welch [49], who owns area several businesses in the District, purchased the business and liquor licenses of nearby Sparky’s, a coffee shop that had closed. Welch has helped launch 22 startups but has no restaurant experience. She didn’t know exactly what she planned to do with the licenses, other than open a small cafe. Around that time, Neil Takemoto, 40, another local entrepreneur who had worked with Welch, stopped by to chat. When Welch told him about her plans, Takemoto suggested crowdsourcing the restaurant.

“‘I said, ‘Great!’ ” Welch remembers. ” ‘What the hell is that?’ ‘”

Takemoto runs a business, CoolTown Studios, that helps companies use crowdsourcing and other social media techniques to support community development.

Here’s a schematic illustrating the collective developement process from the site his company created to support Elements:

The Elements project is a fascinating attempt at a proof-of-concept using “wisdom of the crowds” to build a real-life, carbon-based business from the ground up.

It’ll also be interesting to see what happens now that the effort has been publicized beyond the core group of enthusiasts and supporters. Since the article has appeared, about 30 people have signed up.

What happens to the wisdom ofthe crowds–and the value of their advice–as the crowd expands? Crowdsourcing theory says things will get better, as greater collective intelligence is tapped.

We’ll see. I, for one, am looking forward to the opening, sometime next year. Process is good. Product is vital for a restaurant.

Which is to say: I sure hope the food’s good.

The 2.D’oh! Roundup: Oldpapers, Winning Money and McCain in Plain View

The Print ‘n’ Read Feature

This week’s Print ‘n’ Read feature–my recommendation for an online article so worthy that you might actually want to print it out and read it offline–is rich with irony. It’s a 74-page PDF about the future of journalism–as seen by the people who are running newspapers.

It’s tempting to dismiss this report, from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, with a consider-the-source wave. But the report ["The Changing Newsroom: What is Being Gained and What is Being Lost in America’s Daily Newspapers?"] is based on a thoroughgoing study based on face-to-face interviews and legit-survey-style questionnaires sent to newspaper leaders.

It’s at least an intellectually honest attempt by journalists to assess what’s happening to them. As a result, it’s less idiotically defiant and self-serving than many similar efforts. The people surveyed seemed downright chastened.

I’ll spare you the details, but it’s full of stories of optimism and ambition and furious attempts at innovation, all against the backdrop of a breathtaking descent into financial ruin.

My favorite oddball gem, so sweet and earnest and foolish you just want to pinch the cheek of whoever thought of it and send ‘em to bed: Some unidentified newspaper tried to sell copies of its important investigative report on Amazon.com.

How to Thrive in a Down Economy, Part LCVII

I love playing with ComScore’s news releases. Everybody pays attention to the top of the list to see how the Big Dogs are doing. I like scouring for other details.

Like this latest, from a list of Top 10 gainers over the last month. With a 30-day rise in traffic of 409 percent, the entry at the top is. . .GSN.com, home of the Game Show Network.

Why the spike of such an inane property? Always hard to tell. But it’s worth noting that the economy’s lousy, and GSN gives out cash prizes. And its latest sweepstakes? You can win a $500 gas card.

Dataviz of the Week: Partisanship in Plain View

On the impossibly-cool datavisualization site Visual Complexity I found this gem, Voting Patterns Among U.S. Senators, which depicts voting relationships among U.S. Senators in 2007. It was created by the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland and published this spring.

The graphic demonstrates that Democrats tended to vote as a herd in 2007. The GOP? Not so much.

And why is the senior Senator from Arizona hanging out in the middle, unaffiliated, with Sen. Sam Brownback? He was campaigning for President and didn’t vote much.

The Feds and Social Media: EPA Goes Blogging

From the Who Knew? files: The Environmental Protection Agency has been hammering away at a group blog since April.

Don’t worry, it’s not the Bush hacks extolling the virtues of offshore drilling. Greenversations is written by a group of civil servants at the agency who explore greenish issues in a personal way. As they go, they often mention EPA services that can help you, the citizens of America, live a greener life.

Here’s Lina Younes, head of the agency’s multilingual communications office, on how the agency helped her fix her leaky toilet, in a manner of speaking.

I learned about the WaterSense program through EPA and found out that the new toilets with the high-efficiency WaterSense label were finally available in the Maryland area where we live. We studied various options. We considered the dual flush toilets that we’ve seen in Europe and more recently in EPA’s Potomac Yard green building, but we finally opted for single flush toilets that use 1.28 gallons per flush and we couldn’t be happier. They do the job and we’ve put a stop to those leaky toilets, finally.

The entries appear to be vetted by EPA staff. But I came across some useful stuff. In this entry about what to do with an old cell phone, I came a fairly cool federal publication on The Lifecycle of a Cellphone. It’s made for kids, but I learned a lot about the resource intensive manufacturing process of phones, and where the motes of deadly toxin are embedded.

The whole point of Greenversations is to “open up the agency to the public,” to digress into 2.0 communications vernacular, and “put a human face on the agency.” It appears to accomplish this. Yes, but will anyone read it? Hard to imagine someone engaged enough with environmental issues to read blogs would be attracted to this 2.0 public service announcement outlet, however well done.

Comments are moderated, as you might expect. But Greenversations has at least some tolerance for agitprop. A response to an EPA science writer’s introduction of a new regular blog item on environmental science:

Steve Holmer says:

July 23rd, 2008 at 12:05 pm

Rather ironic, but it is encouraging that EPA staff have not given up on science. However, reading today’s Washington Post about how Director Johnson repeatedly lied to Congress about the decision concerning the CA waiver doesn’t leave one feeling like EPA has yet turned the corner.

