[IxDA Discuss] Meaningful labels

[Jim Drew]

>From: "jackbellis.com" <jackbellis at hotmail.com>

>C) there is some imagined expectation that a powerful machine could be used
>without reading words? (This third item is not meant to be facetious.) Or
>maybe it's not a deliberately imagined thing... maybe it's just an
>undeniable practice and the consequences are what they are? Sort of makes me
>think of Homer Simpson at that nuclear reactor control panel.

We did a usability test of our in-process product a couple weeks ago and saw examples of this.  In one case, a user had done a search in her library for a particular item, which returned no results (correctly), and a message was put up in the library view saying that no results were found.  All well and good.

She then tried to add more content to her library, but when she checked the library, she found that the content was not there.  (We had retained the search key in use, so until she added that item of content, she was SOL.)  Repeatedly, she added content, checked the view, saw nothing, figured something was wrong, added more content, and so on.

At no time did she stop to read (or perhaps notice) the message which would have cued her in to what was going on.  While you can argue that we shold have cleared the search key or made the message bigger or used color and animation to attract her attention, some of the blame still falls to the user: there was message text in the middle of the big blank library view and she never stopped to read it, nor did she ever stop to figure out why her library add efforts were failing.  She apparently figured (a) anything going wrong was her fault, (b) it was up to her to figure out what the problem was and how to fix it, that she could not depend on anything but her own wits, and (c) doing the same thing over and over again would eventually make it "stick".  (And possibly (d) she was told it was beta software with some quirks and bugs, so manye this was one of them.)

I see it with friends who are barely computer literate trying to use the likes of Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Mail, too.  Even though there is a big red string in front of them, they don't read it, they don't look for any feedback at all.

-- Jim Drew
   Seattle, WA