A Curious Mind

I always use my Mum as an example of a general internet user. If I don’t think my Mum could use something then it’s probably wrong for most people.

If you’ve ever been involved in User Testing, live or remote by using something like What Users Do, you’ll notice a few things;

1. They’re not like You and I.
2. They do everything different to You and I.
3. You’ll want to sit on your hands whilst watching them go through the required tasks as you’ll want to try and point them in the ‘right’ and ‘better’ direction of how they use a computer, let alone their general internet usage.

I found out this morning from randomly looking to do my grocery shopping online that one of the largest grocery shopping retailers ‘Tesco‘ failed on this first hand. As you’ll see from the below, they have a ‘Sign In’ button however when clicking on it, you can’t sign in. It simply produces a drop down navigation for the areas of the website which is not the action a user requires, nor the information they need to complete the action. To sign in, you have to go through to a section to then sign in by another means.

It takes nothing for a user to become confused by something, it takes nothing to lose a customer because of something not working or confusion as how something works.

Let’s not make things difficult for people using what we build. They’re looking to get from A to B in the most seamless way possible, let us help them do that by not missing things like Tesco.