March 10, 2009
Real world usability: What NYC could learn from the web
by Alastair Halliday
Context is key for good usability. It's important for users to know where they have come from, where they are, and where they can go intuitively. Unfortunately too many sites neglect this with poor design, user flow, and ultimately a lack of understanding of a user's behavior. It's easy for designers who have been working extremely closely with their client's content and understand exactly how the pages relate to one another to forget to take a few steps back. It often helps to look at the larger picture from the perspective of a user who has just arrived at your site through a direct link or who has landed INSIDE your site through a google search.
What NYC could add to their street signs to make contextual type navigation make the city more user friendly
But the importance of context isn't limited to site design. The more time you start thinking about the end user the more likely you will see examples of directions or navigation in the real world that hasn't taken context and the end user into consideration well enough. One such instance struck me when Mark and I were in NYC for a meeting with one of our clients. It's a pretty quick day trip for us to take the Acela Express from Boston/Providence to NYC and then to hop onto the subway where the goal is to emerge somewhere close to our final destination. I take a certain pride in my ability to be able to intuitively navigate through unfamiliar places, but there is something about emerging from a subway or mall where my internal compass goes polar on me. In this instance, we emerged from the subway to find ourselves staring at a piece of real world navigation that was placed there without considering context. It was a numbered street sign. What's so bad about a numbered street sign? You have NO idea which direction to walk in order for the numbers to increase or decrease. That's a pain when you emerge from the subway onto 57th wanting to head in the direction of Columbus Circle, walk a block south to the 56th which is JUST far enough to be annoyed that you now need to walk BACK another block in the opposite direction. "That's not so bad," some people might say. Well, what if you are on 9th and have to walk the long side of a NYC block to 8th, only to find that you have actually been walking in the direction of 7th? Still no big deal? Well, I disagree. I'm sure some designers argue it's no big deal for an end user to find themselves three levels down in a navigation on a site and not clear on how to get back a level or two, but if there is a simple solution, it should be used. In the case of a web site the solution may be a bit more complex because the overall structure of a site needs to be planned out to accommodate ease of use.
For NYC, a simply smaller hierarchically designed number could be placed to the right and to the left of the current street number you are on. That would make the sign behave a bit more like a "you are here" dot on a mall directory...but don't get me started on the poor usability in contextual navigation and design that takes place in a mall.