Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide
A fascinating, highly surprising study of the way people actually look for information at a Website.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide
Chapter 8: User Preference
Overview
In doing software usability testing, we've found that users usually prefer the application that they find most usable. We expected the same to be true of web sites, but it's not.
After users had worked with several sites, we asked them which site they liked best and which site they disliked most. Table 8.1 shows the rankings. It also shows the rankings of sites in order of user success.
| User Success | Users Like Most | Users Dislike Least | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Edmund's | Travelocity | Tie: Edmund's, Olympic |
| 2 | Olympic | Olympic | |
| 3 | Hewlett Packard | Hewlett Packard | Travelocity |
| 4 | WebSaver | Tie: Edmund's, Disney (new) | Hewlett Packard |
| 5 | Travelocity | WebSaver | |
| 6 | Inc. (new) | Disney (old) | Inc. (old) |
| 7 | Disney (new) | Inc. (new) | Disney (new) |
| 8 | Inc. (old) | Cnet | Fidelity |
| 9 | Cnet | WebSaver | Tie: Cnet, Disney (old) |
| 10 | Fidelity | Tie: Fidelity, Inc. (old) | |
| 11 | Disney (old) | Inc. (new) |
If user likes, success, and dislikes all measured the same thing, we would expect the sites to appear in the same order in each column of the table, but they don't.
Success and User Likes
Asking users if they like a site is not a good indication of whether they can successfully use it, as shown by the differences in columns one and two.
For example, notice where WebSaver appears it was one of...
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