Lessons from the Dark Side of Usability: 1

We tend to think of usability as a good thing, a helpful light in the murky wilderness. After all, usability is all about the user, right? Helping smooth the user’s path, and making things easier?
Isn’t it?

Sadly, this is not necessarily so. Like any other tool, usability can also be turned to evil.

It, too, has a dark side. (cue diabolical laughter)

In this series, I’ll be pulling in examples of usability twisted to serve not the user but some other nefarious plan - usually the bottom line. We’ll look at what the user expected or wanted to do, how evil usability is likely to trip them up, and what we can learn from it.

The Case of the Surprising Download Button

The afternoon began simply enough. A client of ours needed to send us a very large file for a rush project, but his email account’s size limit wouldn’t allow it through. Rather than wait for a CD via snailmail or teaching him how to use FTP, I told him to try one of my favorite little free tools, YouSendIt.com.

A few minutes later, I received an email from YouSendIt, with a link to go download our client’s file. The email looked like this, and I’ve placed a red arrow next to the download link:

In a hurry, I scanned the email, located the download link (with some difficulty, but that’s not the point of this episode), and clicked.

Now, let’s stop and consider what I, as the user, am expecting to see next. Not that I’ve given this any conscious thought, mind you. I’m just trying to retrieve the file so I can complete our client’s project. I’m completely and selfishly focused on what I want to do, and couldn’t really care less about what YouSendIt or anybody else wants me to do.

So what I’m expecting to see is either

A) the file download starting (in my nifty Download Statusbar addon for Firefox), or

B) a web page with a link or a download button for the file

With these expectations, and not forgetting I’m distracted and rushed, when the following web page came up can anybody blame me for immediately clicking the nice, big blue download button?

Instead of the expected client file downloading, a notice popped up asking me if it was OK to run an executable file. HUH? I asked. And after declining the kind offer of an unknown application, I looked again at the page.

If you look more closely than I initially did, and actually read the text in the body and in the gray box (which I didn’t), you’ll see the download button has nothing to do with the client file I so desireously wanted. Instead, it’s to download a promotional offer for some software I’m not going to promote here.

Evil usability strikes again!

Usability Lessons Learned

So, in the interest of learning from our mistakes, what usability principles does this example illustrate?

1. Know your user’s expectations, at each step and for each page.
2. Better yet, set your user’s expectations in advance for what’s coming next - then fulfill those expectations properly.
3. Web users don’t read. This is especially true if they think, as I did, they already know what they’re doing.
4. Web users move quickly. Even if they’re not under the gun for a client, you can’t count on having scads of time to communicate your message.
5. Focusing attention with color and placement works. When this page comes up, the shaded box and the big blue button are the most prominent items on the page, drawing the eye (and mouse) right there.

Have an especially good example of evil usability you’d like me to include on this blog? Include the URL in a comment, and I’ll check it out.

Until next episode,