Scrolling verus Clicking, Again

Not too long ago I wrote that we should get away from scrolling and go back to the codex. Jakob Nielsen in Scrolling and Attention: Alert Box, March 22, 2010 wrote:

Today, users will scroll. However, you shouldn't ignore the fold and create endless pages for two reasons:

Long pages continue to be problematic because of users' limited attention span. People prefer sites that get to the point and let them get things done quickly. Besides the basic reluctance to read more words, scrolling is extra work.

The real estate above the fold is more valuable than stuff below the fold for attracting and keeping users' attention.

So, yes, you can put information below the fold rather than limit yourself to bite-sized pages.

In fact, if you have a long article, it's better to present it as one scrolling canvas than to split it across multiple pageviews. Scrolling beats paging because it's easier for users to simply keep going down the page than it is to decide whether or not to click through for the next page of a fragmented article. (Saying that scrolling is easier obviously assumes a design that follows the guidelines for scrollbars and such.)

Initially I was a little surprised by what Jakob Nielsen wrote as it differed markedly from what I've surmissed UNTIL I noticed that we were referring to two very different activities. He does use the term "article" but his examples refer to stores showing products versus a reader and an article. There is a considerable difference between reading an article and the quick scrolling through data that one does when going through a store's displays or a search engine's results page.

Just Say No to Coupon Codes, Part II

I've long argued against the coupon code. My primary concern has been that customers without the customer code would be turned off as they are missing a sale. Several clients (one in particular which will remain anonymous) thought that customers missing out of the sale would be more inclined to sign up in order not to miss future sales. I always thought that it would be preferable to include the customer code in the email link. This way the customer wouldn't have to remember the code. One could always entice others to sign up by having notices posted during the check-out process that if they signed up they would be able to take part in future sales.

How nice it was to see The Guru of Gurus, Prognosticator of all Prognosticators, Jakob Nielsen, mention these same points in his column: Short-Term Memory and Web Usability

Instead of using coupon codes, encode offers in special links embedded in your email newsletters and automatically transfer the coupon to the user's shopping cart. This has two benefits:

• The computer carries the burden of remembering the obscure code and applying it at the correct time.
  
• It eliminates the "enter coupon code" field, which scares away shoppers who don't have coupons (and who refuse to pay full price when the checkout flow blatantly signals that other users are getting a better deal).
  

Jakob Nielsens First Rule of Usability

Jakob Nielsen's First Rule of Usability still holds true today: pay attention to what users DO - and not what they say.

This holds doubly true in what users predict they will do in the future.

Say, for example, that 50% of survey respondents claim they would buy more from e-commerce sites that offer 3D product views. Does this mean you should rush to implement 3D on your site? No. It means that 3D sounds cool. The world is littered with failed businesses that banked on people's attitude toward hypothetical products and services.
First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users

When in doubt, think like Dr. House. "The patient always lies about what he does." Do not take the user's "word" for it - send out your staff to ascertain how the patient/user acts,

In short, any and all changes must improve the bottom line. It must reduce the time and effort in accomplishing a task by the users, whether they are customers or employees.

Launching New Windows: Part II

Almost a year ago I wrote that I thought that users would soon be comfortable with sites that launch new browser windows. When a link takes the user away from the current site to completely new information there are times it makes sense to open a new window. An example of this would be an intranet where a user is tasked with learning a new product line. There are times when it is expected that the user may click numerous times while exploring the new product line. After finishing examining the product how will the user get back? Back links do not always work as there may be numerous places from which the user came. Will the user click the back button 20 or 30 or 40 times? Will we expect this user to go into his history and find where he was? That's not necessary if the other window is still open. Opening new windows is analagous to someone opening up yet another book on his desk and flipping through this second or third book while still having the first book opened.

It is possible to come up with another method aside from opening up a new window? Yes we can pass a parameter with the "original" page and add it to the navigation. I struggle to see how this is a better method. It would not be. Even expert users would get lost in an ever shifting navigational schema. Following the "open book" metaphor opening a new window, making it smaller than the standard window to stand apart is a clear and simple means of providing distinct data to the user.

