Usability Hell

The new Path iOS app seems to have got almost universal acclaim - and it is a nicely designed iOS app. Hats off to anyone with the guts to try a social network at this point.

However, they’ve made several major strategic mistakes….

iOS Only Approach = Insanity

If they had developed a responsive website (1 website that adapts to different devices/resolutions) instead of iOS app, they would have had all these benefits, much quicker:

Runs Everywhere

A responsive website runs on any device, desktop, tablet, phone. The above page is what I get when I click on a path email notification. Seriously.

iOS has maybe ~200m users? The web has ~2billion (including all iOS devices).

Even among people with an iOS device (including me) - why if I’m sat in front of my computer would i want to use my phone to access Path? (hint, I wouldn’t).

More work for way less product.

[Edit they now have Android app - but everything in post remains true]

Speed of Development & Deployment - UnLean

Build, Measure, Learn. The lean startup mantra we’re all aiming to implement at our startups is heavily disrupted by iOS. Not only by being harder, slower & more expensive to develop, but the app store is a huge road block slowing that learning process to a crawl. Deployment takes days and weeks, forget continuous deployment.

Even if there were no app store approval process, updates require users to download every update. Even if that process were automatic, which it isn’t, the bandwidth required to download multiple code changes per day would be horrendous for users & for the startup. You also have the nightmare of many (even thousands) of software versions out there to support.

So Path learn & iterate way more slowly. The biggest advantage of a startup is agility and rapid ability to iterate; iOS kills this. You get some competition who isn’t hamstrung in this way & you’re screwed.

You are also at risk of being rejected by the app store approval process at any time. This alone puts the fate of your business in Apple’s hand & is a constant threat.

If path were web only from the start they would be several years ahead of where they are today.

Cost

To just reach Android, iOS & desktop web - is 3x the work, 3x the code base & at least 3 times the cost.

Add in Blackberry & Windows Phone and its 5x. Who knows what devices we’ll be using in a few years.

You then have multiple incompatible platforms to manage, with multiple dev teams. $2.5m of venture funding only buys you an iOS app after all this time. Thats a lot of effort for a single platform.

Instead of duplicating the exact same functionality across 2/3/4 platforms - Path could be moving forward & learning 2/3/4 times faster. Or running 2/3/4 times more efficiently.

Ease of Development

HTML & CSS are universal standards. The browser is the ultimate, ultra fast platform for running apps now. It’s the dream Java never lived up to. Web skills are everywhere.

Trading these in for esoteric development languages, in uber high demand, with very few truly world class coders, puts you at a huge disadvantage.

It is also a lot of work to optimise iOS & get the most out of it (I’m not an expert in iOS development but this is what I hear, for example in the recent Kevin Rose interview on This Week in Startups). Way more best practice & help exists with the web, along with frameworks & libraries like JQuery & JQuery mobile.

Disadvantages of web

Hardware integration - you can do most things through the web you can do natively now, eg location. You could recreate path in HTML fairly easily (certainly the important bits).

App Store - it’s nice to be in the app store - but not worth all this pain.

By developing on iOS you’re trading, perhaps, 1 or 2 cosmetic ‘nice to have’ things most people barely notice - for fundamental, business threatening, viability threatening disadvantages.

Limiting Friends

Path users are limited to 150 friends.

There are 2 tangled issues here.

1. Limiting friends for ‘intimacy’

2. Being a more trusted platform (vis a vis privacy) than Facebook.

Focusing on privacy from the beginning, and building trust can make Path the trusted alternative to Facebook.

Having a limit on friends has nothing to do with privacy & trust. This arbitrary limit is just an inconvenience for users - what is the benefit to them?

Many people would hit the 150 limit then spend lots of time they don’t have figuring out who to unfriend. There’s nothing stopping people self-imposing this limit.

The ONLY use case I’ve heard for a small, ultra private/limited social network is ‘to share kiddy photos’. That takes you from 2bn+ potential users to a few million - and maybe guarantees you niche obscurity. Why not just call it ‘kids photo net’ and be more honest - it’s a tiny niche market.

Even that is a red herring. A platform that people trust, which allowed more private areas for an inner circle, is the issue here. The 150 limit is irrelevant.

You’re also killing the network effect. A good % of people, maybe most, maybe almost all, don’t want a friend limits. So many will never join path - which will do a great job of stopping it hitting a tipping point (along with iOS only).

