UX Fumble: Air Canada enRoute
Speaking of bad usability, take a look at Air Canada’s relatively new enRoute in-flight entertainment system.
This system is really cool because it lets you watch a whole bunch of movies and TV shows on-demand (when it works), but they’ve made some critical errors in its usability and user experience. Here we see the TV feature, that allows you to presumably watch a TV show of your choice.
So what went wrong? Well, the one thing they managed to successfully do here is bring the worst experience of watching TV to the new system. Who wants to navigate through sets of unnamed channels to see what they’re playing? And what happened to channels 1-3, 12, 14-18, and 21?
The way that these are organized and displayed are completely nonsensical. A list of shows organized by genre (and alphabetically) is all that is needed here. Presumably, the designers of this system think that people wouldn’t be able to understand such a mental model, but really, what they’ve done is just made this system more difficult to use. To see what shows are playing on each channel, I have to touch each one, then hit the back keep to return to the channel menu.
Apologies for the lousy photo quality; The iPhone isn’t renowned for its stellar camera.
The critical flaw here is that the shows are on-demand, completely eliminating any need for channels - the concept of a channel is only required where something is being broadcast, or streamed live. As you can (barely) see above, ‘Ch 4′ is in fact just the sports channel - so why not name it that?
When you give the user more control over how to watch their content (being able to play/pause/rewind/skip video), there’s no need to restrict or cripple the way in which they can navigate amongst the content.
Bad Usability Calendar - 2008
The Bad Usability Calendar offers handy tips for each month of this year.
UX Fumble: MovieTickets.com
Encountered when trying to order tickets at the Scotiabank Theatre in downtown Toronto. “Please set the website to your appropriate country (located at the top-right corner of website).” Am I missing something here?
New Gmail Labels - Right on
I’ve got to say that Gmail’s newly redesigned, customizable labels are at least a ten-fold improvement in user experience. They look great, and really ‘pop’ out at you now. Love that I can choose which colours I assign to each, too!
Why Are You Here?
Over the past month or so I’ve been watching you. Yes, you. Well, it’s been longer than that, but it’s been about a month since I’ve been using Crazy Egg to monitor usage of this site. I’ve used both Mint and Google Analytics before to get some basic usage information, but nothing quite as clear as the heat map produced from Crazy Egg (see above).
Why am I gathering data? Well, I’m a bit of an information junkie. It’s not like this site is profitable to me in any way, but I like to know that my little slice of the Web is at least a little bit useful to the people that choose to type in www’s and .com’s surrounding my name. Before you freak out over privacy, just look at how much information I share about my life, and compare it to the meager info I know about you - mouse clicks, IP addresses, and referral addresses. It’s more persona-based information than personal.
So what have I learned from the results?
You want to know who I am, what I do, and what I can do.
The Contact and Resume pages saw a lot of hits, and many people tried to click on my (unclickable - sorry for the tease) picture to get a better look at me. I suppose that’s flattering.
You want to see my pretty pictures.
The Flickr thumbnails along the side saw lots of clicks, as did the Photography link (which also takes you to my Flickr page). Many also tried to click my (mostly unclickable) headline photos, like the one at the top of this post. Again, sorry to tease you there.
You don’t care about my archives.
Or, at least, you don’t care to flip through them month by month (I don’t blame you); The search box saw a lot of hits, and I hope it works, since I didn’t write the code that drives it.
You’re a little shy.
Lots of posts had the comment button clicked on, yet no comments came my way. No need to be bashful; We don’t judge here.
Overall, it’s not really surprising that most people seem to be coming to my personal site because they want to know more about me. I’m getting an annoyingly high amount of Google Images referrals, which I suspect, based on the search terms, are from people hoping to rip off the image they find for a presentation, piece of work, or paper. Stop that. (I tried to block Google Images using a robots.txt but it hasn’t appeared to have done anything).
Other than that, there’s a whole lot of name searches. People trying to find out more about me - I’ve seen to-be employers, clients, and friends come in this way. It’s really kind of shocking how many, really. Heat maps seem to be a really great way to gather generalized data about user behaviour. I wish I could easily generate them in some of the usability testing I do!
Primary & Secondary Form Actions
I know there’s some usability gurus reading, so I think I’ll start including more posts in this domain. Luke Wroblewski published an interesting study on primary and secondary actions in Web forms on his blog, leading up to the release of his book, Web Form Design Best Practices. They made use of some great eye tracking tests to determine which designs worked best for the users.
He also just put out a nice and clear presentation entitled Designing for Web 2.0.
Holes in the User’s Experience
Here’s something that I’ve experienced quite a bit that UIE’s Jared Spool points out quite astutely:
The vendor tells me my package is on the way, but the shipper disavows any knowledge of it. The product (already paid for) is in some sort of shipping limbo, which is exactly what the tracking system was put on earth to avoid.
A hole in the user’s experience.
Usability Testing for Gaming
Wired published an interesting piece (questionable title aside) on the usability testing Microsoft is putting Halo 3 through to catch bugs, exploits, and to improve the player experience, How Microsoft Labs Invented a New Science of Play.
-
About
-
My Work
-
My Social Web
-
Subscribe
-
Archives
-
Who I'm Reading
-
Admin
Adam is a User Experience Specialist at IBM in Toronto and also produces content of all kinds around the Web.
Photos
