Jan 23, 2009 6
Many people mistakenly think that “web design” means making a website looks nice. Well, that’s only half of the equation. It’s so much more than just layout. One of the major elements in web design is usability, which roughly means making a website feels nice. The other half of the equation that many people tend to forget. A successful web design normally requires balancing of these two major elements.
May 19, 2008 1
Pop quiz, hotshot. How do you navigate to the previous screen in a BCA ATM?
If you’re like me and most people, you press “Cancel”, reinsert your card, punch in your PIN again, and navigate to the screen that you want. Try repeating that while finding a menu item and a few people line up behind you and you keep reinserting the card back as soon as the machine pops it out.
I saw there were at least two buttons on the keypad that were unassigned and could have been programmed as a generic back button. Even if implementing a generic “back” button is too much effort, the “back” function could have been easily assigned to one of the side screen buttons.
And if you want to pay for a ticket, do you go to “Pembayaran” or “Pembelian” first?
klikbca is not any better. They seem to enjoy torturing their user. OK, rather than just complaining, I’ll straight away give one possible improvement to their balance checking interface. Merge the “Informasi Saldo” and “Mutasi” as one menu item called “Informasi Saldo”. Then, show the balance at the top and all the transactions for the past 31 days below it by default while still allowing the user to filter the transactions by date. Don’t ask the user to manually count (today – 31 days), just show it. If the range I put is more than 31 days, then just show what you have up to 31 days, don’t ask me to correct the starting date if you can easily fix it for me. If the info is too much and I don’t want to see that much info, then I’ll filter it later. If it’s too much info to show in one page, split it up into multiple pages. This is common sense. Why force the user to jump extra hoops every time?
The default should be sensible, and the default should be chosen because most people use it that way, NOT because it’s easier to program it that way. In order to understand the user’s pains, a designer must see from the user’s perspective and use the things they’re designing themselves. My girlfriend pointed out to me that most of these usability idiocy is because the people who designed/created it don’t use it themselves very often, and I agree with her.
All these big companies providing services to the public must hire at least a usability expert rather than wasting their money on paying half-assed so-called “designers” (that is if they even hire designers, they probably just let the programmers do the design). I mean just look at their websites. If any of you is an Indosat M2 subscriber, you would know how terrible their website is when you check your internet usage, it looks like it’s designed and written by a high-school kid who just learned PHP. Who the hell in this Web 2.0 age uses pop ups to notify the user that the login was successful?! Yes, successful, not unsuccessful.
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