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The Occasional Frequent User
By Micha | November 8, 2007
Last weekend we set the clocks back for the winter. It’s always nice to have an ‘extra hour’ and to perhaps do something a little special: lay in bed, go for a leisurely breakfast, take a long walk in the park. It’s one of the perks of living on a tilted globe.
For me, this time of year also means that I get to be an Occasional User for certain technology interfaces such as the button riddled panel on my car stereo and the monstrous web tool for managing expiring domain names.
In the past I’ve been completely stumped by the task of adjusting the little car stereo clock and for many years I just let the thing be off an hour throughout the winter months. Having of course lost the manual I was not able to get beyond the point where clicking the ‘Clock’ button would simply toggle the LEDs between clock time and CD song time.
One year I had a brilliant insight – or was it an accident? – and I held the ‘Clock’ button down for long enough to set the LEDs flashing in a promising fashion. Then all I had to do was figure out which of the many other buttons would actually adjust the time. Eventually, after enough stop lights, I was able to accomplish the task.
The problem is that I would forget all of this in the following six months. As an Occasional User I was perpetually untrained, at least for a number of years. It’s not so much a learning process as a forgetting-and-relearning-process. This year however I was very pleased with myself for getting the whole operation done in the space of a single stop light.
But then there’s that domain name problem. I decided, for convenience sake, to transfer all my expiring domain names to my newer registrar, GoDaddy. It turns out that GoDaddy uses the ubiquitous “Domain Control Center” for domain name management. The Domain Control Center is found on many registrar sites including, ironically enough, the site I am choosing to leave. I don’t know much about the mysterious world of domain name registrars but it appears that either one corporate entity controls a good number of disparate brands or many registrars license The Domain Control Center engine. Considering that www.domaincontrolcenter.com takes us straight to GoDaddy.com one might draw the conclusion that it’s GoDaddy’s baby.
That in itself is not a problem. Where the whole thing comes to a grinding halt for me is that this DCC is essentially unusable for anyone who has more than a tiny handful of domains to manage. I had about a dozen in this batch and after an arduous 2 hour struggle, several of my domain names had still not made it across the transfer chasm. Perhaps I’ll try again someday but in the meantime I have better things to do with my time.
So what exactly was the problem? Well largely it comes from two factors:
• The plethora of cryptic links on the interface
• The dogged insistence on doing everything piecemeal
These two conditions actually spell out a core usability problem. Each is a distinct design paradigm and each points in a different direction: the first towards a more Frequent User who has managed over time to learn the meanings of the links; the second seems to cater to an Occasional User who has only one or two items to manage and needs the task broken into a linear sequence of steps. I fell into a third, unsupported category as one who is an Occasional User who would like to be efficient in managing a significant number of items - in bulk.*
To make matters rather more stressful is the fact that the proper authorization codes and IDs must be reconciled for obvious security reasons. This is done through emails coming from both the old and the new registrar. One takes the information supplied in each registrar’s email and enters it into the process at the other’s site. Although this may sound complicated in words, the user who has a single domain name to manage may not notice a problem. But in my case I found my inboxes for my two respective email accounts (old registrar and new registrar) became populated with the likes of this:
Now what this means is that not only is one forced to deal with the numerous changes one at a time, but without domain name information in the subject line one must also play a rather silly lottery to guess which emails contain the info for the particular name that is being transferred. The option of true bulk management seems to not exist - or at least it is not apparent to the Occasional User.
So let me describe the user experience in terms of an analogy. Let’s say you’re cooking an omelette. This is typically not a complex task because you simply pull all the ingredients out of the fridge and get them ready on the counter. Then you crack a few eggs and place them in the bowl, mix ‘em up and cook. Very simple.
Now let’s do the same thing in a Domain Control Center style of working. You walk into the kitchen after entering your password (if you can still remember it from last year). You open the fridge and realize the ingredients you want are not there - you will need to transfer them from the grocery store. Your fridge gives you secret information that will enable you to acquire the eggs from the security conscious grocery store. You go to the store and at the front door you give them your other password (if you can remember that one). You want to get a dozen eggs but are told that you can only buy one at a time. You make numerous trips to the dairy section and return to the check out with a single egg. Naturally, you’d like to pack up the eggs in your shopping bag but are told that they will be delivered – for security reasons of course – to your home.
Back in your kitchen, you are told that the eggs (when they arrive) cannot be all put in one bowl. Instead, each egg must be scrambled in its properly assigned bowl, each of which you must select before bringing the egg into the kitchen. The eggs arrive in the back of a truck in individual, unmarked brown paper bags. You go to your front door and ask the delivery guy to give you a bag. He brings you one but in the kitchen you find it’s not the right egg for the currently active bowl. You head back to the front door and ask for another. You spend an hour or so trying to match eggs with their respective bowls, endeavouring to ignore the shouts of your kids who are due to expire from hunger at any moment. You begin to wish that there was such thing as a fast food restaurant in this strangely twisted world.
There are many instances in which our world is so strangely twisted and our time so amply wasted by systems that are poorly designed. On a happier note, today happens to be World Usability Day. I applaud the higher profile that this international event gives to the efforts of usability professionals who work hard to remedy some of these unnecessary and avoidable stresses. But they can only do that if software producers take the step to hire them. If you are creating a software application, do your customers a favour and hire a proper usability expert to help ensure your product caters to such factors as these significantly different types of users: the Frequent User and the Occasional User and, yes, the Occasional Frequent User. It can make a world of difference.
Footnotes
* To be fair, there is a ‘bulk transfer’ feature in the Domain Control Center. However it seems to be inconsistent and after entering multiple names at the start I found myself having to deal with individual items again. It could well be that I missed something in the interface - but then that’s my point about being a perpetually untrained Occasional Frequent User. (back to story)
Topics: Uncategorized, user interface design, subject oriented design, usability, graphical user interfaces, customer relations, user relations, customer service, user experience, ineffective communication, design simplicity, target users, target markets, web monsters |
January 2nd, 2008 at 5:16 am
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