Since I originally started this blog for my rants (and raves) about software (creating and using), I didn’t feel up to posting anything since my father-in-law’s death in June from an unexpected stroke. However, I am going to start a separate blog to post (mostly rants) about the medical and health insurance industrial complex. Stay tuned for that.
In the meantime, I’m getting back on my horse and will also start some reflecting on introducing agile methods into a development environment, namely the company where I work: Guidewire Software.
And, lest you think I’m not ranting about anything in this post, I’d like to rant about Blogsome — yes, that’s the site that hosts this blog. Generally, Blogsome has been just fine, except that I hadn’t logged in for several months and so not only did I not remember my password, I couldn’t remember how to log in to my account so I could post. My expectation was that somewhere on the Blogsome home page there would be a place to type my username or at least take me to a login page, but there was none. So I looked for a help page or a FAQ, but there wasn’t one. I went to the forums, but didn’t feel like sifting through the threads to find the answer. Finally, I searched through my emails and found the original “welcome” email and used the link contained therein.
It shouldn’t be this hard. I can maybe understand the lack of help pages if you have a nice-sized forum, but the use cases for help pages vs. forums are quite different. What I can’t understand is hiding the login page. And it’s not just Blogsome that does this, but many other sites seem to have home pages that are geared towards new users, making the login/sign-in area hard to find. For example, Jellyfish (one of my favorite “rebate” sites, and I especially enjoy their Smack Shopping reverse auctions) makes it hard to find the login button and instead has a bunch of “wasted” space:
Yeah, it’s not only tiny, but it’s in brackets (further deemphasizing it) and is next to the “Sign Up Now” text, so you might even miss it — I have. And what happens when you click on the tiny login link?
Ohhh, that’s what the “wasted” space is for! Well why isn’t that just there the whole time? My guess: it would ruin the “design”. Form over function wins and the users lose. And lest you think that it’s just some random site that might not have the money for someone dedicated to usability, Washington Mutual Bank recently redesigned their site and now it suffers from the same problem:
Again, the web site is treating the customers it already has as second-class citizens by forcing us to spend extra mental effort trying to find the login area. The fact that it’s clearly labeled doesn’t help, since we’re programmed to look for a pair of input fields that signify a login area, a visual clue that’s missing here. So what happens when you hover over the little plus sign next to the Log in link?
There, that’s better. Just like Jellyfish, why couldn’t this be open all the time? There’s even less of an excuse here, not just because it’s a bank web site, but there’s no “design” to be ruined here, it’s all blank whitespace.
Remember, just because we can now do fancy things with Ajax, doesn’t mean we should sacrifice usability for “cool” designs.
