The Web Is Still Mostly Unusable

August 30, 2005 | 17 Comments

It amazes me that some of the most popular, most successful Web sites and applications out there are hard to use, poorly designed and generally over complicated. I’m a firm believer that extreme simplicity is the wave of the future, but Web 2.0 and the worthy concept of “doing one thing really well” hasn’t seemed to catch on in a widespread way.

While on my honeymoon I had some real trouble with Expedia. I booked my trip through them and I can safely say I’ll probably think twice before doing it again. Why? While they do things pretty well up front, the second you’ve got a problem, like say the airline changes the time of your flight, things go straight to hell. Without boring you with the details, their system is simply to complicated and “feature rich” to deal with some very common, and very simple, problems. As well, while they have the technology down, their behind the scenes processes are a joke.

But I guess it works for them…I think they’re the biggest online travel agent on the Web.

There are more examples…

Look at MySpace—in many ways bigger than Google—and a challenge, to say the least, from a design and usability standpoint. Or one of the many photo sharing services out there that are still bigger than Flickr. Or, refer to my experience with Overstock.com.

There are examples of applications and Web sites all over the Web that have major problems, yet some how do just fine. Is it because there isn’t something better? It’s it because they’re better at marketing and branding? Is it because their customers are stupid?

How long before we’ve got better built and better designed sites and applications going up against the really big guys? I don’t think they’ll be jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon themselves any time soon. Although one can hope, and I, for one, would be happy to help some of these folks.

I’ve been pimping Flickr to everyone I know, yet still most people I know (non-Web geeks) use these ridiculously bloated applications that require me to sign up, load applets, sit through ads, etc. just to look at photos. The advertising I can handle, the sign up just to view photos…I can do without. Either way, why would you use those services when something like Flickr is so much better in so many ways?

Changing the Web? We’ve got a long way to go.

What will it take to spread “Web 2.0” (for lack of a better moniker) to the rest of the Web? I think those of us who write about, speak on and advocate for a more usable, standard, collaborative and generally better Web might need to bring some old topics back up. Back to basics, if you will.

We need to not only solve people’s problems and make more usable sites and software, we need to make sure people know about it. I know that it goes against the new wave of entrepreneurial “rules” but to make a significant change we’ll need marketing and PR and most importantly to extend beyond the circles we run in. It goes back to reaching a wider audience, something Web standards and best practice folks have been dealing with for a long time.

It’s hard to see the forest for the trees and I know I spend enough time with people who think just like me and who know how much better the Web can be than the Overstock.coms of the Web. We need to spread the word to the non-geeks. Talk about Flickr and other “Web 2.0” successes. Find out what people’s core problems are and solve them as well. Focus less on design and technology as it relates to our “design and development” problems and more as it relates to the problems of our customers and clients.

You think most people care if you use Ajax? Only if it makes their tasks easier. What Ajax means to me is more ways to solve people’s problems. Nothing more. But first we’ve got to understand the problems, right? We have to know what people want.

I want applications that work—every time (although, in the case of ESPN’s Draft Application, I’ll take one time!). I want e-commerce with back-end processes that can deal with simple problems. I want quality information and content, not fluff. I want to be able to find something easily and to be able to make use of it once it’s located. I want powerful features that I’ll actually use and that’ll do what I expect. I want help and feedback that makes sense to me. I want Web sites and applications I can rave about and tell my less geeky friends and family about. I want to spend less time dealing with the Web so I can spend more time off the Web.

What do you want?

Filed under: Web General
Keyword Tags: usabiltiy web+design web+2.0 business

Comments

1. Jason said:

Keith, I think some folks are seriously just ignorantly blissful on the Web. A friend of mine’s band got a site listing on MySpace.com and is as happy as can be that they now have an ‘Internet presence’. I couldn’t even find their site by searching from MySpace’s search! Maybe we are giving users a little too much credit.

Posted on August 30, 2005 10:47 AM | #

2. Riogerio said:

I believe the main problem is that people don’t really get to know the Web medium before they get to working on it. As a communications major, they always insisted that before making a message, you have to know your medium.

In my professional experience, here in México, the people who work on the Web are always thinking of a different medium that they want to adapt. Design has to look like a magazine article and sound has to be radio like and short movies and animations have to be like a motion picture. This is not radio or magazines or even a movie theater. When people start to understand their medium they can better work for it. Untill then, we’ll have developers and designers breaking their heads and fixing up code to get the Web to do things that are not inherent to itself.

Understand your medium and work for it. It doesn’t work the other way around (of course I can use my TV as just a simple radio… but why would I?)…

Posted on August 30, 2005 10:58 AM | #

3. Rogerio said:

Spelled my name wrong… I get so pissed about this trying to educate the uneducated!!!!!! hehehe

Posted on August 30, 2005 11:00 AM | #

4. Andrea said:

I’ve thought about this a lot in terms of university sites, and I think it carries over into Expedia-type sites as well. A lot of folks would rather keep using inefficient sites where they have learned how to accomplish what they need to do than to have to learn how to use a new site, even if it is much better and easier to use. They get very frustrated when web sites change, because they have to think about things they didn’t have to think about anymore.

