I’m speechless.

I honestly don’t know where to begin. I’m afraid I might get carpal tunnel syndrome from typing up all the usability issues on this website.

http://www.levi.com.sg/copper/index.html

Enjoy.  Comments are more than welcome.  I’d love to start a dialogue about this.

P.S. No offense is meant to the Levi’s brand or the team who built it, but a lively discussion on the blend between creativity and usability is certainly warranted.

The other night, my wife was inquiring about making an appointment somewhere and went online to find a location. I’m being vague about what type of appointment this is because I don’t want to call out the specific website that she encountered, because it had an incredibly horrid usability error. And when I say horrid, I mean it was so bad that it actually prevented a conversion from occurring. Was it a technical error? One would think so, but the error message it gave made it seem intentional.

I took a slice of a screen shot so you could see the error first hand. Check it out…

“Please check spelling of your last name” ????

What? Are you serious? Now this isn’t a login page where it’s possible she was entering an incorrect user name. This is the page you get to after clicking through from a PAID search ad on Google. Above the form it provides an offer and says “Register Now for a Free Consultation”. Clearly the purpose of this website and form is to convert visitors into customers. If this was a technical error, wouldn’t it have said something different like, “Please make sure all fields are completed”? Plus, how are they to know if we had spelled our last name incorrectly or not? Our last name could be Kashingtoniktoriley. Would that be spelled wrong? Oh, okay. Maybe they don’t think we spelled it wrong. So what do they want us to “check the spelling” for? It’s not like we are even using illegal characters. Even if we were, the error message doesn’t say that. It just asks us to “check” it.

Okay, rant over. But this is just a really funny case where had someone checked the site, not to optimize the usability, but at least make sure it was simply usable, the business could be cashing in on many more conversions.

I’ve been in this business for about 8 years now and the one thing that still gets me is how easy it is for people to get caught up on the misconception about a page being cluttered.

Now before my career shifted into the user experience world, I was a marketing guy. I say this because I fully understand and appreciate the marketer’s need for their design to appear clean and simple. BUT, clean and simple doesn’t necessarily mean sparse. Websites are not billboards. They don’t have to contain 7 words or less.

I think the main problem lies in seeing a page during the design process from the perspective of looking at the page as a whole entity.

The reality is that people using that page are not taking a 50,000 foot view of it…they are on a mission to accomplish something and they have blinders on to everything else that is irrelevant to them. Couldn’t everything else be seen as visual clutter? Yes, but only if the page is designed poorly. You CAN design a good page with a lot of information that does not have visual clutter.

That is the precise reason you hire specialists in user experience and design. If everyone only had one user task on their page like Google, you wouldn’t need anyone to design it. It’s pretty easy to put a search field in the middle of the page and place a button near it.

What is challenging is creating a page that meets the needs of a wide variety of users and still makes each one feel like they clearly and easily accomplished their goals…all the while being aesthetically pleasing and reflecting the brand message.

If they are doing their job well, the UE and Graphic designers are using proven design principles to group, title and visually separate like items in such a way that users can easily pick up a scent as to where to go next. Jared Spool, who coined the concept of scent, has proven many times that what makes a good user experience is not the amount of clicks a user must make, but whether or not they had confidence that they were on the right path. The user who can quickly and easily pick up a scent isn’t going to see the rest of the page as visual clutter, so long as the other items on the page are not distracting them from their path…even if there is a lot on the page.

If you do anything as a result of reading this blog entry, when you review the strength of the usability of a page and you think it looks cluttered, look again. Reign yourself in from that 50,000 foot view and put yourself in the context of each user type first; then decide if it is busy and creates a negative user experience. You’ll be surprised at how uncluttered the page actually is.

Last week, I spent hours freeing my dining room from its 1964 wallpaper captor. It was Me V. Wallpaper. My fingers sore and callused, I was at war! My husband begged me to hire contractors for the job. I wouldn’t hear of it. I come from a generation who believes that if you work really hard, make sacrifices, and have a good strategy for success, there will be a big payoff in the end.

It’s typical for people in my generation to feel the way I do. Our families sold us on the American Dream, often by their actions. I know mine did. Growing up, I took pride in my immigrant grandfather, forced into self-employment in the 6th grade, who worked night and day to grow a successful New York City window washing company. I watched my cousin start her own clothing line… my uncle start his own magazine…my brother start his own programming business…my mother’s first husband grow his own movie production corporation… and my mother become a CEO. Their dreams were all very different. But hard work, sacrifice, and strategy were always the key to their success. My family came to American to live the American Dream. And as I watched, they lived that dream – again and again.

But Generation Y is getting a slightly different message from their families – particularly the youngest members of this user segment, now in their teens. They are more separated from the blood, sweat, and tears of their forefathers. Life has been easier for them. Technology made this possible. The expectation of inheritances made this possible. Helicopter parenting made this possible. Gen Y parents are telling their children that they can do and have and be anything they want, just like my parents did. But they are leaving out the part about the hard work, sacrifice, and strategy. The American Dream is vastly different for Gen Y.

Online, Gen Y often gets confused when their parents’ advice doesn’t work. Gen Y is asking, Why? Why do I have to figure out how this shopping cart icon works – why can’t I just check out? Why do I have to learn to play this video game – why can’t I just play? Why do I have to search this website – why can’t I just find what I’m looking for instantly? Why are they making me try?

