Usability Reviews #1

Welcome to Usability Reviews, a new video podcast run by me, and David Barrett. Usability reviews is kindly hosted by YouTube and Minds. Click on the show to play it, otherwise you can access it in Quicktime format(45 megs)or in iPod format(31 megs). Hope you enjoy
Update: I should point out there are 4 swear words used in this podcast, so without headphones it may be not safe for work. Additionally, the search comparisons comes directly from Leon Bambricks article, as linked below.

Apologies, we've pulled the video down from youtube, as their terms and conditions basically mean we give up all our rights to the material, and as ZeFrank put it "They can make money off our work however the f**k they want". It's now on Googles video site, and you can watch it here.

What is this show about?

Web applications are dialog by dialogue between the end user and the server. You can test how usable a web application is by simply examinig the dialog between the user and the application. If it seems like a friendly interaction that is short sweet and to the point, it's a good sign. If the user wants to say things and the application simply isn't listening, or is mis-understanding them, it's a really bad sign.

1. Please give us a user name and password. Thats it.

   

2. Please give us your firstname, surname, username, email, mobile number, and make three decisions about what mails you want. Note: This is only step one of 5 to actually subscribe to ireland.com

   

When you're designing an application you should look at eliminating as much fluff as you can from aspects such as sign up. For example, there is no point in having a separate page that simply says "Do you agree to our terms and conditions? Yes/No" Why not have that as part of the first page, or do as Yahoo! does, have the Next Button actually say "I agree to the terms and conditions".

A sidenote:
This is where I believe you should lay the AJAX on thick, minimise the visible roundtrips, and try do keep your interaction with the user as short and simple as possible.

So where does this show come in?

In this show we're gonna look at the good and the bad in terms of dialogue. We may move onto Comparing and Contrasting web applications at a later date, at the moment we are still finding our feet. We may at a later date look at tailshq or FogBugz, or another web based bug manager, if you'd be interested in that, let us know.

Did you manufacture this dialogue?

Nope. Bugzilla is an application I use quite often, while trying to do my bit for the open source community. The bug I was reporting had been solved, I was just recollecting the experience I had while reporting it. Here are the screenshots if you don't believe me. In my opinion, many of these screenshots could be amalgamated easily, and some of them just shouldn't be there.

Bugzilla is free and works for soo many projects, why are you ragging on it?

2 reasons,

1. You're right. It works really well for massive projects like RedHat, Gnome, Evolution, Gimp etc. It makes perfect sense to use it for these projects as long as it is only programmers who have to see it. You should never let an end user who is non-technical see Bugzilla though, it sucks for them. Yet an awful lot of FOSS projects/operating systems point their users to Bugzilla without thinking about what actually happens when they get there.
2. It could be so much better. If the knock on effect of this show is that I/We are widely hated by the FOSS community, then that is a tragedy, but does not take away from the fact that bugzilla could be massively improved, and could become FREE in all senses of the word. If this show inspires someone somewhere to work on improving the UI, or work on a customer friendly bugzilla that is free and open source, then great. Thats what I am hoping for.

So why a video podcast?

I like blogging, and I think video podcasting gives you an oppurtunity to say a lot more, while not taking up too much a visitors time. People can listen quicker than they can read, and I certainly talk faster than I type, so its a new medium that could work out well for this type of article. If its popular enough, we'll probably do a mini series assessing various applications we find around the web. If it bombs, then I'll go back to writing articles/posts here for the few that read them.

Feeds/RSS/etc

I've created a new category for this show, so that if you just want to see Usability Reviews and not the rest of my weblog, you can subscribe to the above feed exlusively. Alternatively, you can subscribe to the whole weblog by using the feed in the side bar.

Links mentioned

• Bugzilla
• Award for the Silliest User Interface As used in the podcast, Leon Bambricks example of comparing two interfaces.
• Reddit.com Register Page
• Ireland.com Register Page (1 of 5)
• Yahoo! How to handle T&C
• TailsHQ A soon to launch web based bug tracking application, looks nice.
• FogBugz Joel Spolskys Bug Tracking Application
• RoundUp A free open source Python based alternative to Bugzilla
• David Barrett My co-host in the show
• usability@antidis.com is the email address for any show related enquiries, alternatively you can leave a comment here.