How to score on a date with your users (or: Setting realistic expectations)

Some episodes of MADtv included a returning sketch called Lowered Expectations. The sketch featured weird candidates appearing in a video dating service for those who have 'low expectations'. In a similar way, developers often need to lower their expectations in order to enable successful user/software interactions.

Application developers often expect their users to perform unrealistic tasks. They require users to recall many details, click miniature links with their mice or precisely type long URLs:

In order to define a blog's timezone in Blogger, a user must scroll through a huge list which is sorted by the [UTC+X] offset values. Each item in the list includes the UTC offset of the timezone, continent name and a major city in the area.

Blogger is setting unrealistic expectations. It actually expects the user to know his UTC offset in order to find his location on the list. After a 3-4 minutes of scrolling back and forth, I remembered Israel is either UTC+2 or UTC+3. But defining my blog timezone should not take 4 minutes.

Realistic expectations take user abilities into consideration. It's reasonable to assume that the user can define his location with no problem, but it's completely unreasonable to assume that he knows his UTC offset value.

So how do you score on a date with your users? You make it dead-easy for them to achieve their goals and make it hard for them to get confused and make mistakes.

Stressed out message boxes and design alternatives

A while ago I was using blogger's spell checking feature (the old version in blogger's pre-beta). During spellcheck, blogger found an error in my spelling and displayed a list of suggestions. I wasn't very happy with the suggestions so I entered my own text in the 'replace with' box and hit Enter.

Blogger then displayed the message box above, telling me that I chose to replace the erroneous text with my own input that was 'NOT VALIDATED' and recommended that I run spell check again.

Aside from being way too stressful, this message text is also way too long. users don't read message boxes. In fact, users dont read.

Sometimes a developer/designer realizes that a message might not be very clear to the user and decides he/she has to do something about that, but usually, decorating the text with ALL CAPS or adding more text just doesn't cut it. Message copy has to be simple and get out of the way quickly. Sometimes, using other design elements (such as a dialog that suggests, "run spellcheck again?") can help solve such issues instead of just wrestling with more text & effects.

If you're interested, Humanized has an interesting article about silly message boxes and some alternative solutions.

Wrong indication and scaring users off

When a new user visits bloggerforum, he sees an image similar to the one above. bloggerforum makes an exceptional effor to inform the user what he can and cannot do. It seems, however, that the user can hardly do anything.

One can assume that the bloggerforum people dont want to scare people off deliberately. The problem is that they're displaying unfiltered information. Someone thought that it's really important to tell the user exactly what he can and cannot do, instead of just placing a reply button for the thread and asking the user to sign up (or sign in) on the next page.

The register to post links are the most important ones on the entire page. They're the door for the most important interaction any user can have with a forum system - post in the forum. These links are not well placed and unlike some other links on the page (previous post, next post, etc.) have no images next to them.

Good design is often about creating clear hierarchy. Communicating to the user visually what is important and what isn't. bloggerforum clearly needs a hierarchy make over.