Editor's Blog Section

From Editor's Rant column, issue 51 – spring 2009

Do you have to go through a self-abasement ritual in order to persuade your web development department to make even the most trivial changes to the pages of your web site? Do you have to arm yourself with a stiff dose of Dutch courage before you even ask?

Hopefully not; but to judge from many of the retail web sites we encounter, you’d think this was pretty commonplace. How else is it possible to explain the extraordinarily poor web site usability that is still so common on the internet?

How to account for those form fields that request supplementary information about something you haven’t entered yet; for the scolding insistence that information like phone numbers be entered with no spaces in them (anyone who can’t deal with spaces shouldn’t be doing web design); for the forms that revert to default after you enter one wrong piece of information?

Think about this. The Wright brothers pioneered powered flight in 1903, and little more than ten years later, fighter aircraft played modest but significant a role in the First World War.

The internet has been around more than twice as long as that, and online shopping was already taking off ten years ago (metaphorically, anyway), yet users are still having to stumble through badly designed checkout processes as if they’d only been invented yesterday.

There’s a disconnect between the people who commission web sites and the people who build, maintain and (crucially) update them. Faults we at F&E have discovered on consumer web sites often persist for months, even years, when they could usually be rectified in days.

OK, so you can’t afford massive usability studies – you just want to get online. But that doesn’t stop you listening to your customers, does it? It doesn’t stop you trying your web site yourself, and being on the lookout for problems.

Who runs your business? You or your web development team? Take control.