Missing out on simple features to increase usability
December 28th, 2006 by Stefan JuhlThere are quite a few details and features that will highly increase usability of websites and online services. But often, many miss out on these opportunities to improve the user experience. In the last couple of days I’ve noticed several of such simple features that was “missing”.
It’s the end of the year and I’m gathering and sorting all invoices etc. to wrap them up for my accountant. It takes quite a while to do so. But few of the online services I use have functionality that significantly eases the task.
The feature I mainly appreciated is the ability to print all invoices in just one click. Many provide neat PDF invoices that are automatically generated. Yet only few can provide me with a single PDF file that contains all invoices for the year. Usually I have to select and print all invoices separately and I find that quite annoying.
Not even Adwords offer such functionality which you should expect from a company like Google who preaches a lot about usability and simplicity. Paypal doesn’t have such functionality either - at least I can’t find it - but they do provide me with a downloadable history though.
A simple detail that also annoys me, is that some online services doesn’t put decent information in emails. E.g. for a subscription service where they bill my credit card each month and send me an email about it, they shouldn’t make the sender be “admin” and the subject should contain more specific information than just “Your membership has been renewed!”.
For emails with lack of information there’s a big chance that I won’t recognize them and they might end up “disappearing” among my spam other emails. I want the info to be something I immediately recognize e.g. by them using their actual name and by writing “we’ve billed you credit card $28″ in the subject etc.
I think these are good example of opportunities to increase usability. And I’m of the belief that if I’m paying for companies services they shouldn’t waste my time. Hopefully, in time, more will become aware of such small details that will improve their users experience.
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Posted in Random Stuff |
January 5th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Nice article! One of the worst usability issues I have is informational and response popups. Even web 2.0 companies utilize them all over the place.
January 6th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
On the PDF side of things, that’s not a major problem for me being a Mac user. I can save out any document from the Print menu as a PDF, which I do for my own time tracking & invoicing tool.
So I can go straight from the browser (because it’s a web application) to PDF and then email out to the client.
There are also plug-ins for Internet Explorer to do the same thing for Windows.
However, this kind of thing shouldn’t require the user to mess around to make up for the developers not putting the user / customer first.
As for Google being up on usability, I’m not so sure about that!
Go look at the code for their web properties, or even their AdSense search boxes .. tables for layout, anyone?
January 6th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Hey Wayne!
My main issue with the PDF stuff is that they don’t provide it all in one single PDF. Because even with tools making PDF creating easy, I’ll still have to do it 12 times when it’s invoices for monthly pays. And if that takes a couple of clicks each time and I need to it 12 times, then it’s a lot more work than just clicking one time and getting a PDF with all invoices in it. But as you say, the developers should put the user first.. So that’s the really the issue.
With Google being up on usability I wasn’t referring to their actual services but just the fact that they often state they want to make things simple and easy to use.