The good

The first thing to note is that White Stuff’s branding has been carried across to the website very successfully. The same casual language and tongue-in-cheek humour from their other marketing material is present, particularly once you venture further into the website.

It’s relatively easy to find your way through to the product listings using the main navigation and once you get there, items are sensibly categorised. The site makes good use of breadcrumbs to let people know where they are within it and allow users to reach pages from more than one likely route. For example, it’s possible to view ‘his accessories’ by navigating through ‘his stuff’ or ‘accessories’.

Product pages allow people to view clothes in greater detail.

The product pages are well laid out and if you mouse over the item’s picture, a zoomed-in portion of it appears to the right. This doesn’t always work immediately after the page has loaded, but clicking the image opens it up in a new window. Either way, it’s essential to have this higher resolution photo for customers ordering online, as this helps negate the fact that they can’t touch or otherwise examine clothes in greater detail.

The not so good

This dog’s tail is the only image link that provides some kind of hover effect.

However, White Stuff’s website has a number of issues which detract from the experience. First of all, there’s an over-reliance on large clickable images. These make the site attractive and afford their graphic designers a great deal of freedom, but they make navigation unnecessarily difficult. There’s no hover effect on the images apart from the change of cursor and the borders of these clickable areas are sometimes unclear. Thankfully there are alternative text links in a more traditional navigation menu on the left hand side of many pages.

There’s also a lack of page navigation at the bottom of each product listing page. This seems initially trivial, but is likely costing White Stuff sales. Consider the high summer page; when I first visited this, my attention was drawn to the clothes and I then scrolled down. However, once I reached the bottom, I went to another section, unaware that there were more items to view. If the page navigation was more obvious and was also at the bottom of the page, I’d be much more likely to click through to the other pages.

Are there any more products after these?

Of course, I haven’t properly tested the site, but if you did an eye tracking study or looked at the sales of items on the subsequent pages, I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t a huge drop off after that first page.

Conclusions

The White Stuff website provides a generally good experience for customers buying and researching clothing online. It retains the fun and quirky branding that makes the company stand out and has a number of features which make the process easier. However, the large image links can be tricky to use and the page navigation has much room for improvement. With a few small adjustments, the White Stuff website could go from simply “good” to great.

At first, usability testing seems fairly straightforward; watch someone using your system and infer something helpful from it. However, once you start to look into the details of doing a proper test, all sorts of questions begin to appear. What type of data are you going to collect? Are you going to have a post-test feedback form? If so, how will that be structured? How will you analyse the results?

I haven’t done any formal usability testing yet, but it will be a focal point of my final year project at university, so I’ve been looking for books that explain the process. Measuring the User Experience initially seems like a textbook full of boring statistics, but on further inspection the information inside is very practical. Tullis and Albert’s book sets out to cover the whole process of doing a usability study, from planning and collecting data all the way through to analysing and presenting it.

It begins by explaining why you’d use metrics in a usability study and introduces the various types of data that you might measure. It’s heavy going to begin at first, with nominal and ordinal data, measures of central tendency and nonparametric tests, but once you reach the third chapter, it starts to make sense. Here there’s a section which outlines ten common usability studies and which metrics you should pick for each of them, including comparing alternative designs and evaluating frequent use of the same product.

The chapters that follow which make up the core of the book cover each type of metric in further detail, including performance, issues-based, self-reported, behavioural, physiological, combined and comparative metrics. Within this mass of information are some great discussions of usability testing issues and how to tackle them.

One of the most interesting of these is “What constitutes an error?”, which is something that I probably wouldn’t consider until I’ve started a study. You’d think that it would be fairly obvious, but apparently “there is no widely accepted definition”. Two other particularly useful sections were a comparison of post-test rating schemes (their suggestion was to use SUS) and a detailed examination of how many participants to use.

After briefly covering web analytics data, card-sorting and accessibility, the book moves on to six case studies before concluding. Considering that Measuring the User Experience covers many topics in great depth, the final chapter does an impressive job of summarising their recommendations. Tullis and Albert give ten key lessons to take away, all of which are practical steps that you can apply to your work. These are indicative of the book as a whole; plenty of technical detail, but wrapped up in a way that you can actually make use of them.

If Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think! is a first step into the world of usability, then Measuring the User Experience is great choice for where to advance your other metaphorical foot to next. For someone like me, who is familiar with many of the concepts but has never had a chance to apply them in a formal study, Tullis and Albert’s book is highly recommended.

Songkick

I first heard about Songkick on a Guardian podcast last year and signed up immediately. However, their website was initially very confusing and didn’t work well at all. You downloaded a bit of software which scanned your iTunes library for music and then added artists to your profile. The problem was that it didn’t take account of how many times you listened to any particular band, so you ended up with everyone. I only want to see a few bands in my library live, not all 492!

Songkick’s upcoming events page gives you a clear overview of who’s playing when.

Fast forward to this year and Songkick has dramatically improved. The visual design has been overhauled and you can now add bands by importing your favourite artists from Last.fm. It provides a single, clear view of upcoming events, which is exactly what I want.

There are also a number of other features, such as the ability to add past concerts to your ‘Gigography’, similar to Last.fm. You can track more than one location, so for instance I’d be mainly interested in Nottingham, but would also consider going to London if it was an artist I really want to see. Songkick also allows provides links to one or more ticket vendors where available, which is presumably where they make their money on referral fees.

Why is this button so large?

I do have a couple of reservations though. When I tried to import my favourites from Last.fm, it didn’t work and I had to email support. I did get it to work eventually, but even now it says “Import failed”. There’s also still too much visual emphases on adding events. Surely this is Songkick’s job, not the user’s? Maybe you’d want to add a little publicised event occasionally, but it’s not a main action I’d associate with this kind of website.

Bandsintown

Bandsintown offers a similar service and also allows you to import your Last.fm favourites, but feels less polished than Songkick. Instead of providing you with a list of all the events that your artists are playing at, it has a couple of views to choose from.

Bandsintown’s cloud view requires you to hover over each artist to view dates.

The first, which you always see when you log in, is a cloud of band names and the second is a more traditional calendar. I can understand the reasoning behind these two; the former answers the question “who is playing in town during this period?” and the latter “I’m free on this date, who’s paying then?”. However, both of these views require you to hover over either the band’s name or date to view basic event information and this makes it difficult to plan what you’re going to see.

The calendar suffers from the same problem.

For me, Bandsintown’s lack of a single list is its key flaw. The cloud view is an interesting idea and it has the added benefit of introducing you to bands not in your favourites, but it can’t replicate the usefulness of a straightforward list. If they provided something similar to Songkick’s default view, then I think it would make planning which concerts you want to see a great deal easier.

It does trump Songkick on a couple of things though. First of all, it has RSS and iCal feeds for your upcoming events; a seemingly obvious feature which only Bandsintown has. It also tends to show more ticket vendors than Songkick and lists the actual prices more frequently.

Conclusion

At the moment, Songkick provides the best experience and most useful service of the two websites. Its design has greatly improved since it was first launched and its single list view allows you to see when your favourite artists are playing at a glance. However, Bandsintown only requires a modest number of changes to be as valuable a service. Given the speed at which Songkick has gone from being confusing and unworkable to its current state, it would be very naïve to write off Bandsintown just yet.

Amazon’s wish list is extremely useful.

The same principle applies when we buy online. Whenever I buy something online, it’s rarely on the spur of the moment. I’ve almost always read about it somewhere else, listened to a sample or otherwise done some research before purchasing. However, once I’ve decided to buy, I don’t always purchase it straight away. This is where wish lists come in.

Wish lists provide a way of collecting items you’re interested in but haven’t decided to buy, or things that you will buy in the future. Books are a great example of this; you often know which ones you’d like, but it’s impractical to buy so many at once because of the cost and speed that you can read them.

For retailers like Amazon, there are plenty of benefits for offering wish lists. They provide customers with a convenient way of keeping track of items and one that is always within the context of their store. They also encourage repeat purchases, as people are giving themselves a reason to come back to buy again. Once you have an established list, you’re probably going to keep on adding to it and buying from it for the forseeable future.

