mediajunk

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?

The rise and rise of open source software (OSS) continues. Free OSS versions of operating systems (e.g. Linux), desktop applicationss (e.g. OpenOffice) and Content Management Systems (e.g. Mambo) are among the most popular in their categories.

What's surprising is that we use so few open source apps. After all, Sourceforge.net -- home to most OSS -- currently lists circa. 140,000 projects.

Why hasn't OSS penetrated more markets? Well, OSS is typically designed and developed by hardcore geeks, who do so partly to escape the annoying constraints of developing commercial software. These annoying constraints, however, are often directly related to the end-user's needs. As the author of usability classic "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" puts it:

The open-source movement is arguably a haven for these frustrated programmers -- a place where they can write code according to their own standards and be judged solely by their peers, without the advice or intervention of marketers or managers.

So, what can we do to improve the usability of open source apps? One initiative that's worth a look is OpenUsability - a site that aims to match open source developers with usability engineers.

Which usability engineers would be interested? That, in my opinion, is the rub. Most usability experts worth their salt are busy with the projects keeping them gainfully employed. Professional usability engineers and information architects are rarer breeds than software developers.

Would-be experts -- the equivalent of armchair football managers -- are more common and more likely, in my opinion, to respond to OpenUsability's call. After 20 minutes' browsing the members section, I found a dozen members who claimed on their profiles to be usability experts. None offered credentials (neither qualifications nor work experience) to back up these claims. A few provided website links but the sites were unimpressive. One even had a Flash intro -- the cardinal sin of website usability!

The biggest flaw in OpenUsability's premise is that developers decide whether or not to implement usability changes. In my experience, developers will stubbornly resist changes recommended by a usability reviewer. The more labourious the fix, the stronger their resistance.

The OpenUsability project must overcome these issues if it is to make open source software more user-friendly.