As interface designers, it’s not our job to teach Gen Y about hard work, sacrifice and strategy – tempting as it may be. Instead, it’s our job to meet their expectations by designing interfaces that get them what and where they want fast. It’s our job to prevent Gen Y from realizing the flaws in their parents’ message – to continue to shelter them from the harsh realities of real life and to grant them what they believe they have been entitled to all along. After all, the Internet is one of the few places where their parents’ message can actually work. With a well designed interface, you can be, have, and do anything you want – almost instantly.

Life isn’t easy at 5 foot nothing. Take it from me. When I first learned to drive, I realized that I had a choice. I could either press the pedals or see over the dash – but not both. Nothing fits. Pants are always too long and heels are only so high. I have to hurl dishes into my kitchen cabinets. And to top it all off, I’m a lefty.

Products are designed for average users – not for people like me. It’s about what’s most profitable. It’s about the 80-20 rule. I get that. But what about the people who get left out of the design process? What about me?

I’ve met several people over the years who have shared my plight with average product designs. None have been more memorable than my former student of statistics, Jonathan. Jonathan was blind. One day, he asked me to print the content of my course website so someone could read it to him. Jonathan told me that most websites weren’t made for people like him – even with the existence screen reading technology.

I wanted to understand. I downloaded a trial version of Jaws and listened to my favorite websites. I was horrified. Sites with the most organized visual designs were often the most confusing to listen to. My stats website was no exception. At that moment, I decided that I would not let my website fail Jonathan like so many others had – I would give Jonathan the same online experiences as every other student.

I spent months learning about the web accessibility standards. I listened to my site again and again. I tested my links with Bobby to find the flaws I couldn’t hear. I worked closely with Jonathan to understand the experience of a real, non-sighted user.

Jonathan thrived. He used his earphones to explore my site in the student computer lab. He loved to learn about stats – and that’s really rare for an undergraduate. By semester’s end, I found Jonathan helping several of my sighted students with their homework.

The web is one of the greatest tools in human history. But it’s not just a tool. It’s a place — a place where non-sighted people cannot go. Will the day ever come when people take this more seriously? Will the day ever come when potential clients are beating down our doors for online accessibility evaluations and repairs? With pioneers like Bruce ‘BJ’ Sexton taking on giants like Target.com, perhaps that day is closer than we think.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling small, I think of Jonathan and what his life without the web must be like. Even if major companies are legally forced to include him (see the Section 508 website), it will likely take years to get their sites up to standard. Jonathan will have to wait a long time before he can surf the web like the rest of us. Meanwhile, I’m online all the time. Online, being small means nothing. In that space, I fit. In that space, I am capable of anything. Jonathan helped me see and appreciate something that I took for granted – a charmed virtual life.

Google recently launched a new testing site, SearchMash. It’s an interesting concept for multiple reasons but mostly because it is a live user experience test for their flagship product. The quote from Google about SearchMash goes something like this, “The goal of SearchMash is to test innovative user interfaces in order to continually improve the overall search experience for our users.” It’s a great idea to field test something like this in a live environment and get data on the fly, I wish there were more companies doing it this way. It will be great when they start to integrate the findings into the actual Google search. I like what I see so far in things like bringing images to the same search results page, a separated call out for Wikipedia entries, and collapsable boxes. If they went one step further and made the boxes customizable like on the personalized Google Homepage (ability to “resize” and reorder) then this would be my default search engine.

The linking option menu is a nice touch as well, I especially like the “More from this site option” where it narrows the search to one particular site. They were also clever in adding a simple survey, “were these results useful to you?” in the right hand column. I think they should integrate AdSense next and see what users do.

Back in the late 90s, it seems like using a tab format for organizing information was the hot thing. Every site seemed to be an Amazon.com copycat or they were using tabs as an attempt to mimic how physical papers might be organized into folders.

I’m not sure why the trend faded out, but tabs are definitely making a comeback. Not necessarily for primary navigation design, but as a way to consolidate a high quantity of information on one page without requiring a lot of click-through effort.

Because the new Yahoo.com and many news oriented sites are utilizing tabs, users are becoming more comfortable with this form of navigation. The exposure from these highly visible sites has started an upward swing again. In the last few wireframes our team has developed, we’ve utilized tabbing systems for:

Exposing Content on Home Pages - Content that is typically buried on back pages and represents information that users are seeking can be brought forward, exposing awareness of it without creating clutter. This gives the home page better “scent” (coined by Jared Spool) and alleviates the burden on the user to try and learn the site’s taxonomy and nomenclature to figure to find content.

Exposing Widgets & Functions – Bringing small forms and functionality that represent common tasks users will want to immediately initiate from the home page is HUGE in improving the user experience. Delta.com has done a great job of this by consolidating these functions into modules that include tabbing systems.

Product/Service Detail Pages – Consolidating detailed information about a product or service is another great use of tabs. It is a very fast and simple way to browse and scan information without having to expend the physical effort of clicking and waiting for a page refresh.

So, while tabs seem cool right now, our newest designs haven’t gone through usability tests yet. I’ll post some updates when we get some reactions from users.