Until recently I had a rather nescient attitude to the needs of users who have barely seen a computer never mind used one. It’s easy for developers to forget about these people. However they exist, and with the rise of the internet as the dominant carrier of information, I would presume that now more than ever the new computer user is finding their way online.
Most developers have had the “keep it simple” mantra for UI development drilled into them over the years, both in an academic and commercial setting. However, having spent some time educating a few older family members (who fall into the computer newbie category described above) on the ways of the internet, I’m of the impression that it’s not just simplicity that is required but moreover consistency.
For example. A simple hyperlink like this one which seems innocuous to the average user, can cause trouble. Why? Well, when “teaching” people to use the internet it’s helpful if you can define some simple rules. One of these rules might be “Things you can click on will be underlined”. Rules like this give a surprising amount of comfort to an inexperienced computer user. However, until actually watching a family member struggle when links are not underlined I would not have known/believed the problem existed. To them the link above just looks like a piece of coloured text, which they don’t associate with the simple rule. A similar situation occurs when links are in the form of an image, where unless it looks like a button then they are unlikely to click it.
However, many sites don’t underline hyperlinks, so an alternative rule may be “When you move your mouse over a piece of text and it turns into a little hand, then you can click it”. That is as long as someone has not change the default cursor – thank you for this feature Internet Explorer! This rule is not ideal though as means you have to trawl the entire page to find links.
If you plan to really confuse a new user then you can always do the following: fail to underline the text, have it the same colour as the rest of the text, and instead of using an anchor tag, use any tag you like and just assign an onclick handler to the element in javascript. That way you get no cursor that changes to the familar hand as well. Awesome.
The above problem really does exist and I have seen it on many websites even those undertaken by well known web agencies.
This is not the only area of inconsistency, there are many others. In fact, another problem that seemed to cause increased stress levels is time/date input – for example a flight search engine. Most sites that require this functionality tend to provide some sort of calendar widget. Therefore, you can show someone how to input a date by asking them to first click on the calendar image, now click the appropriate button to navigate to the required month, then click on the required day to select. However, every calendar widget is slightly different which is just the start of the confusion. The real problem is reserved for those sites that do not have a calendar widget to select the date. The user then looks everywhere trying to find this calendar button to click, and finally is left pondering the date format to enter manually – if they even get this far. Surely it must be to the benefit of everyone if we agree on a standard calendar widget that can be skinned in some way? Just a thought.
I’m sure there are many other areas where this sort of confusion can occur – I can only begin to imagine the problems with Flash sites! Hence the next time you are designing a webpage that is intended for public consumption it’s probably worth bearing this in mind.