Usability is one thing, for some reason, I continue to pay attention to when I got to sites. I may not be able design graphically, but I'd like to think that usability is one thing I consistently get right. The biggest reason I pay attention is because your application is useless unless someone can actually use it.
Recently I went to pay for my college tuition online and had to enter in my card number and expiration date. Ok no problem except it took me literally a minute to figure out what I was supposed to do so I took a screen shot.
The credit card isn't so hard to figure out, but the expiration date drove me nuts. I had to read it about 3 times and THINK about it, and I am technology savvy.
Recently I wrote quick registration app for people coming to our paintball game, and used a bit of my usability knowledge to help users not have to think about anything except there information.
Lets go through my thought process though first.
I needed to get 2 key pieces of information.
- First and Last Name
- Phone Number
This presented a few problems:
Do I ask for first and last name in separate text boxes thus being sure to get proper information? Problem here is it puts more work on the user when they only need to add information.
If I have them do it in one text box how can I guarantee a good clean output in the back end and be reasonably sure they will put in their first and last name?
When it comes to phone number there are a lot of ways to write your phone number and in a huge list it could get annoying looking at all the different numbers done different ways. Plus, I need their area code because some are coming from out of state.
First thing I thought of to do was show them how to do it with an easy to use example.
Conclusion
Using and easy to understand example based on other how many other sites do it. You can increase the usability quickly of your forms and application in general. All the people that have registered have all included their first and last name and phone number just like I have as examples above. So please when writing your applications go ahead and take a few extra seconds and think about how you want the data to look and see if there is a way to literally show the user the format you would like.
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