Blogging to Fame!

Usability has always been an important aspect while devoloping any interface for common users. This small post about my MyBlogLog's Blog experience can help many while they design for their blogs.

How confusing designs can be without Usability- An Example.

Being an active member of MyBlogLog, and how great it is as a social platform, it is sometimes surprising to find errors in its usability. I was trolling in its official blog, and came across a post Spam, Eggs and Spam, and commented on it.

To my surprise Rafer, one of the authors of the blog, told me what Widget Hogging is. Not only this a few others visited my profile and left public and private messages answering the same. When I got back to the comments section I noticed something like this.

At first even I thought there is something wrong with MyBlogLog because I never asked it. There was no question about asking it as I knew what it was and was planning to write another in the series of Spamming, including this. Then I realized that my comment wasn’t this but the one above it.

This is a very small example of How designing can be very confusing if Usability is at stake.

Another example from the same blog is when You had put in your comment and hit the publish button the first thing appears on the screen is error, which gives quite a first negative impact. The page was designed to differentiate Humans from Automated commenting. The next thing that becomes visible is the CAPTCHA image. The better would have been the captcha image under the Comment section before publishing button, or if that’s not possible as this blog is on Typepad and a different page has to be used, do not use an error message. The title could have been ONE Last Step or anything else, more appealing and definitive.

When we design Pages we accept that users will understand and be patient and compassionate towards our design. He will wait for the whole page to download and then will go through each option available, which certainly not the case. As a user we will go for the simple and easy enough approach to find what we are searching for, and because of millions of Sites on internet the first site we land onto is not our last option. If we do not find things easy enough or confusing, we do not hesitate to hop on other sites. Design your own with this in mind and your user will be spending more time with you.

For your Success,
Divya Uttam.

Bookmark this article:-

Technorati Tags:- Web Usability,MyBlogLog

Labels: Web Usability