In his latest Alertbox, usability expert Jakob Nielson focuses on what he calls “one of the oldest principles of human-computer interaction,” namely, that users treat things grouped close together on the screen as related. The converse is also true: they treat things left far apart as unrelated, and can therefore easily miss a button or a check box they need to complete an action.
I know this has happened to me more times than I can count. I’m trying to buy something online or merely fill out a form, and I get stopped because I’ve missed a “Terms and Conditions” box way down the page, or failed to see that I needed to fill in a Captcha code. That’s a problem because, as we’ve mentioned in the past, anything more than a one-second delay can interrupt a user’s train of thought and lead him or her to go surf somewhere else. Some delays are unavoidable, but of course those that can be avoided, should be.
Nielsen takes his own example from Apple’s iTunes software for upgrading iPhone apps. There is a button for updating all apps at once, but it’s located all the way at the bottom right-hand corner of a mostly empty screen of app icons, where it can be overlooked. The result, says Nielsen, is that “Several months after getting an iPhone, I still thought users had to manually check each application icon one at a time.”
He suspects that the problem might have been overlooked because in testing, Apple might have used a screen filled up with app icons, which would have put the relevant button much closer to the last of them. To him, this “shows the importance of including a range of realistic configurations and sample data, both during user testing and in design reviews.”
Nielsen probably assumes an even more basic recommendation goes without saying: to do significant user testing before releasing a new web interface in the first place. It is safe to assume that Apple, because they’re Apple, did. But many small businesses, in particular, don’t. They don’t feel they have the budget or the time. And they certainly don’t have the budget to do the same kind of testing as Apple. But that doesn’t mean they can afford to do nothing. Even a small business can cajole colleagues into surfing around a new website to test out its features before it goes live.
