Considerations Involved in IP-based Geolocation and User Language Detection

By Cody in Constructive Criticism, Design, Usability

I’m going to revisit the UPS homepage—one more time—that I already discussed in Improving the UPS Homepage by Remembering Fitt’s Law and It’s 2010—Use Clickable Labels on Checkboxes. Despite the the sparseness of this particular page, there is a third thing here that I think could improve the user experience significantly and reduce a barrier to entry to the site (and concomitantly, potential premature user abandonment).

I think it would be very useful to pre-populate the dropdown based on the user’s IP-based geolocation and browser language settings (the Accept-Language header). Why pre-populate instead of automatically redirecting? Zak Wilson and Ivan Stojic have argued that IP-based geolocation should not be used in web apps because it causes more problems than it solves. I don’t fully agree—those users are in the long tail and for the majority of users I would be willing to bet geolocation gets it right. The annoyance caused to the few users who travel extensively or are behind corporate firewalls isn’t really enough to outweigh the benefit conferred to the average non-English speaker who goes to google.com and yet sees the site in what’s probably their language.

All the same, Zak and Ivan are correct that the Accept-Language header is a better piece of information to use first. Given the potential for even that to be incorrectly set, and the fact that UPS has already decided to deploy an interstitial, I think it makes sense to at least pre-populate the dropdown with a best guess.

However, it’s quite possible that UPS has considered this feature and determined that visitor satisfaction counterintuitively goes down as a result. Why? Because given that the site can obviously figure out the correct setting for most users, they may be annoyed that they were presented with an interstitial page in the first place. The average user probably isn’t aware that their language settings can be automatically determined, and so presenting them with an uninitialized dropdown hides this fact.

Again, this possibility only underscores the necessity of A/B testing. Much like other complex dynamic systems with many inputs and outputs—weather, nonlinear electric circuits, molecular biology—it is difficult to predict the ultimate outcome of seemingly innocuous or superficially beneficial changes when users are involved. It would be great if someone from UPS could comment on this page and discuss the considerations involved while designing it.

It’s 2010—Use Clickable Labels on Checkboxes

By Cody in Constructive Criticism, Design, Usability

Returning to the UPS homepage I discussed in last week’s post Improving the UPS Homepage by Remembering Fitt’s Law, another problem concerns the checkbox. I’m really dismayed that it’s 2010 now and we therefore live in the future, but we’re still seeing sites not using <label> elements with checkboxes. And indeed, that is the case here—the ‘Remember this location’ label associated with the checkbox on this page is not clickable. This was also pointed out by Patrick McElhaney in a comment on the previous post.

This is another instance of where Fitt’s law applies—the tiny checkbox is a small target area for clicking, and so it makes sense to enlarge it by making the label clickable as a proxy for the checkbox itself. In desktop software on all major platforms (OS X, Linux, and Windows) the label of a checkbox behaves in just that way, and is always clickable.

I should note that, of course, on such a large site as UPS’s the changes I’ve been suggesting would have to be backed up by some A/B testing to ensure they achieve the desired effect and do not have any unintended consequences. Of course, too, UPS may be so big and critical to its customers that they would not abandon the site no matter the magnitude of its interface shortcomings. I would be willing to bet, though, that the changes would improve visitor satisfaction if not reduce abandonment, and any site can stand to increase the satisfaction of its users.

Stay tuned for one more critique of this page in an upcoming post!

Improving the UPS Homepage by Remembering Fitt’s Law

By Cody in Constructive Criticism, Design, Usability

Upon navigating to the UPS homepage for the first time, you as the visitor are presented with an interstitial page asking you to choose your country and language so that you can be redirected to a localized version of the site. These interstitial pages are quite common for companies which have global operations and customers in many countries.

In the case of UPS this page is generally very understated and well-designed. One way in which it could be improved, though, is by increasing the size of the button. Fitt’s law states that the clickability of a target is a function of the target’s size. The button here is 17×18 pixels—an area of 306 pixels. That’s only 0.0236% of the screen on my 1440×900 display—two ten-thousandths of the available pixels. There’s not much else on this page taking up any space, so there’s plenty of real estate to make this change.

Critically, pages like these are barriers that potentially keep visitors from continuing further into your site. They are simply one more hurdle the user must jump over before doing what they want to do on your site. Presenting visitors with a very small (and therefore difficult to click) button is one additional thing that could lead to premature abandonment. It could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. There’s a tradeoff between making buttons microscopically small and comically large, and I think this button could definitely be enlarged to minimize the effect of the hurdle of an interstitial page.

What do you think? What else could be improved here? Stay tuned for a couple more posts about this page.

Anatomy of a Stylesheet Rule

By Matt in Information Design, Design

We were putting together a CSS style guide for a client and created this image as a quick guide to the anatomy of a stylesheet rule. It’s helpful to have a common vocabulary of terms when talking about something you’re working on, and even more helpful to know they’re the right ones.

Novelty and Innovation

By Matt in Design, Commentary, Usability

Simply new and different do not innovation make. In fact, the difference is pretty substantial. According to the OED:

innovative: featuring new methods; advanced and original.
novel: new or unusual in an interesting way.

I was spurred to write this commentary after seeing a Tumbl’d photo of a creative bathroom arrangement by serial entrepreneur and innovator Jakob Lodwick. Here’s the photo, for reference:

While I find the arrangement of the toilet paper dispenser interesting, and love that there are people like Jakob out there willing to publish this sort of thing when they discover it, I take issue with it being called “innovation.” The bathroom does feature “new methods” (or at least one), and, hey, it’s plenty original, but does it fulfill the third requirement? Is it sufficiently advanced?

I call foul. It’s interesting that the toilet paper dispenser is screwed into the chair, but at the same time it’s a waste of a chair, arguably one of the most functionally perfect inventions in human history. There would perhaps be merit to this if it were posited as an art piece with some message behind the configuration, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. I think it would make much more sense to put the basket on the floor, keep the roll in its usual place — at arm’s length on the wall — and then have an extra chair to use. From a functional design standpoint, it seems more like a misstep than innovation to me. As it stands, the chair is impaired for other uses and the toilet paper dispenser can now be accidentally removed from the bathroom.

I don’t mean in any way to single out Jakob or indict his creativity. In fact, I’m not so certain the post wasn’t entirely tongue-in-cheek. Rather, his photo-and-single-big-word post prompted me to write something I’d been meaning to articulate for a while. I think in the slightly feverish atmosphere surrounding the software and web development community nowadays, there is a tendency to get a little too excited about things before they’ve either been properly examined or vetted by history.

Novelty is a good thing, and I’d hate to live in a world without it. In fact, a lot of innovation — I’d even wager the vast majority of innovation — comes from experimenting with novel ideas. But novelty is not innovation on its own, no more than simply experimenting with food, machinery, or art (regardless of your credentials) is innovative on its own. The same goes for software. It’s the reason things that momentarily enthrall us eventually fade: many of them are just novel. The things that stick, on the other hand — the wheel, the chair, rock music, Craigslist, the MP3, and the Post-It (literally) — those are innovative.