"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." - William Morris

The Basics of Usability: Have a Site that Works!

Posted: May 24th, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Interaction Design | Tags: , | No Comments »

With all these amazing AJAX-ified websites these days that are so simple to use it’s amazing when you come across a site that is from a major company that just doesn’t work. In this case it’s MSN’s AdCenter. For work reasons all I needed to do was sign up and activate an MSN AdCenter account, but apparently that process is not one that is supported by the site.

At first I tried signing up using Firefox 2.0. AdCenter let me fill out the entire first ‘tab’, with username and email, but then on the second tab none of the dropdowns were populated – which made it pretty tricky to choose a credit card type. Thinking this might be a classic Microsoft “we’re only supporting IE” issue, I fired up my IE6 and started again. This time it looked more hopeful, the dropdowns were populated. I guess the “if IE then populate dropdowns” function was doing its job. Oh no, wait. The dropdowns were populated, but every time the data is submitted it tells me that fields from the first tab weren’t filled out – whereas I knew they had been. At this point I gave up, rather than go and install IE7.

Now the thought occurs that even Microsoft doesn’t want to be so stupid as to prevent paying customers from signing up, purely to increase installs of its browsers. Surely? Or am I just being way too naive? Especially as now with IE7 when you mis-type a domain name it re-directs you to the MSN Live Search automatically, thus increasing MSN ad revenues. Either way, whether MSN has done this through ‘business drivers’ (read: ‘pure malicious thoughts’) or just by sloppy UI coding it is just plain bad, and in these days of open, usable web UI frameworks it’s plain unacceptable.



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