It’s like they’ve set it up to fail deliberately.

Business Model

For a social network to make good money, like Facebook, you need huge, long term penetration. Path won’t get this while it has the above problems.

In it’s current form generating solid profits seems a very long way off.

Summary

To get some debatable ‘better device integration’ - in exchange for business threatening disadvantages is crazy.

How Path can beat Facebook

Path may say they aren’t trying to beat Facebook. The problem is Facebook is their only real competitor, they are fighting them whether they want to or not.

Their biggest barrier currently is themselves, they have their foot on the accelerator and the hand break on.

Here’s how they win…

1. Abandon iOS, go fully responsive web
Cheaper, future proof, unlimited iteration, runs on *everything* right now. Do way more with way less.

2. Remove 150 limit
A lot of people are looking for an alternative to Facebook. There isn’t one (Google+ is way different). Path could be it. It could change the world. Most people don’t want a 150 limit.

Most websites do this - but I’d expect more from The Telegraph - check this out

I know, shocking isn’t it.

Just in case you havent spotted it look at the end of that paragraph:

Read older posts by Tom here.

This is basic stuff. They would never allow fluffy, wasteful writing like that into the paper, but all standards seem to vanish online.

Here is how it should read:

Older Posts by Tom

There are multiple problems here.

Pointless words ‘read’ and ‘here’. 

Bad copywriting is bad copywriting - it reflects just as badly on you online as it does in print. Standards should be enforced.

Barely perceptible link

Not only is the link not underlined (web usability 101), but it is in a shade of ‘blue’ with barely any perceptible difference to black.

Links should always be underlined, and for maximum usability a different colour; ideally blue.

Undescriptive link text

‘here’ tells us, and search engines, nothing about where the link goes. We have to read the rest of the line for context (remember we scan, we don’t usually read everything).

Search engines, however, will think that is yet another link to an article about ‘here’.

Why Only Older Posts?

What if you want to read his newer posts, or more likely - just want to see a page linking to them all? Better examples:

Tom’s Posts

Tom Chivers Home

Tom Chivers Profile

Here’s the page you click through to:

Nein, nein, nein, nein, nein!

Tom’s Newer Posts

Web users understand what blue underlined text means. It’s a hyperlink. You don’t need to explain it by saying ‘go here’. Adding ‘for’ or ‘read’ is totally redundant. We know you read a post. This awful, wasteful copy & bad usability add a tiny bit to the cognitive load of millions of people every week.

Causing countless man years to be lost to this problem every year.

Dont Make Us Think!

‘Small’ usability errors like this are often a huge red flag for a website. It’s usually a signal that the site is littered with usability issues.

Resulting in fewer, shorter, more stressful visits to your website - leading to lower revenue and profits.

Companies can’t afford to ignore usability.

Telegraph, please apply the same standards to your website that you do to your newspaper!

Soundcloud is a pretty cool service - which is why it pains me to write this.

I don’t use it much & wanted to unsubscribe from their emails. I wasn’t expecting a Lord of the Rings 4 part epic.

All emails should simply have 1 click ‘unsubscribe’ button at the bottom.

For the record unsubscribe shouldn’t be formatted like this:
click here to unsubscribe from our mailings
(you d****)

but like this:
unsubscribe
Get a clue.

Anyway - this is where the saga begins.

What I Want

1. To Unsubscribe

What I Don’t Want

1. To login and ‘manage my messaging settings’.
2. To have a warm fluffy chat with you about how your life is doing and what your thoughts on your relationship with me are.
3. You to try and stop me unsubscribing by making the process a f****** 10 minute game of ‘lets make nick piss about like a twat’.
4. To fool around behind the bike sheds or come home and play video games with you.

I don’t give a f*** about your site or my messaging options. Just let me unsubscribe for the love of f**** God!!!

Here is what happened

Step 1
I click ‘manage my messaging options’ or whatever - just to be dumped at a login screen.

I never use Soundcloud - that’s why I’m unsubscribing - therefore *I don’t know my login details* doh. There is no good reason to make me login here.

I click ‘forgot password’

Step 2
I get an email from the Soundcloud weatherman, WTF?! I bet you think thats like kooky & a bit zany right! I don’t want zany, I want unsubscribe!

