Bad Design Decisions
December 02, 2003 6 | Comments (Closed)
We’ve all made them. Some have been poorer than others. Some are easily remedied and some are a nightmare to back out of. They’re bad design decisions and there’s always a story behind them. If I share one with you I’m hoping you’ll share some with me.
As you can imagine, having spent many years designing and developing Web sites, I’ve got lots of stories I could tell. What I’ve decided to go with is one that started out small, but ended up being very costly. It’s also one that helped me get on the road to user advocacy and hammered in the importance of getting to know your users.
The Java Jumble
Back in my Boeing days I worked with a very talented team of Web professionals. It was a great experience and we did some great work.
Much of what we did involved online learning. There came a time when we were asked to build some training that was mandatory for certain groups of managers. If you know anything about Boeing, you might know that there are lots and lots of managers so this was a pretty large user group.
As far as I can remember we did very little, if anything, in the way of user testing or user research. That was mistake number one. We sat down with instructional designers and engineers and went from there. We assumed we had a handle on what our users wanted. Mistake number two.
It was decided that it was very important “to engage the user” and this was a time before Flash was really in use, not that it would have helped the situation at all, so it was decided to go with Java. The site was highly interactive and for the first week or after it launched everyone was happy.
Then the calls began to come in. Some folks couldn’t access all of the courses, others were confused as to what they were supposed to do. Because we’d had little (as far as I remember) contact with the users up to that point, we were not prepared to deal with this.
We also realized that the interactive parts of the site were a bit hard to maintain. Updates were tricky and costly. We’d assumed that we’d not need to change it much so this wasn’t a concern when the project started out.
It ended up being a costly mess. We tweaked, twisted and tinkered with the site but nothing worked. I built an HTML only version of the site, thinking that we could provide that as an alternate, accessible version. It was rejected by the instructional designers as not engaging enough.
This lingered for months.
I’m not sure what ever happened with that site, before it was resolved I jumped ship to try my hand at the dot com thing. I just know it wasn’t anywhere as successful as it should have been and the cost was through the roof.
My guess is that, had we done some user research, we’d have learned that thousands of busy managers, who probably weren’t the most Web savvy folks, would have preferred something simple and very easy to get through. I doubt they’d have cared if it was “engaging” as long as it was quick and easy. But that’s just a guess.
If I knew then what I know now I’d have organized some gorilla usability and done my best to get some visibility for it. But then again, it’s because of this situation and others like it that I am an advocate for users now.
Learning from your mistakes is key to success and a fair share of the blame had to fall on me as a development lead.
I really wish we’d taken the time to get to know our users and understand better their needs. If we’d done that I’m quite sure we’d have made a better, more informed design decision and everyone would have been happy.
Filed under: Web Design
Comments
1. Nick Finck said:
Why worry about the past mistakes you may have made. These were nothing more than learning experiences. Sometimes you have to fail in order to succeed.
Posted on December 2, 2003 01:35 PM | #
2. Keith said:
Of course you’re right and I don’t worry about past mistakes much. We all make them and hopefully learn from them.
Sharing them (and the lessons learned from them) though might help others learn or at least avoid the same mistake.
Well that and I had some readers ask for examples of bad design and on this site anyway – ask and you shall receive.
;)
Posted on December 2, 2003 01:53 PM | #
3. Dave Meehan said:
The problem there appeared to be that you had faith in the opinions of the instructional designers. You assumed that they knew what was required to make the program a success. Your suggesting that they failed to understand the users requirements, and that you perpetuated that failure. That is not necessarily a failure on your part. You have to put that kind of faith when a new team is formed, because for each person to analyse the others competencies would be equally damaging to timescale and cost.
I had a similar experience a few years ago. I’d been asked to provide a small part of a large solution using a product I was responsible for. This was off the shelf, and should have only require configuration. There were performance and reliability problems and so I went on site to dig deep and understand the cause. The problem was trivial as it turned out with a simple workaround, but while questioning the users about usage patterns etc I came across a fundamental. They misunderstood the pricing structure for each transaction, like by a factor of 100 or so. The project was doomed because at the specification stage someone on our team had failed to understand the transaction volumes and pricing for each of those transactions. This was only a pilot, but the project was around USD3 million, and we’d already invested something like USD300,000 in resource on the pilot in the hope of getting the business.
Senior managers were keen to try and save the project (more than one moved on during this debacle), and I just withdrew my departments resource from the project, knowing that my own profitability was more important than saving someone elses turkey.
The business never came in.
Posted on December 3, 2003 01:47 AM | #
4. Christian said:
I don’t know whether this is a true design decision, but I often find that insufficient planning when starting to build out a site often comes back to bite me on the arse.
For example, not filling in certain meta tags on the template page that you use for the rest of the site, so that you then have to go back to each page and fill them in (or do a global find and replace, of course). Or, hard coding the footer and then having to make a change when the information or copyright date changes. Or, not making sure that your template page validates and then having to go back and fix a whole bunch which have the same error. I could go on…
Lesson learned: don’t be *so* eager to get cracking on a site that you don’t set it up properly first.
Posted on December 3, 2003 04:35 PM | #
5. The Scholar said:
Anytime I used frames on a site that required constant updating.
Posted on December 3, 2003 06:46 PM | #
6. Christian said:
A bit late but I thought I’d drop a comment to show that even the ‘experts’ can get it wrong. I’ve just been using shopping.com which was redesigned by 37signals and have discovered a couple of interesting usability flaws from my short use of the site.
I’m looking for an MP3 player so on the home page under “Electronics”, I click on “Audio” to get to the right area. However, there’s no mention of MP3 players because it’s taken me to “Home Audio”. Why? I have no idea. Feeling pretty confused, I click on Electronics to see a list of all categories, and then click on “Handheld Electronics” as that seems like a pretty obvious place for it–after all, they’re all hand held aren’t they. Right? Wrong!
Finally, I go back to “Electronics” and browse through the list and find “Personal Audio”–at last! Apart from the obvious fact that “Audio” shouldn’t take you to “Home Audio”, why they didn’t add MP3 players to within “Handheld Electronics” I’ll never know.
So then I have fun looking at all the players, settle on one and hit “compare prices”. I like to see the full cost and so I notice that I can “Enter zip code in orange box to see the total price including tax & shipping”. So where is the orange box? Nowhere on my screen. That’s because it’s below the fold of the page–aagh! The search box is within an orange stripe though, and I almost considered typing it in there before I scrolled down the page. Why didn’t they put the orange box above the list of stores? It would have been so easy to do.
I wonder how much business shopping.com is losing because of these problems, bearing in mind that this is just one category out of many? A little more usability testing might have gone a long way in this instance.
[Rant over].
Posted on December 6, 2003 08:17 AM | #
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