Welcome

When I left the journalism industry two years ago not many people were thinking about the usability of their websites. Within the past few weeks I have seen a few things that make me believe that maybe they are starting to come around.

With the spike in online newspaper readership last year, thinking about the user seems to have started to become a priority.

A few weeks ago the Atlanta Journal Constitution posted a job to the CHI jobs list seeking Usability Engineer/Analyst. I also found it interesting that they posted to the CHI jobs listserv and not the typical places you would post journalism jobs. The CHI jobs listserv is one of the locations for people who are interested in the area of user centered design and usability to look for jobs.

I have seen some papers that have done some usability testing on their own without a position like this. A recent online journalism review article talked about a small paper in Alabama that conducted usability testing on their website. This article reminded me of some of the papers I read from the mid to late 90 that discuss usability testing like this on software and other websites outside of the journalism industry.

This is a very positive step for the industry as a whole. Hopefully usability testing will lead to user centered design techniques throughout the industry.

This is the second example of bad usability that I have seen with a PayPal integration. I am trying to decide if this is the way PayPal wants things or something else.

From Woot.com:

Once again the PayPal button is closer to the credit card entry area than the selection of the credit card option. I thought maybe it had something to do with the hiding of the text boxes since that can be tricky cross browser. Switching the position of the radio buttons shouldn't make any difference in this case.

I did work on one integration project like this during the summer but the vendor I worked with with didn't have this setup for payment selection. I am not picking on PayPal because I interned there this summer if it was any checkout system that was doing this I would be equally critical.

I am a huge fan of Southwest airlines they get you where you need to go for a reasonable price. A few weeks ago I tried to book my flight home and kept getting this error message "The purchaser's first name was not entered. Please return to the previous page and enter the purchaser's first name." So I check to make sure my passenger info is entered and try again. Same thing again so I gave up thinking there was a glitch.

I saw the form pictured below and thought that part was only for people using PayPal to checkout so I guessed the next page would have the information for those of us not using PayPal.

So tonight I tried again filled out the form and got the same error. Here is the payment part of the form.

After staring at it for a little while I realized I was supposed to enter my credit card information in the boxes below the PayPal button. Ok, I see now but this doesn't make sense.

Out of curiosity I clicked the PayPal button to see what it would do. Here is the result of that.

My confusion was in the fact that indented below the PayPal button was the form for the credit card info. This is an easy fix I think.

That is much clearer to me. Click the credit card button and fill in the info below it. Click the PayPal button and poof it is gone and you go through the PayPal checkout.

For my statistics class I ran a quick usability study of 10 subjects to gather some data. Often when you run tests you have to connect a web cam and microphone to your laptop. The camera has to be positioned so you can get the facial expressions of the participant this can take a little adjusting. Plus you have to make sure you remember the camera, microphone etc.

I have found an easy way to bypass the web cam.

If you use Camtasia on a MacBook running BootCamp and Windows. It makes it so much easier to set up your test since the only external thing you need to connect is your headset. The built in microphone might be strong enough to pick it up but I didn't want to take the chance of loosing audio.

It is nice to offer your user an external mouse since running Windows on a Mac is a little odd when it comes to finding the keys that need to be pressed and understanding how to right click.

The nice thing is that you can carry all of this equipment around in your backpack without adding any more weight than you already carry if you bring your laptop with you everywhere.