Lists don’t always have to be private though. Amazon also allows users to share theirs and use them to let other people know what they’d like to have. This can be used for people you know, for Christmas and birthday lists, or for people you don’t. For instance, some open source software developers advertise their wish lists so that other people can reward them for their work in a way other than simply paying them.

Wish lists are best used in shops where there are a great number of items available. Choice can be overpowering and prevent people from making a decision, so providing a way of collecting likely purchases is essential. This is particularly true of higher value items like flights, cars and houses, where picking the right one is non-trivial.

Kayak allows you to add flights to a temporary wish list.

Flight comparison website Kayak is a great example of this. It allows you to add flights to a temporary wish list by ‘remembering’ them while you’re searching, with no registration required to do so. With so many flights available and often very little difference between them, being able to create a list is essential.

Given the benefits and potential widespread use of wish lists, it’s surprising that they aren’t more websites using them. iTunes would benefit enormously from a proper implementation of them; at the moment you can create one, but it’s a little cumbersome and not an advertised feature. Threadless could also do with one now that the number of products they have for sale is much greater than it used to be.

Wish lists can be used in a variety of ways, from planning which books you’ll buy over the next few months to helping to filter out the best flights. Whatever type of shop they’re used in, they offer value to both retailers and customers. Wish lists can not only help people buy something right now, but also encourange repeat business over a long period of time. If you’re an online retailer, adding something which does both of those things should be a no-brainer.

Time always goes from left to right.

Time flows from left to right, at least in the Western world. It progresses in graphs from the axis on the left to the empty space on the right. You click on the right facing button to go to the next month in a calendar and on the left one to go to the previous month. Sometimes it flows from top to bottom, as on Twitter, but on the horizontal plane it’s always left to right.

The same metaphor applies to a wide range of chronologically ordered information, including websites. However, some ignore this standard and this can be confusing for users. Take a look at this example, from The Unofficial Apple Weblog:

If we’re currently on the second page of posts, which button would you click to see newer or older posts?

If you assume that this navigation uses the standard metaphor of time and click the left button to view older posts, you’ll be a bit surprised, because it does exactly the opposite. TUAW’s page navigation not only has the direction mixed up, but the words ‘next’ and ‘previous’ are also ambiguous.

If you’ve gone from the first page to the second page, going to where you’ve previously been would mean returning to the first page. However, if you arrived at the second page from elsewhere, you might interpret this as viewing previously written posts.

This problem is extremely easy to solve if you stick to two basic rules:

• Left arrows go back in time, right arrows go forward in time.
• Use ‘older’ and ‘newer’ instead of ‘next’ and ‘previous’.

The following example from the Impact website I designed removes any ambiguity:

By sticking to the conventional depiction of time and using unambiguous words, you’ll end up with a much clearer navigation that won’t confuse people who visit your website.

Chris: “I think she’s arriving next week.”

Andrew: “Why would she arrive a week later? She’d be effectively paying more for each week then.”

Chris: “What do you mean?”

Andrew: “Well, you paid £500 for this, right?”

Chris and I: “Uh… no!”

The notion of volunteering is a noble one. You give up your time, for free, to help someone or something else out. Cost isn’t something I’d associate with volunteering, so when I started looking for somewhere to work in the summer of 2007, I was a bit surprised. Almost all of the of the volunteer positions cost money.

I was particularly interested in marine conservation work, since I’m a qualified scuba diver, but the prices for these were staggering. Six weeks working in Fiji? £2500. Four weeks in South Africa? £1849. That’s how much you have to pay them to work there, with no flights included. At this price point, you might as well go on a normal holiday and not have to work forty hours a week.

After a great deal of searching, I managed to find a volunteer scheme in the USA that was free. The Great Basin Institute runs a program each year where around twenty international volunteers work alongside their American counterparts in environmental conservation projects. In return for working four days a week, you get a place to stay and a $5 food stipend per day.

