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Does usability really matter to usabilitymatters.org

  • Writing by Rajveer
  • On October 21st, 2008 at 9:54 pm

The Usabilitymatters.org is a non-profit organization who claims to impart usability awareness through interaction between designers and design-sensitive consumers. Although you can find some sensible ‘real-life usability ideas’ in website contributed by the users. But there is something that bothers me a lot. I doubt whether this group have enough knowledge about web usability.

I remember the three words in usability used earlier – ‘mastery, mystery, and misery’. The UMO is expected to have mastery in web usability, but it puts me into a big mystery when I surf their website and that ends in misery when I review the website.

In light of that, I just have to laugh whenever I read that website name itself is called Usability Matters, really? – No! I see usability issues anywhere I take my eyes on UMO’s website. You can find below are just a few examples from them, mind it these points fall under most common web usability rules. I don’t really love to write lengthy article so just tried to do most of it using illustrations, please refer to the red colored circles, underlines and text used in the pictures.

I guess I do not have to mention that many users still use low screen resolution, see how poorly UMO renders on 800×600 resolution, one word – horrible. Horizontal scrollbar shouldn’t be there, and without vertical scrolling user can’t find essential information.

Check the pictures below to find out how badly you can design a website layout; I wonder someone really had to put lot of efforts to design such a mess.

Bad web design

Bad web design

Page titles are so irrelevant that it seems to be done without any consideration at all. I pity on the disable users may come to check this website and of course search engines also can not understand what any page like these may contain.

Irrelevant page titles

You can find lot of irrelevant alt and title attributes used, check out the best example used in the website logo itself. Can you imagine what ‘UMO’ means, unless it is as familiar as NASA. Attributes like alt meant to provide supplementary information to help user (especially disable users) understand, not abbreviations.

Irrelevant title and alt attributes

Some of the areas in UMO website can be a challenge to your eyes, so you may fail to read some important links and content if you don’t have good eye power.

Hard to read content

On of the worst example of HTML markup, forget about validating the pages. Using tableless layout doesn’t mean can do whatever you want. I would strongly recommend these guys to learn some coding standards.

Poor markup

Guys! You need to have a good common sense to deal with forms. The picture below is a good example of a bad combination of great confusion, the red circle highlights that all.

bad form design

What could be worst than having a fixed size popup window that doesn’t show the complete content, user will have to scale the window manually to read the hidden text.

bad form design

I will try to deliver this article to UMO group and hope they take it seriously and positively.

2 Responses

  1. Eugene October 22nd, 2008 at 9:57 pm

    Nice article. Thanks. :) Eugene

  2. aroopam bhuyan October 24th, 2008 at 2:53 pm

    Rajveer,

    Very good observations. Your article should make the people in UMO realise what they preach

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