Today is World Usability Day! If you are wondering what is World Usability Day, here is the Wikipedia definition.
Established in 2005 by the Usability Professionals' Association, World Usability Day or Make Things Easier Day occurs annually to promote the values of usability, usability engineering, user-centered design, universal usability, and every user's responsibility to ask for things that work better.
Basically it’s all about user experience. So, we thought to list down some of the usability turn-offs we've faced. Since we love digital, we have tried to find out some usability errors on different webpages. Being true to our belief, we started with self-criticism.
- Not mobile-ready: Yes, we admit that our website does not look as good on mobile. We are working on it and soon we will be ready with our mobile-ready avatar for our mobile users.
- Type your List name on a Word Doc first, and then on Twitter: If you have already created Twitter lists, you know the drill that the list name cannot exceed 25 characters. But where is the word-counter?
Our suggestion would be to type the tweet first on a Word Doc, if you want to save your time and energy.
- You click on Facebook button and it redirects to your Facebook home: It happens with us all the time. We check a company’s website. Try to gauge their social media presence by clicking on the social icons and land either on the website's home page or our Facebook home page. Bazinga! Sheldon would have said!
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- They ask you to login but don’t let you do it: This is a common usability error that almost every web user has faced at least once. Try logging in to Airtel India website. You can’t, even if they say, “Select the service you want to login for”.
All the segments like Digital TV, Broadband and others turn out to be non-clickable,even if the URL changes with every click.
- You can upgrade, but downgrade? NO: Dish TV users can relate to this. You can customize a plan, but nowhere there's an option to downgrade existing plan.
One of our colleagues wasted an hour downgrading the plan. But everytime he hit the submit button it took him back to the first page. After a bout of frustration he posted
- Mobile shopping is fun, only if you find the right option: Now let’s take a look at AT&T website. If you want to shop for a mobile plan, you will find a hard time to detect the plans in the first place.
There is neither a clear call-to-action nor a gist of plans on the home page, which might often make a customer leave the website without any purchase.
- You are reading something interesting and a pop-up message appears out of the blue: Yes, it’s frustrating and at the same time disturbs the normal cadence of your web activity. For instance, it's shows a window for live chat like that of Virgin Media. What would you do then? Maybe you would chat for a few minutes, if you would have time. But mostly people don’t have that time. Thoughts?
Want to add your experience? Share with us. We will get yours featured in this post.
(*img source - meme-pictures)
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