The wife and I went out for dinner last week at a Scottish Pub (MacNiven’s if you must know). We like the food, and the beer selection is outrageous. With our meal they brought an assortment of condiments, both American and from the UK. My favorite UK condiment is called Brown Sauce. It is brown, and it is a sauce. Period. No fancy description or label. It says what it is, and it is what it says (sorry to get Dr. Seuss on you there).

Well what does this have to do with usability or user experience? I thought you would never ask.

The next day I was looking through my Twitter search (follow me @travisbsmith) for “Usability” and the following tweet jumped out at me. It is from @jdgraffam (how exactly do you cite a tweet?).

“In the UK, do you know what they call the brown sauce? Brown sauce. We should do that more often when labeling things online for usability.”

This idea of calling things what they are is huge for usability, information architecture, interaction design, and user experience. Users need to be able to understand what is available to them on a site, as well as where links are going to take them next. Links and titles should be understandable and logical to users. Users who cannot figure out where they want to go next will simply go to another site that speaks to them in language they can understand.

So how do we choose titles and labels that are understood by everyone?

This is one of the great mysteries of the web. There are some titles and labels that are becoming more universal such as, about us, blog, and portfolio. The only way real way to know what your users are looking for is to ask them first. User Research on the front end of a project can give the rest of the project more insight, and a better understanding about what you users want to see on the site. This user testing can be done with an existing product, with prototypes, or even with a simple card sort. The main idea is to find out what users expect to see in terms of labels, or what they think a label means before releasing a product into the wild.

Sure, you will not be able to ensure that 100% of users will understand every label or link, but doing user research and user testing will allow you to be sure that more users will understand your site, and that their overall user experience will be positive.

So until next time, keep it usable, Internets (or World Wide Web if you want to call it what it really is).

Last time on the Tuitive blog, I talked about doing one thing well. Today I am going to expand on that. New technologies, especially on the web, have to play well with other programs.
The days of proprietary formats, and disconnected applications are numbered. As more and more applications begin to move to the web, being able to share information and users is becoming vital to success. The idea of making user stick to one tool or another is starting to backfire.
Users want freedom.
“I want to be able to update my tumblr blog with photos from my Flickr account, and then tweet about my new photos and update my Facebook page. Oh, and I want to be able to do it from my cell phone…”

This sounds ridiculous when you type it out (but it is nicely illustrated above), but many of us are doing it every day. I will not take the time to update each of my accounts across all my cyber hangouts. Instead, I want the systems to do it automatically.
Users want to be able to choose their own tools and services online, and they want these tools to work together with services they already have chosen to use. Users want to know what other services will work with a specific service. This interaction with existing services is no longer a luxury feature - it is a necessity. I am not going to sign up for a new online tool if it will not work with my existing Facebook page, personal blog, Twitter account, and my cell phone.
Users also want the ability to move to a new tool whenever they want, without loosing their existing content or the time they have put into that service.
The use of open API’s has helped users weave their preferred services together. The best web services are beating their users to the punch. Flickr, for example, has a blog-ready photo widget you can create and then paste into our blog. When you update Flickr, your latest photos are now on your blog.
In order for a web service to survive, it has to be able to play well with others.

Until next time, keep it usable, Internets.