But instead I get ‘Manage notifications’. FFS.

Step 3
There’s no ‘stop spamming me’ check box. It actually makes you manually select every single f****** thing I don’t want to be emailed about. GAAAAAAAAAAa.

Just to make me think more & complicate things further there are a series of random drop down lists too.

Step 4
After all that pissing about I notice this hidden on the right:

Yet more messaging settings. Do I need to go in there too? I don’t know, this isn’t clear (<a bad place to be).

Look - it doesn’t matter who you are or what your site does - and Soundcloud is better than 99% of sites out there. Most people don’t give a f*** about your website.

If someone wants to unsubscribe - let them do so in 3 seconds - not 5 minutes. Time is precious.

No one is going to hack into people’s emails and secretly unsubscribe them. There’s no security risk here. But there is a risk that you’re gonna royally piss people off, who will endup hating you, writing posts like this - and will be less likely to come back.

Remember - most of your users wont come back. Take them into account.

Every email list should have 1 word, 1 click unsubscribe. The End.

We really should be past captcha by now.

I could hardly think of a better way to screw up the user experience than forcing someone to read a hard to read word.

Actually I can - that’s failing to log you in, but not telling you whether the login was incorrect, or the captcha was incorrect. As an exercise in ‘how pissed off can we make our users’ it’s A+.

Sure, in theory it’s more secure to do things that way. Forcing you to pop into the Google offices for an anal probe and interview before you login is more secure too.

Actually could that be another reform Larry is desperate to get rolling since getting back in charge?

Just tell us which one is wrong because seriously, I’ve got better f****** things to do with my day than try and decipher some text that is deliberately hard to read! Communist Russia couldn’t come up with a more ridiculous task.

In fact, come up with a better solution, you’re Google FFS!

Google+ has been interesting to play around with & will probably be at least a medium sized success.

I also like the fact since Larry Page took over again design seems to be getting a higher priority at Google.

However, there is some usability feces just waiting to hit the giant Dyson Airblade that Eric left behind.

Google clearly liked the old days, pre 2000, when they could spend their work days in their underpants in their Mom’s garage. You can tell because they have brought back the timeless web 1.0 usability classic, buttons with no label (image above)!

In 2011. REALLY. WHAT - Google WHAT! I’ve been using + for a month or two and still can’t remember what they’re all for.

WHAT!

Hot rollover areas: instead of clicking the ‘Add to Circles’ button, when you roll over it it pops up a check box list. This breaks 20+ years of web convention - everyone is going to click the button. You shouldn’t expect users to remember that this one button works differently. Why not make it a drop down list?

Like Facebook, Google seem to think they can re-invent usability because they’re so big. They can’t - or at least it will take years before most people even begin to start getting it & only then if other sites also begin to adopt their conventions.

I’m all for JQuery-ish, fast client side interfaces - Google practically invented this with GMail. GMail stuck to convention though - and Google+ just went that bit too far.

We have fond memories of 2000 too Google (animated gifs are also big in Google+) - but what’s next, 28.8 dialup real player postage stamp sized videos in a microsoft java virtual machine running Netscape Navigator 10 Gold on Windows 95 with Eudora Pro quake 2 LAN party?

I’m getting nostalgic already…

Probably the guy who has done most for usability - thank you.

RIP

Transport for London - who have a pretty good website, do one thing so brainless, so webtarded that it must be the work of a person who can only exist in the public sector (because any profit making business they work for goes bust rapidly).

The type of brain dead fool that is ‘promoted out of the way’ by their dumb ass boss so they’re no longer their problem.

I’d imagine this is how the meeting went between a Web Developer & said Upper Management COCK:

UMC: What are we doing about security, my daughter’s Windows 95 PC got a virus trojan when she was 12 15 years ago.

WD: Passwords must be 8 characters.

UMC: If we make the user enter 1 capital letter, 1 lower case letter and 1 number will that make the password harder for a script kiddy to guess?

WD: Theoretically yes, though surely you can see why that is in the top 5 dumbest things I’ve heard in my 32 years on this planet, including stuff Sarah Palin says.

UMC: Oh so you don’t like security?

WD: You’re right, I’m wrong. Why don’t we also make them come in for a retina scan and send everyone USB retina scanning units who wants to use the site?

UMC: Right.

