The User

The winners of the first competition to identify the 10 best-designed application user interfaces are:

• Campaign Monitor by Eyeblaster (Israel): Integrated management of multiple advertising campaigns for media buyers.
• CMSBox by CMSBox (Switzerland): Content management system.
• FotoFlexer by Arbor Labs (USA): Photo editor.
• PRISMAprepare by Océ (The Netherlands): Print shop software.
• Seating Management by Magellan Network and DesignBox (USA): Hostess-stand reservation book for restaurants.
• SQL diagnostic manager by Idera (USA): Database performance monitoring and diagnostics.
• SugarSync by Sharpcast (USA): Synchronizing files across multiple computers.
• SuperSaaS by SuperSaaS (The Netherlands): Creating and hosting scheduling and reservation systems.
• Wufoo by Infinity Box, Inc. (USA): Online forms, surveys, invitations, and payments.
• Xero by Xero (New Zealand): Accounting for small businesses.

Of the winning applications, 70% are Web-based and 40% are locally hosted.

The winning designs are revolutionary, but there’s nothing revolutionary about the usability methods employed to ensure their quality.

The way users enter a website influences their navigation and bounce rate. The number of users which come in through different points of the website rather than the homepage has increased. This has a big impact on some websites, which means that their bounce rate might increase exponentially.

Bounce Rate (sometimes confused with Exit Rate) represents the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

A visitor can bounce by:

• Closing an open window or tab
• Typing a new URL
• Clicking the “Back” button to leave the site
• Session timeout

Bounce rate is generally considered a negative statistic because the website failled to engage the user, and thus lacks appropriate content. (more…)

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen says on his latest article on BBC that people are becoming much less patient when they go online.

Instead of getting caught in marketing traps designed to make them linger on a website, users are more and more determined to search something, rich their needs quickly and leave. More that that, they are becoming suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention.

In the last 10 years the success percentage of users which found what they were looking for has risen from 60% to 75%. This rise is due to 2 factors: first the usability of the applications has risen, more designer think more about the users needs instead of just designing for creativity, and on the other side, users get more accustomed with the applications they use.

“This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other editorial choices that try to distract them. Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so. People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience. I do not think sites appreciate that yet, he added. They still feel that their site is interesting and special and people will be happy about what they are throwing at them.”, said Dr Nielsen.

“Between the ages of 25 and 60, people’s ability to use websites declines by 0.8% per year — mostly because they spend more time per page, but also because of navigation difficulties.” says Jakob Nielsen in his recent article about web usability.

Mainstream users as Nielsen calls them are the most important group because they are generating the most traffic and they are the ones that have the highest buying power. The problem is that the majority of users fall into this category  especially if we extend the target to 65.

Nielsen also says that “the biggest factor is that older users need more time to understand pages, scan the text, and extract the information. [...] The human aging process starts around age 25 and causes erosion of cognitive resources, loss of visual acuity, degraded reaction times, and reduced dexterity. People need more time for the same mental operations; they have less memory capacity and take longer to process the same perceptual input.”

I also believe that another factor for this could be impatience and lack of time to spend on the internet, with so many websites out there.  I used to search an entire site when I wanted to find something. Now after working on the online medium for some time, I don’t have the time to spend trying to understand what a website wants to explain. If I don’t get it they lost me, I move on. In my job I encountered this pattern at most users, the majority search and find quickly what they are looking for and they are gone, or if they don’t find it quickly enough they go away faster.

I tested this on my mother as well, she hasn’t got any clue, so if she doesn’t find the things quickly she says they don’t exist or can’t be found and closes the browser. Maybe, there will come a time when things  will be getting more and more simpler, as are some mobile phones, because are tired to try to learn a new technology, and just want to use something with the knowledge they already posses.