I went out to the USA and spent eight weeks working as a volunteer in a part of the Great Basin Institute called the Nevada Converation Corps. This was mainly comprised of about 150 Americans who were working as part of the AmeriCorps scheme, which rewarded them with a grant for college. The work was tough at times, but being able to meet so many interesting people made it more than worthwhile. I made some great friends, had an awesome time and would recommend it to anyone.

We worked at the site of the Angora fire, helping to restore the landscape and prevent ash from polluting Lake Tahoe.

However, it turned out that not all of the international volunteers had got there by simply going on the Great Basin Institute website and signing up. One person had paid about £500 for the priviledge. As you can imagine, those of us who were there for free were somewhat bemused and the guy who had paid was quite the opposite.

It wasn’t the Institute that had charged him though, it was an separate company, Real Gap. When I found out who he had paid, I was a bit surprised. I used the same company when I went out to Australia and New Zealand to help me find paid work and they were fine. I’ve even been to their head office in Tunbridge Wells. So how and why are they selling volunteer work that you can otherwise get for free?

If you look on their website, you’ll find the exact same scheme I did, labelled as “USA Conservation In Nevada”. Except, of course, that it’s listed as £499-£599. You do get a £50 phone card and travel insurance (worth about £100), but that’s really the only added value they offer. When I emailed Real Gap asking about the cost breakdown, they said:

“The programme fee includes funding that goes to the organisation in Nevada to cover volunteers’ accommodation, food, training and airport transfers.”

The Real Gap website doesn’t name the Great Basin Institute, presumably to stop people from just signing up for free.

So Real Gap (and presumably other companies) are selling the Great Basin Institute’s program and then sending them some of the money for things that they would otherwise provide for free. When you think about this, it doesn’t seem all that bad at first. The organisation has to pay for your food, accommodation and someone to look after you, so the money has to come from somewhere.

However, part of the reason why organisations like international volunteers is that they’re cheap labour. Even with overhead costs, not having to pay people is a huge financial bonus and if you can charge them too, then even better. Selling these places could also discourage people from volunteering altogether. If all you see are programs which cost hundreds or thousands of pounds, then why would you bother instead of a normal holiday?

Whether this practice of charging volunteers is ethical or not is debatable and I’m not entirely convinced that it’s bad in every case. After all, there are certainly organisations out there who can’t operate without the additional exposure and income from willing participants. However, if you are looking to volunteer abroad, make sure you’re aware that you don’t always have to pay. A little bit of research can go a long way.

Reading is something most of us do all the time, more than walking, eating or writing. Text is everywhere, on signs and computer screens, in books and brochures. Consuming and processing all this language happens so quickly and so frequently that you barely even notice. It’s something we do automatically, something you’re doing right now, without even thinking. Yet we rarely stop to think how this actually works and what we can learn from it. This is something While You’re Reading sets out to answer.

Originally written in 1997, Gerard Unger’s book was revised and translated from Dutch into English a couple of years ago. Instead of taking a purely theoretical approach and only examining the science, While You’re Reading presents the subject matter from the point of view of a designer. Unger explains how the eyes and brain work together to interpret text, but focusses on how typography enables this to happen.

One thing I found particularly interesting is how we can read at such speed. In effect, we cheat. Our eyes jump from word to word in saccades, fixating on a portion, but not all, of a word. The more experienced a reader you are or the more familiar you are with the text, the more words you can fit into a saccade and the faster you can read. In fact, there are many words that we just skip entirely.

“Research has shown that practised and well-informed readers skip large numbers of words. In fact, they can skip some fifteen percent of content words (nouns, verbs and adjectives) – and up to sixty percent of function words (definitive and indefinitive articles, prepositions and conjunctions). On average, a good twenty percent of all words are skipped.”

Twenty percent! It’s no wonder that proofreading and editing feels like such a laborious task; you have to slow down and make sure you check every word instead of speeding ahead.

As you might expect from a book about sight and typography, While You’re Reading is well laid out and extremely legible. The text is slightly larger than normal with reasonably short line lengths and chapters never go on for too long, making them easily digestible. There are also plenty of illustrations to complement his assertions and although the citations are a little too prominent, it’s generally a very comfortable book to read.