This is shortsighted, but I think it is also human nature.

Posted on August 30, 2005 11:06 AM | #

5. Jakob Heuser said:

The success of sites such as MySpace is hardly an exception in the history of the web. When things are fun to do, people do them. Given enough time, the user learns the interface, the problems, and copes with them. Once active and enjoying the web site, the user forgets about all the problems they had..

Interface, IA, and the lot seem important for the initial customer, but if the product provides enjoyment and entertainment, they will invest the time to learn. We see this all the time with Gaia (current project). The menus aren’t the greatest, it’s very much not web 2.0 yet, and there’s a pretty sharp learning curve. And yet, 10s of thousands of teenagers go on the site daily to chat in forums and play games. In talking with some of them, they don’t remember the bad parts - where to shop, how to play some of the games, server jumping when part of the site would go down, etc. They only remember their friends are there and that they’re having a great time.

Coming then to the original question, “what do you want?” one should be asking “what do you want from a site that does _______?”. In a web application, I like the things you like, Keith. But when it comes to sites that entertain me, I want to be entertained, and I’m willing to mill about in Web 1.0 if it’s entertaining.

Posted on August 30, 2005 11:09 AM | #

6. Geoffrey said:

I think you are mostly right about all of this and it is up to us “geeks” to spread the word about sites that do work. But I think often the case might be that people would much rather rant about bad sites than rave about good ones. An old adage in the restaurant business is that if somebody dines at a restaurant and has a great time they will tell 1 or 2 people. If the same person has awful time they will tell 8 people.
I think we should all continue to expose the many faults of the interweb, but, like you said, let’s not forget to keep promoting the ones that are doing it right–there’s more of those every day.

Posted on August 30, 2005 11:21 AM | #

7. Kev said:

The sites that we as web standards/designers/usability evangalists like don’t have large marketing budgets or established long term presence. An example - I use flickr, my Mum and Dad use Photobox. No amount of persuading will get them to budge because they don’t care about the benefits, they see every ‘new’ piece of web software as something new they have to learn - hence they don’t bother.

Our problems are traditional - word of mouth advertising is still very powerful but when its compounded with a medium that is still unnatural territory to the vast majority of people, its also very slow.

Posted on August 30, 2005 11:36 AM | #

8. Keith said:

Jakob – I think you bring up a good point, but I don’t find MySpace “fun” and I certainly don’t enjoy the experiences I’ve had with say Expedia. I think MySpace is successful because they’ve got easily accessed pictures of hot people. ;0) But really, it’s not about better technology or all of that, it’s about the experience, just like you describe with Gaia.

If the experience can succeed inspite of the problems, Web 2.0 or no, then it should be ok. My guess is that these applications do well simply becasue people have no other choice that they know about. People deal with it because they don’t have another option. Not dealing with problems is more “fun” in my book.

What I’m getting at is that the people who run and own these sites and applications don’t worry as much as they can about the experience, they don’t have to improve on the “fun factor” because there is no competition. Hopefully that will chance with “Web 2.0.”

(By the way, I don’t really like that term “Web 2.0”, but I can’t think of anything better…)

I sure as hell think there is a MySpace killer out there, and if MySpace were smart, they’d take steps to make sure it’s themselves.

Again, people cope because they have to, make it so they don’t have to and they might just stop using sites that give them problems. I’m not using Expedia again. I’ll sure as hell never go back to Overstock and Flickr will be my photo sharing application of choice because it works better. I could go on…

Geoff – Agreed. Problem is, there is less to rave about than there is to rant about.

Posted on August 30, 2005 11:39 AM | #

9. Keith said:

Kev – True, you have to provide a compelling reason to get people to change. I’ve been able to do that with Flickr a bit, but you’re right, it is hard to get people to learn something new, nevermind how much better it can be.

That’s one of the biggest problems. And on of the reasons why marketing and the like is important. People tend to listen to what they deem “authoritative” and frankly, for many folks, that’s legit ads and marketing and such…

In this way the Web is a slow medium. Heck I still know tons of people who don’t really get “blogging”…but we take it for granted. Forest for the trees again…

Posted on August 30, 2005 11:44 AM | #

10. Christian Watson said:

Keith,

I’m not clear how your experience with Expedia relates to their site. It sounds like you had a customer service problem. Perhaps you can elaborate?

Anyway, I think that the problem in large part stems from the lack of a user-centered design process. Why? Because these web teams are probably under-staffed and don’t have the time or resources to spend getting it right for the user.

The management team probably don’t know or care much about this aspect of the design process (except that it slows things down a great deal) and so the web team are forced to make decisions based on assumptions rather than user data.

