Usability Reviews #2 Calendars Yahoo! versus 30Boxes

Every major web application is a glorified interface to a database. When you place an order on amazon, all you're really doing, technically, is inserting a new entry in the orders table, that has your information, and a link to the whatever shopping cart you bought (which is held in the carts table). A nice measure of how usable your interface is, is to examine how far away the user is from the database. In the example we talked about in the podcast, you could pretty much see exactly what the Yahoo! calendar database was, it was looking right at you.

They do a couple of things to attempt to hide it, replacing words like NON NULL with Required, but you can see every textfield is probably a VARCHAR, every textarea a TEXT, the constant nagging to specify your time zone, it all reeks of lazy programming. The end effect is visible in the dialogue that me and Dave played out.

I imagine that give or take a couple of nuances, 30Boxes and Yahoo! calendar probably have a similar database structure. The quality of the software is determined by what they put in front of it. How are they hiding the database?

So when you're working on your own web applications, you might use a framework like Rails/Django/J2EE/etc, and most of these frameworks do some very clever things, such as scaffolding. You might fool yourself into thinking "Great this thing is creating the front end for me too!". Not so. Lets talk about Jimmy, the web developer.

Jimmy reads 37Signals, Jimmy refreshes reddit 40-50 times a day. Jimmy has seen how the big boys earn their money, and damn he wants in. Jimmy favours convention over configuration, he has gotten real, he believes Rails will change the world, and thinks Joel Spolsky is an idiot for having the audacity to say otherwise. Jimmy is waiting for the next round of VC funding from Y-Combinator. At this stage I'm sure you know Jimmy, I do.

Well, Jimmy this idea for a social site with peer produced content, based around book reviews. Naturally he will write this application in Rails, which like any good framework requires a database specification first. Jimmy scribbles out a few bad diagrams before settling on his best one, and then he throws it into his Rails environment, and BAM, he has an interface. Here's what it looks like...

[Note: Wufoo really is too good, an actual Rails interface looks worse, but would be equivalent. It's not looks I'm talking about here]

This is the sad part. Jimmy launches it by posting on every single one of those news aggregators, he even sets up dummy accounts so he can give it plus points. People come in their hundreds, and some of them even stay to submit a review. Then after attempting to submit one review, they slowly back away realising that they just aren't bothered using a tool that asks too many damn questions. Jimmys adSense revenue plummets from a whopping 12 euro a month to a pitiful 4 euro a month. Thats just 13 cent a day. That won't pay for Starbucks, let alone a new MacBook Pro. As Jimmy slowly realises he won't be on the cover of Business Week with 60 million dollars written above his head, he starts to wonder... where did it all go wrong? He has learned a lesson, people don't like using software that is hard to use, with some exceptions

A good interface won't guarantee success, but in the web 2.0 era a bad one can be a death penalty. Do not accept scaffolded forms as your interface, with or without styling. You should design your interface without your database in mind. Preferrably before the database has even been thought about. Do not be scared to use small pieces of Natural Language Processing, especially when there are only a few possibilities. How many different words are people likely to say when they mean 'tomorrow?

Thats it for the week

Anyhoo, enough preaching for this week. Be sure to check out wild apricot, and please let us know what you thought of the episode. Again, if you know of any sites that do a good or bad job usability wise, please let us know.

Links Mentioned

• 30 Boxes The shiny calendar from San Francisco
• Yahoo! Calendar Part of the Yahoo! mail experience
• 37 Signals Web applications company with good emphasis on end user experience
• We can't review them all, but here are a few other online calendars
  • Trumba
  • Spongecell
  • Kiko (recently sold for $250,000)
  • The BackPack Calendar from 37 Signals, $5 a month to use.
  • Google Calendar apparently lead suspect in the webappicide of kiko.com
• Wild Apricot as reviewed in the show
• Wufoo Excellent form building application that I use for all the mockups here
• Jimmy2.0 book review site (obviously it doesn't work, functionality is still in beta)
• UR 1 The previous episode