While You’re Reading isn’t a typical typography book in that it’s not instructional. It doesn’t lay down rules about leading or spacing, but instead aims to explain why these work. It’s a great read for anyone who’s already read about typography and provides an interesting, alternative perspective on something we take for granted.

To see what the current state of subtitling is, I conducted a brief survey of popular online media sources. The data I gathered is not comprehensive due to small sample sizes, but I believe it’s enough to provide a good measure of subtitling support. Here’s what I found:

Notes on data collection

BBC iPlayer

You can only determine whether a programme has subtitles or not by playing it on the iPlayer, so I only took a sample of the 20 most recent highlighted shows.

Hulu clearly marks programmes with closed captioning.

Hulu

For Hulu, I sampled 100 shows from the list of the most popular programmes from the current day. The US-only equivalent to iPlayer also clearly shows which programmes have closed captions and which do not.

DVD

DVDs are obviously not online media, but I thought that they would provide an interesting comparison. I collected data from the top 50 list on the DVD Subtitles website.

BitTorrent

Although downloading media using BitTorrent is a legal grey area at best, it’s such a popular way of getting TV programmes and films that it would be silly to ignore it. I collected data by browsing The Pirate Bay’s top movies and checking each torrent for subtitle files. I ignored duplicate films and those with foreign language subtitles already included.

Half of the torrents sampled had subtitles, but it’s probable that the number of subtitled films is actually slightly higher due to the strength of the subtitling scene. Websites like Open Subtitles, Subscene, DivX SubTitles, Subtitle Online and allsubs.org have huge databases of subtitles which work with BitTorrent downloads.

iTunes’ subtitling support is extremely poor.

iTunes

I collected the data by using the browse view to list all of the films, then counted the number of subtitled films in each category, before aggregating that information. However, there is a caveat, which is that some films like Team America are in more than one category. I counted 128 films with closed captioning, but the iTunes Power Search shows that only 99 unique movies actually have it.

Observations and conclusions

The most surprising thing that I found was the extremely weak level of subtitling on iTunes. Apple provides closed captioning support on the iPod Touch, iPhone, Apple TV and within iTunes itself, but this doesn’t include any TV programmes. The films which are subtitled are easy to find, but there are still very few of them on the store.

In contrast to the legal alternative, BitTorrent provides much better subtitling support. Although few advanced releases have subtitles, many of those which have been ripped from DVDs do. There are also numerous websites which provide subtitles for both TV programmes and movies. Getting media from BitTorrent might not be legal, but when it comes to online distribution, it’s often the only option available.

The iPlayer has good subtitle support, but you can only see which programmes have them by playing them.

The BBC’s iPlayer has the best subtitling support, which is no surprise given their commitment to accessibility and the level of subtitling already available on their standard TV broadcasts. However, it’s worth noting that you have to play each show before you can determine whether it has subtitles or not. The US equivalent, Hulu, is not far behind. Most programmes have subtitles and those that do are clearly marked.

I included DVDs as a benchmark, but expected the number of films and TV box-sets with subtitles to be significantly higher. Evidently, subtitles on DVDs are not something that can be taken for granted.

As someone who never uses subtitles, except in foreign-language films, I assumed that number of films and TV shows with them available would be far higher than it actually is. In fact, all of the sources I sampled could do much to improve their accessibility for people with a hearing impairment. In the case of iTunes, the lack of support is embarrassing to say the least.

As you may know, I’m a volunteer for Young Enterprise, a business and enterprise education charity for children and young adults. I did the Company programme when I was at school, in which you and other students meet once a week and run a company for a year. I was then a volunteer business advisor the following year and I’ve been doing the same during my internship at BT.

One of the most interesting things about advising a Young Enterprise company is seeing the mistakes they make and how they deal with them. Since their business education is at most a year or two of business studies or economics lessons, they’re always susceptible to making basic errors which more experienced people wouldn’t. However, this is almost the whole point of Young Enterprise. As the charity motto says, it’s all about learning by doing. Young Enterprise offers pupils a chance to make these mistakes before it really counts and in a low-risk environment. If they lose all their money, then the shares they sold are worthless, but nothing more.