You know how it is - companies are more focused on adding new stuff (features and the like) than on getting what they already have right. I experience this all the time, although fortunately I’m largely able to push back and make sure these steps are included in the development process.

Posted on August 30, 2005 12:34 PM | #

11. Kevin Laurence said:

Flickr might be well designed, but it still suffers from a major disadvantage. You can’t use it to order prints.

My relatives want to buy prints of my family photos, so until Flickr offers such a service I’ll continue to use the commercial services that offer printing (see the lengthy forum thread on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/forums/ideas/1149/).

Good design is irrelevant if the service doesn’t do what you want in the first place!

Posted on August 30, 2005 12:40 PM | #

12. Britt said:

You’re right. Many people still don’t understand concepts or process we take for granted. For example, at work I found that some people don’t use a Basecamp site because they can’t remember their login and password. I take for granted that Firefox remembers it for me (they use IE) and that I subscribe to the site’s RSS feed.

I’ve been thinking about ways not only to make things easier to use but to spread some of my knowledge of processes and tools that help people save time and get more use out of the web.

We, or at least I, tend to forget how much time we spend doing things on the web and how much we know. We’re tapped in to such a rich community of people sharing advice and tips, but it’s not a resource that people know how to utilize.

Posted on August 30, 2005 12:44 PM | #

13. Keith said:

Christian – It was a problem that was rooted in customer service and technology, but their site was a big part of the problem as well. All of these things are (or should be) related. You know that some problems can’t be solved well by technology, yet we still try to force users online when somethings are better left done, say over the phone.

ANYway, It would take much to long to get into it in detail (and I don’t want to because it pissed me off so much), but basically one of my flights changed and they didn’t have the process, or the technology, to easily infom me of that change. A simple 5 minute adjustment cost me about 4 hours on the phone, countless e-mails and a lot of stress.

Kevin – Your right. But that’s not really what I’m talking about, I bet if you could order prints via Flickr that’d make you think about using it for that. Why do people use poorly designed and implemented services to share photos, when all they want to do is share, not print? You make a good point, as it pertains to Flickr, but Flickr is there to share photos. If they mess that up by adding prints I’ll be hacked off. ;0) Hopefully they can do it and keep the core service working as it does. They understand their customers and seem to care about that stuff, so I’ve got high hopes.

Posted on August 30, 2005 12:55 PM | #

14. evan said:

Why is the web ugly?
Easy, it was all designed (UI and look & feel) by the engineers that built the site. They have the backend behind it going, but a lot of these big sites never went to a user interface designer, or graphic artist until they had the money to do so.

Luckily, now i’m seeing startups employing designers right off the bat, rather than making them back-burner like the old days.

Myspace is a great example of this, NexTag is another. Each make tons of revenue, but look and function like a pile. Other sites have put too much money into design resources, and skimped on the code. Expedia may be one of those sites. They got the backend working, and probably wanted to get bought out or acquired - they then realized their site wasn’t as cosmetically pleasing as their competitors… so they dump a ton of money into design, and end up spreading themselves too thin on engineering. It’s a fine balance to make sites look and function well.

Posted on August 30, 2005 01:57 PM | #

15. Paul said:

Keith,

I think a lot of people just get used to the first site that they experience in trying a particular service and they stick with it regardless of design or usability.

For travel, that might be Travelocity. Others might like Expedia because it’s familiar to them and it worked once for them.

People, in general, are opposed to change, especially those who aren’t completely comfortable with computers or the internet to begin with. I think that early web commerce pioneers understood the concept and importance of being “first mover” because they “knew” the psychology of most users/customers.

Posted on August 30, 2005 09:49 PM | #

16. Ted Drake said:

I think there is also a great resistance to change. We recently converted the intranet home page to css-based layout but had to keep it looking and feeling almost identical to the old table based layout. The company was afraid to make significant changes in the interface. Not that it was great, but because they didn’t want the user to be confused.

I think more businesses feel more comfortable going with what is known than changing course for a more usable web. They need to be shown the material benefits of usable design. Often times, this echoes the battle between marketing department designers and IT web programmers for control over interface and user-interaction.

Posted on August 31, 2005 08:05 AM | #

17. Chris G said:

Keith,

Is this a problem with the web or with tech systems in general? Take a look at the arcane codes on the receipt from your local grocery store or how damn unreadable your phone bill is.

And does it even have to involve technology to make it unusable?

User-centered design (or re-design) is gonna be a hot button topic for decades while we take systems that for better or worse mostly get the job done and remake them with real users in mind. On the web, we’ve apparently decided to call this evolution Web 2.0.

The more users see what a really good design can do for them, the more they’ll expect really good designs. They won’t know this, but we see it all the time.

Personally, I can’t wait for Automated Customer Service Phone Systems 2.0. :-)

Posted on August 31, 2005 09:50 AM | #