Category Archives: Usability

ESPN’s Online Video Player

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ESPN Sports

I watch a ton of ESPN on T.V. Ask my fiancee, Shannan. I DVR Around the Horn and Pardon the Interuption. I watch SportsCenter all the time, especially during baseball season. I watch this stuff so much that Shannan can recognize and name the hosts and commentators on other T.V. shows.

One thing about ESPN that drives me insane is their web site. Specifically their built in video player on their index page. It plays the default video automatically. So even if I don’t care about that video, it’ll start playing and making noise as I’m reading something else. Talk about annoying. It even woke me up one night because I left my laptop on one night with ESPN loaded in the current page. It just started playing on its own!

So, this is a note to everyone working on ESPN’s web page. Cut the crap. Don’t play the video by default. You might find you save your company money every month in bandwidth in the process too.

Usability Testing: The Beginning

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We did usability testing for YumDrop way back when we redesigned it the first time. It worked out pretty well. Sales went up. Much success! However, we never did it again. Taboo #1 when it comes to usability testing. I’ve been planning on getting it rolling again lately and finally did with an impromptu session with my brother.

The amazing thing was that I was able to do it OVER THE PHONE! I basically just asked vague questions to see what he thought of different pages on our sites. From the 20 minute session, I was able to get a few good ideas, which is really all you need to start. The only downside of it is I can’t see what he’s clicking on or hovering the mouse over. The important thing I think is that I did it, even if it wasn’t perfect. Something is better than nothing after all.

One thing I was able to get out of Krug’s book was that it doesn’t really matter so much how you do your usability testing (other than a few key approaches), but that you do it and keep doing it. As you continue down the testing road, you’ll continue to improve the stumbling points people have with your web site.

Book Review: Don’t Make Me Think

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I recently purchased Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability for a plane trip to California to my brother’s wedding.


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Image courtesy of Amazon.com

I was able to read the entire book for the most part in about 2-3 hours (which Steve notes was on purpose). Along the way I kept some notes on a piece of paper as well as some in my head. What I found after finishing was I was starting to look at the web sites I work on (FrightCatalog.com, YumDrop.com, and ImportCostumes.com) in a different way. Steve is very accurate in stating that developer’s look at their web sites very differently than those who will visit them. We think that if we like a design aspect or we find a feature useful, the entire world will. After all, we’re trying to develop for the average user, right? Wrong. There is no average user (and if there was, developers certainly aren’t in that group). We, as developers, aren’t the target audience. The rest of the world is and we need to make sure our sites are as easy to use as possible so people don’t have to (as Steve states time and time again) muddle through.

By the end of the book, Steve delves into Usability Testing, something we’ve only done briefly for YumDrop (and it did work when we did it), but we haven’t continued. We will now. To improve our conversions, we need to get people to look at more product. That means seeing how they use the site and what prevents them from purchasing products. One of the first changes we made was altering the header of the Fright Catalog index page, putting search in the upper left and calling more attention to the button. We found that only 18% of visitors used search, which is abysmal. My guess is they didn’t see it over on the right side of the page where it was before because people scan (they don’t read) web sites left to right (like a newspaper or book). I’ll report later on if that percentage increases.

If you don’t have a copy of it, I highly recommend you buy it. Steve does an excellent job at opening your eyes to a new world of developing web sites and retaining users. I’m really excited to apply more and more of what he talks about in his book to our sites. I’ll also be reading it multiple times, which is easy because the book is short. I’m sure I missed some good tidbits!