WD: Why stop there, lets require the password to be 20 characters long, and, here’s the good bit, scan it for words. If any memorable words in any language are in the password, say it is invalid because script kiddies could hack it.

UMC: I like this. We are using 128-bit encryption. I want to use 1000-bit encryption because more is better. I am a highly paid consultant, I once read a blog post about this on Geocities.

WD: Good idea. Why didn’t I think of that - a bigger number is better. You really should go and work for Google, they could use a person like you. What is your background out of interest?

UMC: I started as one of those TFL ticket guys who used to be needed to let people with bent paper tickets through barriers, but now isn’t due to Oyster so just stands around getting pissed off they are going to be made redundant as they have nothing useful to do now.

WD: I’m seeing a pattern.

How can NO ONE at TFL realise this is F****** STUPID???

I can’t think of a SINGLE other website I’ve EVER used that needs capitals & numbers. Even my bank doesn’t!

I just went to signup for a Barclays bike key - same sh!t.

Having to remember upper & lower case letters and numbers is inherently difficult. Usability testing would surely have exposed this.

TFL: WTF?!

I stood at this sign - on the London Underground - for about 2 minutes. Initially in extreme anxiety - should I go left if I’m going to one of the branches on the left of that sign?

I went left for 10 paces, then went back. That can’t be right. Many other people looked equally puzzled.

Turns out both directions link up - it doesn’t matter which way you go.

Problem is - people don’t like to be given more than one option in these situations, it causes us to think (who wants to think on the tube?). Just tell me where to go!

A further problem arises as there seems to be a vague implication that the left and right line branches require a left and right turn.

My solution - either make it one way only - or put two identical signs up - one with a left arrow - one with a right. Or arbitrarily split the line branches into 2 signs pointing half the people one way - and half the other.

It was gutsy - abandoning the ‘submit’ button for comments, and just accepting the ‘enter’ button to post instead.

Part of me loves this idea - less is more. However, it ignores convention and it seems it confused people.

Facebook recently added the above text ‘Press Enter to post your comment.’ below the comment box.

So they replaced one well understood, conventional button ‘Submit’ with a 6 word text explanation.

Failbook - if you have to use 6 words to explain how to submit a comment YOU FAILED - ACCEPT IT AND MOVE ON.

To paraphrase Steve Jobs - get on with your life, spend more time with your family - get over it; just put the button back.

Even Facebook have problems re-educating us on even the smallest of usability conventions it seems….

Many of the millions of geeks who purchased iPads will already have realised it’s actually pretty useless when compared to a small laptop (such as an 11” MacBook Air or 3G 11” Sony Vaio X)

The problem is - it stops you doing so many things, it can never replace a laptop.

On the flip side, there aren’t any killer apps - there’s nothing you can do on it you can’t do on a laptop or even an iPhone (which makes calls).

Sure there are curiosities like Flip Book, or Discovr - but nothing you can’t live without (and if you couldn’t live without it - they’d just make a computer version).

Yes it’s a big iPod Touch - and actually, thats not very useful.

Stuff you CANT do properly on iPad

• Create Content (Graphics, Audio, Pro Video)
• Code
• Type Fast
• Browse Flash Websites
• Install non-app store apps
• Remote Desktop
• Run Various Browsers
• Multitask many apps, foreground & background, properly
• See what apps are open at a glance
• Download & Manage Files
• Download & Manage images / video off SD Card
• Skype Video Chat (no, not Facetime)

Im a geek - the above is what I’m doing *most of the time*.

So you have to carry 2 devices with you (kinda defeats the point in it being so small) - or leave it at home. At which point it becomes a house toy - and you console yourself by ‘using it like a magazine’.

Instant On - laptops have had that for years (sleep).

In reality it gets relegated to Farmville use - or for a TV (so long as you don’t need Flash).

Having owned a super small, 10-11”, ultra-light laptop for ~10 years - I can tell you, it changes your life. I would highly recommend everyone go down that path (the vast majority of us can, you think you can’t - but try an Air or Vaio X - then try going back).

Don’t get me wrong - I’m glad the iPad exists, it’s an interesting device that may lead to even more interesting devices - specially in very specific niches. It’s sure made Apple a ton of money too.

But can it replace a laptop? Not close. It’s for granny & the grand kids - for geeks it’s a toy that they never use.