And yet a year later I still see intelligent, highly educated, but unsophisticated computer users getting lost using tabs and not using tabs to organize their browsing. As of now Jakob Nielsen's warning regarding the user of new browser windows stands.

SERP: user selection of results

Q: How will the users choose among the search results?

Jakob Nielsen: From the user perspective … the top one [result] is going to be the one that ... they ..will judge to be the best and that’s what people will tend to click first, and then the second one and so on. That behavior will stay the same, and the appearance will be the same, but the sorting might be different. That I think is actually very likely to happen.

Interview with Jakob Nielsen: Future of the SERP

A shame, but true. Very few people go through the search engine results scanning for other titles. Look at users browsing through music stores or book stores. They are quite willing to keep looking past the first few titles. There is not the same engagement in web searching. What is the reason for that? Is it the tactile sensation of picking up a CD or book? And how is that going to change when all music is downloaded from the web and book go the way of vinyl?

How do we bring that tactile response, that love to accumulate and touch to the web screen? I wonder how much using a mouse instead of a touch screen changes things? And to what extent are we impeded by the low resolution screens? Higher resolution screens would allow us to put a lot more secondary information on a screen, perhaps enticing users to keep searching – because the search would be much more interesting than simply reading a few characters of text.

SERP: more relevant display

Q: What changes will there be in search results pages over the next 3 years?

Jakob Nielsen: The big thing that has happened in the last 10 years was a change from an information retrieval oriented relevance ranking to being more of a popularity relevance ranking. And I think we can see a change maybe being a more of a usefulness relevance ranking. I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems. So I think that with counting links and all of that, there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked.

Interview with Jakob Nielsen: Future of the SERP

This is one place where SE need to make drastic changes. I don't see any indication of things happening quickly but this is one of the current technology's weak spots.

As mentioned in the article columnar presentation of search results may improve the situation. Users will continue to scan results, with the majority of users giving higher relevance to top ranked returns, BUT if paid searches and content aggregated sites such as Wikipedia can be sorted out from other returns it would be a useful incremental change.

Will Google make such a change? Only if they see a ROI. Until a competitor forces them to do so I doubt we will see much of a change in the short run.

Launching New Windows

I’ve not been as opposed to opening new windows as Jakob Nielsen. If you have a site that is populated overwhelmingly by expert users then there are many very good reasons to open new browser windows and little-to-no downside.

To the extent that Nielsen is talking about ads or gratuitous using of “new technology” for its own sake I agree with him. There are also some sites which open new windows for every link - these are not professionally developed sites and for that reason I don’t consider them as part of this discussion.

To the extent that you have a site that is populated with average users I agree with him. One of Nielsen’s missions is to constantly remind computer professionals – developers, designers (as well as Usability Professionals) that the average user gets lost a lot more often than we do AND gets confused, bewildered and frustrated when lost. And that’s important, angry frustrated customers don’t come back; confused and bewildered staff waste time and are resentful that they’re forced to figure something out.

Still the mantra that one should NEVER create new windows is, I predict, soon going to be obsolete. Now that IE 7 has come out with tabbed browsing it will soon become part of virtually every web user’s repertoire.

The questions that will then need to be answered over the next few years is: how many people take advantage of the tabs? And does the use of tabs make opening new windows more acceptable, as predicted above, or does the average user continue to be thrown by use of opening new browser windows?

Lurkers and Commenters

Jakob Nielsen has an interesting new article in his AlertBox. The jist of the article is that "a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content."

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

So, what can be done about this? How can the site owner increase user participation? The short of it, according to Nielsen, is that you can't.

I have found that posts that have comments get more comments. It seems as people are more tempted to respond to comments than the original post; or posts with comments than posts without any comments.

EDIT 12/20/2010:

Sysomos also found that 80.6% of Twitter users have made fewer than 500 tweets, which likely points to the relative newbie status of the average Twitter user. Also noteworthy is that 22.5% of users are responsible for 90% of all tweets.

It will be interesting to see what happens over time - do Twitter stats start converging to the expected 90-9-1 spread?