mediajunk

I'm a big fan of open source software.

Almost all of our client projects are written in PHP and use the standard LAMP architecure. I love open source products such as Wordpress, which despite some flaws is very usable -- especially more recent versions.

Unfortunately, that's not the case for most open source software. Moodle is a case in point. With great functionality, and used by millions of people across the world, Moodle sounds like the perfect open source LMS (learning management system).

Moodle is far from perfect! For example, Moodle homepages tend to have too information, and to be poorly laid out -- cognitively overburdening the user.

Another popular open source system is YaBB (Yet Another Bulletin Board). But it's impossible to create a unique homepage first, and then to plug YaBB in. Instead, homepages for each app look samey and inherit large chunks of HTML. This problem is shared by Moodle.

This shouldn't be the case. After all, these are back end applications. Why should they dictate what the front end looks like?

I could go on (and on). Bottom line: These applications have got usability cancer.

Why are Moodle and YaBB so unusable? Why is open source software, in general, so unusable?

Matthew Paul Thomas has the answers in his article: Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it.

According to Thomas, open source software offers weak incentive for usability; there are too few designers; and design suggestions often aren't welcome or inivited.

Initiatives like OpenUsability seek to address these problems. But considering that Moodle is by far and away the leading open source app in such a popular domain as online learning, I'm afraid open source usability has a long way to go.

Sorry Moodle, but I can't give you the thumbs up until you start making life easier for users -- the course designers, the content creators, and most importantly the students who take courses.

I just discovered this diagrammatic representation (PDF) of the various elements that make up the User Experience on a website.

It was created by James Garrett in 2000, and is still just as relevant today.

A few years back, a new client hired my company to do some web marketing / consulting work on their website. The site got a large amount of traffic but was not converting many visitors into buyers, despite promoting a product that sold well offline.

In my initial meeting with the "tech guy" and the "marketing girl" -- who, between them, ran the website -- I delicately suggested that the site had some usability problems. They marketing girl looked hurt: "but every page is less than three clicks from the homepage!" she protested.

Of course, the "three-click rule" is a usability myth, but there are many more, as I discovered in the excellent 30 usability issues to be aware of, recently published by the highly Digg-able Smashing Magazine.

Geo-redirecting -- redirecting users to different parts of your website depending on their own geographical location -- is a neat trick. It is handy when your website has different messages or product offers for users from different countries or regions.

But many website owners mistakenly assume that their geolocation software works every time. It doesn't!

Geolocation works in two steps:
1. A script detects the user's IP address.
2. The script looks up a database of IP addresses and their associated countries to tell where the user is located.

There are potential problems with both steps:
1. Many users go through proxy servers, so the IP address that appears to be associated with their computer is, in fact, the server's IP address, which may be in a different location.

2. There are many databases of IP addresses and their associated regions (some free, some commercial) but none is even 90% accurate. For example, look at this table of accuracy for city geolocation, from one of the leading providers of such databases, Maxmind.

The problem is that many websites lock users in to a region-specific part of the website, without giving them the option of choosing a different region. For example, users from Ireland are often taken to the UK versions of product websites, where prices are quoted in pounds sterling ... but Ireland is not part of the UK, and is in the Eurozone!

Another mistake is to make assumptions about a user's preferences based on their location (why not give UK users the option to pay in euros if they want?).

In fact, the makers of Firefox have made a bad assumption about my preferences, based on my geographic location, which prompted me to write this article.

I recently downloaded the latest version of Firefox and, while composing messages in Gmail, noticed that the spell-checker was underlining almost every word in red. I eventually discovered that my language had been set to Irish ... presumably because Firefox had detected my IP address as being in Ireland. (I can't think of any other reason. Certainly, I didn't change any settings.)

If so, even the usually reliable makers of Firefox have committed a gross geolocation foul. At least I was able to fix the problem. Website users who are locked in to a set of regional pages, however, may not have that luxury.

A study of health-related websites has revealed findings that should be heeded by all web publishers.

The results of the health site study were reported in The Times last week:

Research at Northumbria University has identified the factors that get most sites passed by: too much detail, too much advertising, or too general a portal that involves lengthy searching.

The report revealed that users do not like having to spend a long time searching or browsing websites. Scrolling through long passages of text was off-putting, as were advertisements.

Most tellingly, users rarely disliked a site simply because its content lacked quality, with only 8% of participants listing poor content as a turn-off. Design factors, on the other hand, were much more decisive in the acceptance or rejection of a site.

Design, including issues such as layout, navigation aids, use of colour, pop-up advertisements, small print, too much text, a "corporate look and feel" and poor search facilities, were listed by 94 per cent.

Large corporate or portal-type sites were usually rejected by the participants in favour of sites that had an authentic -- even home-made -- feel, and those which offered personal stories.

I believe this study's findings may well apply to other types of website, not just health sites. Recently I gave my views on what makes an authentic website (basically, you know one when you see one).

Companies and organisations should consider replicating the homely, personal authentic feel of "labour-of-love" type websites if they are to achieve success in disseminating information. Perhaps the only way to do this is to recruit and promote passionate webmasters or writers within their ranks?