I just finished Don’t Make Me Think (more articles on that later). When you study web-site Usability, you notice more issues in real life.
I bought some things on sale at Safeway, and entered my phone number. It happily took it. Only later did I discover (luckily before paying) that it had not found my number, but it gave me no feedback on this. Why should they? If I hadn’t caught this, I would have been out an extra $5.
Harris Teeter is somewhat better. If it can’t find my number, it lets me know. However, it does not let me enter a different number again, and I have to back out of the entire thing and wait for the machine to reset. That’s a bit silly.
On the Dulles Tollroad, if you go through without it registering your tag, it sounds a very loud alarm. However, the Greenway does not and let’s you silently go through, only to mail you a letter days later requesting $50 per incident. Guess who no longer uses the Dulles Greenway.
I will follow up on some of the remaining points from “Don’t Make Me Think” soon. I just started reading “Practices of an Agile Developer”, and will offer some follow-up on that as well. Stay tuned!
