Usability is the art and science of assessing and improving the ease of use of user interfaces. In other words, its primary goal is to detect and eliminate elements that confuse a given user base. It's a field where paying attention to detail is fundamental, and assumptions can be a very dangerous thing. The title of an excellent book on the subject, Don't Make Me Think, clearly summarizes the main idea behind usability.
Our first usability mistake relates to our newsletters. ThinkCode.TV is going to have two catalogs of programming videos, one in English and another in Italian. As such it makes sense to have different newsletters that cater to the two different audiences. It's also safe to assume that the number of Italian hackers who understand English is much higher than the number of non-Italians who speak Italian. Thusly we intend to announce products from the Italian and English catalog within the Italian newsletter, whereas on the other hand, we'll only announce English courses and individual screencasts in the English one. Italian programmers can join the Italian newsletter and non-Italians can join the English one. Makes sense, right?
Initially we'd had a verbose explanation about this on the sign-up forms, but we didn't really like the wall of text it created, so we got rid of it. After all, we'd put "English" and "Italiano" links at the top of the page, and assumed that the majority of Italians would just click on their beloved flag and sign up for our Italian newsletter. That assumption proved to be entirely mistaken.
Yesterday alone we had ten Italian people join our English newsletter, instead of the Italian one. We are talking about hackers here. People who are typically fluent enough to fill out a basic form in English, which meant that most of them didn't bother to click on "Italiano", as they assumed (we're guessing) that both languages would lead them to the same newsletter. No one can blame them. It was a genuine usability mistake on our part.
To partially fix this issue we switched "English" into "English Newsletter" and "Italiano" into "Newletter Italiana". Initial stats from today show a huge improvement (only one person decided to join both). All thanks to a small detail that took five seconds to change. Within our first email campaign we'll mention that Italian speakers should switch to, or at least join, the Italian newsletter as well.
If we wanted to take things one step further we could choose what form to show based on the IP or the language of the user's browser. Even more drastically, we could consider merging the two newsletters together and sending out emails that contain an Italian translation at the bottom. But we'd like to be able to communicate with the two groups independently and we feel that English customers may not want to be exposed to the Italian side of things (after all ThinkCode.TV is a Canadian startup).
The moral of this story is that paying attention to detail and usability, can make a huge difference. And with this little tale, we wish you a very happy Canada day!
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
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2 comments:
If I might make a suggestion: Why not have 2 submit buttons? One that says "Subscribe to the English newsletter" with text next to that button: "(English catalog only)" and another that says "Subscribe to the Italian newsletter" (English and Italian catalog). And a 3rd to sign up for both.
I suggest this because few people read webpages, they scan them. I probably would've made the same mistake. When I went to the form page, I don't pay attention to those two links in the upper right, anymore than I would realize you have a Twitter account. I glance at the page, figure out it's a newsletter signup, there's a form, and a submit button. Multiple buttons at the bottom would make it obvious that there are different newsletters.
(It's ironic that you talk about "Don't Make Me Think", because here you do want them to think, you want them to decide which newsletter to subscribe to. Where usability comes in is you're trying to make the decision as clear and easy as possible.)
I like the gist of your suggestion, Scott. In fact, I decided to merge the two lists and use MailChimp.com's segmentation capabilities to distinguish between English only, Italian only, and "Both" subscribers. Thanks for your input. As for the title, it was merely a play on the "Don't make me think". :)
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