Looking forward to better times ahead,

Ah, yes, but now about the government has a database of people who have made comments critical of high-level federal officials! Is Mssr. Holmer safe from government harrassment, even under the provisions of the Patriot Act?

From the Frequent Questions page:

Why do you ask for my name and email address when I leave a comment? How do you protect my privacy?

Providing your name or email address is optional. We ask for your name so that it is easier to carry on a conversation, so we will publish it along with your comment. We ask for your email address so that we may contact you if necessary. We will not publish your email address.

To protect yourself, please don’t include information that identifies you in the body of your comment, such as email addresses or phone numbers. We don’t edit comments, so we won’t be able to publish comments containing such information.

Huh. I wonder of Mssr. Holmer included his real e-mail address. And if he did, whether he got a response “thanking” him for his “valuable comment.”

If any of this interests you, you can always follow Greenversations on Twitter.

But you knew that.

Very Short List: Like E-Mail, Only Better

If you haven’t had the pleasure of receiving the daily e-mails from Very Short List, I recommend you subscribe immediately. VSL produces one of the very few utterly unnecessary e-mails you will choose to read.

Very Short List is very short indeed: It contains a single item daily. It points to a book, website, idea, album, artist or. . .something that probably escaped your attention but shouldn’t. The items are often funny. Not ha-ha funny, but the-world-is-so-much-more-wonderfully-strange-than-we-realize funny.

Today’s e-mail features a website that features user-supplied examples of passive-aggressive notes posted in public.

Compared to Daily Candy, Very Short List is a double-espresso protein shooter, shaken not stirred.

It’s a model of brevity and usability. Its daily item is illustrated with a batty venn diagram ["Always Clickable!"] that locates the item culturally. It has intellectual roots in Spy, the brilliantly defunct fin-de-siecle magazine in which VSL co-founder Kurt Andersen was complicit. It’s funded by Barry Diller’s IAC, of all people.

VSL also raises the question for me about the future of e-mail–the one thing everybody agrees is the “killer app” of the Internet. A brief, focused, useable, brain-stimulating e-mail can accomplish a lot. Even if it’s supported by ads, as VSL is. Professional e-mail marketers often send out unfocused, joyless, self-promotional, rambling crap. It makes us hate mass e-mails.

E-mail isn’t the enemy. Bad content is.

Great e-mails–as 1.0, one-way, anti-social retro as the technology seems–may yet turn out to be one of the most powerful communication channels of the 2.0 era.

The 2.D’oh! Roundup

A survey of recent insights, insults and intransigence from the world of social media:

Coolest tool of the week

Put your URL into Wordle, choose a few options, and create a wordcloud of your site. Here’s mine: [please click here if the image below doesn't display.]

A wordcloud, I should point out, is very different from a tag cloud. This tool just picks up words within a site’s text and visualizes the frequency of their use. Tag clouds [see mine in column at right] show how often you write on certain topics.

From this wordcloud I learn that I yammer frequently about the “news” and use “occasionally” a lot, that I’m “pleased” more than I thought, and that I refer to “bad” “lie[s]” pretty often.

It also exposes some of my annoying tics: the rarely used [by others] “electroland,” “wayleft” to describe people far on the progressive side of things politically, the shamefully retro-poseur “jones” and my tendency to refer to people as “folks.”

You can change all sorts of settings, including the number of words [200, above] and typeface ["sexsmith," just. . .because.]

Rock star blog comments

This week I celebrate a milestone in my blogging history. No, not my blog’s birthday again. This week I got my first rock star comment on my blog.

By this I do not mean some bigshot in the world of 2.0 like Mark Zuckerberg, or some brilliant loudmouth like Mark Cuban, or a sage web vet like Guy Kawasaki.

I refer to a rock star without quotation marks. As in a famous rock musician.

I refer specifically to this comment on my About page by Paul Westerberg, front man of the post-punk indie band The Replacements and now a solo musician in Minneapolis. And, apparently, a reader of blogs. Including this one. Go figure.

In his comment, he catches a typo.

And invites me to download 49 new minutes of music for a mere 49 cents.

Here I return the favor by sharing the URL, which pending cooperation of the tech gods should be working by Monday.

Let’s all show Paul some support with .49 donations as a way to thank him for participating in the blogosphere with a proofreadr’s eye!

[Not] Alltop News

Every trend contains the seeds of its own countertrend.

And so I call your attention to Alltop, a site consisting of newslinks not upchucked by some algorithm, but [it is said] via user-assisted hand-picking based at least significantly on the founders’ tastes.

The founders [one of whom is the legendary Internet "rock star" Guy Kawasaki] refer to the site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet and “aggregation without aggravation.” Say they in a FAQ:

Q. How do you decide which sites and blogs are in a topic?

A. We use a patent-pending, semantic computational algorithm derived from the post-doctoral work of Guy at Stanford. Just kidding. We rely on several sources: results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us. Let us declare something: The Twitter community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop. Without this group of mavens and connectors, Alltop would not be what it is today.

Well, great idea, except that the product is pretty spotty. I found the links maddeningly redundant, often second-rate and a bit.  . .aggravating.

Arbitrarily picking an utterly non-tech topic, I checked out the golf page and found at least half a dozen links each to overexposed kid golfer Michelle Wei’s recent tournament disqualification, and at least as many for overexposed superannuated Australian Greg Norman’s improbable lead going into the final round of the British Open.

Under “Twitterati,” presumably the cool Twitter feeds you ought to know about? Nearly 100 to choose from, many of them way-inside the world of Twits.

My assessment: Alltop is essentially a lot of people’s different RSS feeds pulled together in a tough-to-wade-through mess. Aggregation with aggravation.

Remind me: The value is. . .?

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