Would You Consider This Bad Usability?
Posted By : todd sharp Posted At : July 17, 2007 10:52 AM Posted In: Usability
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I propose the title of this blog post as more of a question to my readers (yes it is web related so don't let the backstory fool you). Here's the story. A few weeks back my wife and I decided that we were both going to enter some baked goods into the local county fair in a friendly little competition. You see, I have bested my mother-in-law (a very decorated and proficient baker) in acquiring ribbons a few times over the past few years. So my wife decided to throw her hat in the ring this year.
So she went to the website of the county fair and submitted her entries online. A few days later I hit the same website with the same intentions and was completely stumped. It seemed pretty obvious - click on the 'Online Registration' link right from the home page - how could I screw that up? Unfortunately I kept getting a PDF version of the available categories opposed to an online entry form. I searched and searched the home page - thinking I may be missing something. Frustrated I called my wife into the room to ask her what I was doing wrong. Amazingly she pointed out that the individual category entries in the PDF were in fact hyperlinks to the entry form for that category.
So my issue here is this. While I think the overall idea here is somewhat cool - I feel this is really bad from a usability standpoint. I mean come on - I do this stuff (web development) for a living and I was stumped as to how to get to the actual entry form. At the same time my wife - who admittedly is less web savvy - found out how to enter quite easily. The biggest issue I have is that after figuring this out I went back and searched diligently for any sort of instructions that would have told me how the system worked - and found nothing. There was no text highlighting/coloring/underlining whatsoever in the PDF that indicated that the items were actual links.
Thoughts? Is it just me, or have others seen this before?
Of course it's bad usability-- it violates the user's expectations. Also, usability guidelines generally state that links should be clearly discernible from other text on the page, although now that blue underlining is out of style there's little consensus on how that ought to be done.
I tend to slog through 10s if not 100s of websites a day and have incidentally trained myself to read/scan as little as possible to get to where I want to go. If something isn't organized the way I expect it to be then there's a good chance that I'll fly by it a few times before taking the time to actually read the site for clues. (or give up)
I thought I was the only one. The unfortunate side effect to this is that I also do the same when reading _anything_ nowadays (newspapers, emails, magazines).
Todd bakes cookies to enter into the county fair!
As for the usability, you're not alone. That is a very poor implementation.
And I might add I am a blue ribbon winner too (at the largest county fair in Ohio).
I ain't afraid to admit it. :)
Never be afraid to admit you can cook, or in your case bake. For some odd reason women, especially mothers-in-law find it very comforting for some reason...
I too think that it is quite bad usability. PDF are synonymous with reading not interacting with (Though adobe has desperately tried to change that thought with active pdfs, and pdf forms etc)
I probably would have had the same issue most of the time, at least in my experience, what appear to be links in pdf documents are just text bits that looks like links e.g. blue instead of black.
Now, if every developer supports basic/fundamental standard (not maniac), we all would have a better experience regardless of medium. Is the PDF form link in blue?