On the rare occasions that it snows in Britain, it seems that crisis point is just nearly averted by the fine (and hugely under supplied) men and women who brave the conditions to clear the roads and apply a fine scattering of salt/grit to ensure that the segregation between car and sledge in our society is maintained. Central London is lucky enough to benefit from a plush duvet of insulation that the white stuff just wont settle for. Apart from on Thursday in which I nearly ended up on my bum at least five times just walking down the road. Like the snow clearing heroes described above, you won’t catch me snoozing by the fire indoors on a winter’s day – oh no – I’ve been out and about the whole weekend.

Today’s minor excursion was over to Westfield shopping centre (near White City tube) with the intention of helping my lovely housemates Michael and Joey pick out a good new set of drawers. Westfield is much like any of the glass, mall-style shopping centres that you now find in all major towns and cities up and down the country. Except it’s bigger, much bigger than most.

Large scale shopping in complex glass structures presents a unique challenge to your Sunday homeware shopper, like me. A cynic, you might call me, but I will assume for now that these places are designed to confuse, redirecting customer attention to flashy window dressing and powerful brand exposure. They are especially confusing for first-time visitors and the inexperienced. Westfield veterans may have built a knowledge of corporate landmarks that give them a big time-saving advantage.

The solution provided for us is most often some kind of digital map and store index, usually built into a heavy duty, assault-proof stand. My personal experiences of these have been mixed, but today’s effort at Westfield was surprisingly efficient… for me.

However, while in the short queue to use the device, I just couldn’t resist watching the two lovely young ladies in front try to use it. A catalog of problems proceeded, and I spotted some familiar usage patterns that brought me home to the world of site usability testing. Don’t worry – I won’t bore you with an essay on testing methodologies or anything like that. Instead, I’ll just share some of these points with you!

First of all, our two young ladies were ‘Searchers’. They started off their information finding journey using a text field to find the necessary store. Online, this fits a large proportion of web users, often those who are more tech-savvy and who certainly arrive with preconceived requirements. It really does highlight the importance of running an efficient and effective search on your site. Make sure search fields look like search fields, and are appropriately labeled, i say ‘Search’ will probably do, maybe using ‘Go’ in an associated button. Results pages must be formatted so that information returned can be scanned quickly by the eye for key words – that could mean putting search terms returned into bold.

The second issue arose because there were two users in this case. Friend #2 quickly gives up on the search and switches to a feature labeled ‘Index A-Z’, by way of hitting several areas of the screen which were not buttons, including a titled labeled ‘Find’. This throws up an interesting couple of issues:

Most importantly, that people engaging in a UI for the first time are inherently confused because they are in a place they’ve never visited before. This confusion should be minimised as much as possible – specifically by giving the user as many points of reference as we can. Give them things they’ve seen and used before, and they’ll interact with them in the same way. In this case, navigational items need to be visible. For textual links, that means underlining, for buttons – well, they just need to look like buttons! This is important, because it really limits the scope of flexibility for the designer, but we’re not working with a blank canvas here.

Additionally, when Friend #2 doesn’t find her result using ‘Index A-Z’, Friend #1 promptly hits the back button. Returning the user to a completed set of data is critical (might be worth saying again – CRITICAL), because the height of user frustration comes from having to retype queries or complete forms twice.

There is a dilemma here between how much you, as the designer or site owner (or whoever you are), already know about your site, your product, your service, and so forth, and how much the average user is in the dark. I’ve had long conversations with colleagues about how obvious a particular design element or written statement should be, because for most people who are directly working on something – these things are just plain obvious and don’t need spelling out. Alternatively, you might take the viewpoint that if a user doesn’t know what your site does, then why are they there in the first place. This is all of course looking at the problem in completely the wrong way. It’s our jobs as designers, site owners, etc, to make our message crystal clear to the user upon their first visit; to make their experience with the site as fast and as frustration free as possible, and ultimately to give them the information or product that they want quickly and easily. As a rule, I would say that whatever you believe to be already blatantly obvious to the end user… make twice as obvious again.

Here’s a little summary for the day… Minimise the time a user engages with your UI, and they’ll spend more time engaging with your product.