As this year’s Company programme is drawing to a close, I thought I’d share three key lessons which always seem to pop up during each year of Young Enterprise.

Know how much money you have

It may seem like common sense, but knowing how much money is in the bank is an issue that every Young Enterprise company I’ve seen has had trouble with. They make decisions about how much material to buy, how many widgets to make and so on all the time, but rarely can answer the simple question, “how much money do you have?”

This often comes about because the appointed finance director doesn’t update the company’s accounts frequently enough. By the time they get round to doing so, they have a box of cash, a few scribbled notes and little else.

Have an agenda

Young Enterprise companies always use agendas towards the start of the year, but often stop writing them after a few months. Meetings become unstructured and companies end up spending more time deciding what to do in them than anything else. In one meeting this year, the company I’m advising spent half an hour discussing what to do without actually doing anything at all.

This sort of thing probably happens because pupils haven’t used agendas before and so don’t really understand why they’re valuable. Agendas initially seem like an overly formal, unneccessary burden. However, once companies see what it’s like to try and running a meeting without an agenda, they being to write them again to regain some order.

Communicate outside of meetings

Although Young Enterprise companies meet once a week, they often work between meetings. This works pretty well when all of the members go to the same school, like this year, but when they don’t see each other every day, communication can be an issue.

A common example of this is someone being tasked to research a subject or order some goods, but then having a problem with it. Often, they’ll wait until the weekly meeting to tell people about why they didn’t complete their task, but sometimes this is too late.

Perhaps these lessons seem too obvious, but I think it’s helpful to remind ourselves why we have agendas, keep track of finances and make sure we communicate well. Young Enterprise gives pupils a chance to learn these basic skills for the first time, but it’s also an oppurtunity for business advisors like me to remember why we did in the first place.

When Mark Boulton published A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web as a PDF book earlier this year, I was intrigued, but not convinced enough to buy it. As convenient as e-books are, to me they’re no match for the reading experience a proper paper book offers. So when he announced a limited print run of 1500 copies, I placed my order as soon as possible.

Designing for the Web is somewhat of an anomaly when compared to other web design books. Instead of focussing on a single aspect like typography, CSS or PHP, it aims to cover a much broader spectrum of topics. Each of the book’s five sections – Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour and Layout – provides an introduction to its subject, but is by no means extensive.

I’ve read quite a bit about the final three parts of the book, so I can’t say I learnt much new, but the first two were particularly interesting. In Getting Started, Boulton analyses the pros and cons of working in an agency, an in-house department and as a freelance designer. He also goes into detail describing the process of moving from full-time employment to becoming a freelancer, including a timescale which I found particularly interesting. For any web designers considering working for themselves, the tips and advice here are probably worth the price of the book alone.

The Research & Ideas section is also intriguing, covering how you move from a simple brief to something you can work with. The process of actually coming up with ideas is also examined and Boulton describes a couple of concepts I haven’t heard of before. I’ve never really thought of where I get inspiration for my work, so this part of the book was particularly interesting.

As you’d expect from an author with a background in graphic design and typography, Designing for the Web looks fantastic. The entire book is in full colour and the paper itself is of a very high quality. At £29, it’s fairly pricey, but it certainly feels the part.

I do have a couple of reservations though. First of all, I can’t help but think that the main text is slightly too small to read comfortably. Each page has a huge amount of white space, which is good, but at the same time I think it could have been better used to make the text more legible. I also spotted half a dozen typos and a number of inconsistent spellings. Perhaps I’m being pedantic and should cut the book some slack for being self-published, but as someone who edits articles on a regular basis, it struck me as a little sloppy.

That said, Designing for the Web is a worthwhile read and an excellent starting place for anyone interested in web design. It doesn’t cover any of its subjects in huge detail, but this isn’t really its aim. It provides an introduction into the most important concepts of good design on the web and is a solid launch pad from which to learn about each in greater detail. Experienced web designers might not learn much new apart from in the first two sections, but for those new to the field, Designing for the Web is worth a look.