Hallway Testing

Hallway Testing: Short Usability Reviews

From time to time I like to spend 15-30 minutes going through some web site to see if I can spot any usability issues. This helps train my eye, and I get to check out sites I otherwise wouldn’t. I’ve done this dozens of times and the sites’ owners always find the feedback very helpful. I’ve decided to post the reviews here so that others (like you) might benefit as well - at the very least, I’d like to add to your design vocabulary by introducing and explaining terms like “interference effect” and “Fitts’s Law”. I also want to showcase cool sites and gain them exposure.

Below is an example usability review. In the future, usability reviews will include more screen shots so that they’re easier to follow. The textual content will be basically stream of consciousness, but formatted better so it’s more readable :).

If you’d like to have your site (or OS X software) reviewed, please email the details at daniel at flying machine studios dot com (no spaces punctuation on flying machine studios). It’s free so there’s no reason NOT to get a review. Plus, you might get a little extra traffic to your site, and if you leave comments here you get to be seen as someone who cares about his site’s usability.

Example: alonetone.com Usability Review

• Home Page
  • “open source, open music, open ears”
    • I don’t know what this means
    • I’m not going to read the text under this
  • I saw “last uploaded tracks” then thought to myself, “how do I upload something?” it was easy for me to find the “upload” button at the top
  • I wasn’t 100% positive what the down-arrow mean. That said, I still think it’s a good icon. I thought it most likely that it was for downloading, and that’s what it’s for
  • Don’t know what the speech bubble icon is for
    • thought it was to talk about it on a forum, but its to send a message. Consider using one of those little letter icons with swoosh marks. Though some might think that’s to email the track to someone. The letter icon without swoosh marks might be better
  • I don’t think it’s necessary to hide the “share” and speech bubble icons.
    • makes performing those actions hard
    • on the other hand I like that you hide them because
    • they’re used less. so good job :P
• Browse all artists
  • “Faces on alonetone” – it takes 45 seconds…
    • This isn’t a very strong call to action. “faces on alonetone” looks like the heading for this page, like it’s describing this page, not pointing out something the user should do.
    • if you want to include a call to action, try using a border and/or separate background color, and/or different colored text. this lets the user know that that different-looking element is different from the text that actually does describe the page.
  • What happens when I hit the big play button in the upper left? I’m not sure, so I don’t want to press it. I wouldn’t press it if this were just some site and I wasn’t trying to review it
    • And… nothing happens :)
  • I really like the design
• Sudara’s page
  • Looks great
• Upload (/signup)
  • Why Alonetone? sub headings (“A solid home for your music”, etc) should be closer to their bullet list and farther from the previous list. proximity → association in the user’s mind
  • The page is visually unbalanced toward the “Why alonetone?” column. Don’t know if this is good or bad
  • Is it necessary to require email activation?
  • Consider changing button text to “Join!” to match the heading, “Join alonetone”
• Login
  • The “alright, don’t blah blah” message element looked messed up in my 1920 pixel wide browser (firefox)
• Activation
  • I like that I’m brought to my upload page and don’t have to log in after activating
• Upload (/chubby/tracks/new)
  • What is “add another field”?
    • oh ok, it’s another field to select another mp3 to upload
    • i thought i could add something like “name”
    • consider “choose another file” to match the “choose file” text. In fact, try starting with two “choose file” buttons, and each time one is clicked and populated, add another automatically.
  • “Want to take it up a notch” block looks like an ad
  • upload progress would be nice but i know that’s a pain. i think that’s made easier now with mongrel because you can add a mongrel custom handler to deal with upload progress
  • after uploading I expected to see a form where I could upload tracks again
  • How do I delete my copyrighted mp3?

So that’s it! If you’d like your site or OS X software reviewed, please email me at daniel at flying machine studios dot com.