Monday July 6, 2009 at 11:26 am
This is a re-post of an article over at DexoDesign.com. I couldn’t have said it better myself, so I’m giving credit where credit is due.
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Is it just me or does it seem strange that there is no Sign In on Amazon.com’s homepage?
Each time I visit amazon.com, and I visit too often, if I’m not already logged in, I stumble looking for the Sign In link. I would expect the “Sign In” text at the top of the page to be a link taking me to a Sign In form. Or even better to automatically display a Sign In form on the homepage. But instead you are required to click on something that would only be available to you once you ARE signed in – e.g. “personalized recommendations”, “Your Lists”, “Your Account”, etc.
This seems like such a fundamental flaw that it had to be done on purpose. But why? Why break with convention and force people to take an extra cognitive step? Did they conduct usability studies and find that this was superior somehow? I’m very curious…
Thursday July 2, 2009 at 4:05 pm
How many times have you tried to print a page from a website and gotten way more than you bargained for?
The first thing is figuring out how to print. Users are used to seeing a print icon in the upper left corner of most common desktop application and will tend to look for it there when browsing the web as well.
Problem is, depending on how the browser is set up, that familiar Print Button might not be in the toolbar. If you’re lucky enough to find the Print Button, you’d better make sure you have a full pack of paper in the printer, because you’re never quite sure how many pieces of paper your one little page could take to print.
Any ads and images on the web page will be printed along with the text, which is probably what you were really interested in to begin with.
If you’re printing at home on your inkjet printer, you probably cherish your color ink just as much as I do. Those cartridges are expensive and we hate having to replace them.
That’s where the Print This button comes in. Most often, you’ll find it on articles or news stories or other pages you might want to share with someone else. By clicking the Print This button, you can usually eliminate all ads and you’re left with plain old black and white text. If you’re using a map site, they’ll usually even give you the option of adding in an image of the map along with the directions.
We’ve recently added a Print This button to the purchase and refinance articles on QuickenLoans.com. This way even if you don’t have a Print icon button, you can still print the article and pass it along.
Do yourself a favor and make sure you always look for the Print This button before gravitating towards the Print icon button in the toolbar.
Tuesday May 12, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Calculator results on QuickenLoans.com include taxes and insurance as part of your total monthly payment along with the principle and interest that make up your mortgage payment.
In the past, these taxes and insurance were taken from national averages. Here’s the issue though: If I live in California, my taxes and insurance are very different than if I live in Birmingham, AL.
So, some of the very smart people here at Quicken Loans took it upon themselves to find a better solution. Now, instead of pulling national averages, the Quicken Loans calculator results show taxes and insurances averages for your state. This makes for a much more accurate result and hopefully makes you, the visitor, that much more educated on the entire process.
Thursday March 19, 2009 at 12:10 pm
During some recent user feedack sessions, we had users take a look at some of our online advertisements and the pages they’d see when they click on the ads. One page in particular incited a lot of feedback. The page contains a form for the visitors information, some testimonials, and a “Recently Featured In” badge for Yahoo. The biggest and most useful piece of feedback was for something that we let slip through the cracks: the phone number.
To get in contact with Quicken Loans on that particular page a visitor could either fill out the form or call us. The problem was, many people didn’t notice the phone number and didn’t realize that calling was even an option.
Sure the phone number is in the header in red text. But obviously that wasn’t enough. When users scanned the form and scrolled down the page, they tended to lose sight of the phone number way back up at the top of the page.
We’ve learned over time that it’s important to have a phone number available as some people just don’t feel comfortable providing their information online. What we learned in this last user test is that the phone number in the header alone is insufficient if we really want to get the message across.
So here’s what we did. We added the phone number to a few other places on the page, where the visitor is more likely to notice it. The phone number at the bottom of the form is also a little bigger, giving the visitor the option to go ahead and submit the form or go ahead and pick up the phone.
Wednesday March 11, 2009 at 12:20 pm
When we conduct usability tests, one of the most common points of confusion is what’s included in a monthly mortgage payment result.
Is it taxes?
Is it insurance?
Or both?
Or neither?
Well, we recently revamped the Quicken Loans calculators, and tried to clear up the confusion.
The new calculator results have a simple breakdown that helps you see the difference between your new mortgage portion and your taxes and insurance portion. You’ll still get the total payment too, though. That way you can see the big picture, or its components.
To check out your own situation, feel free to try the calculators yourself, then comment about your experience here.
Wednesday February 11, 2009 at 5:39 pm
When I conduct user feedback sessions with Morae software, I use the markers frequently. Event when not recording the start and end of tasks, I make notes for myself so I can refer to them when I review the video.
Well – I often mind myself knowing that I created a marker for a particular thought, but not being able to recall exactly which user said it, nor when they said it.
I know there is a search function inside Morae Manager and that I can use it to search Markers. But without being able to type in the keyword I’m looking for, I don’t consider this a true search function. In fact, the first time I used this search, I had to consult the Help module, because I thought I was doing something wrong since I didn’t see the keyword entry field.
Morae Recorder Search Function
In this particular session, we were only looking for open ended feedback, so there were no discrete tasks involved. So that means the markers were especially important.
Ideally, I would be able to choose the recordings I wanted to include in the search and type in one or more keywords to find the corresponding markers.
I like Morae but this looks like a case of not being aware of all of the user’s goals. Just my two cents.
Wednesday February 4, 2009 at 10:47 am
So right now, I’m driving a rental car. It’s a Pontiac G5. Not really my kind of car, but whatever, it’s a rental. My biggest issue with it thus far is that there is no analog engine temperature gauge in the dash. I can tell how much gas I have, how fast I’m going and how whatever it is the tachometer tells me. But what I really want to know is how cold or warm my engine is. Upon investigating a little, I found a button on my steering wheel that allowed me to flip through a few different options on the single line digital read out. It told me stuff like the outdoor tempurature, my tire pressure, oil life and lo and behold, the engine temperature.
Here’s the problem. The readout only told me the engine temperature without giving me the context of the range. If it tells me 35 degrees, I don’t know if that’s too cold, acceptable or too hot for an engine. I’d be better off with just a range that looks similar to my gas guage without knowing what the exact number is.
Poor usability strikes again.
Wednesday December 17, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Give us your feedback. These landing pages would appear after clicking on a Quicken Loans ad on an outside website, other than a search engine. Which page do you like the most? Which would make you most want to do business with Quicken Loans? Leave your answers in the comments.
Thanks!
Wednesday December 17, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Give us your feedback. These landing pages would appear after clicking on a Quicken Loans ad on a search engine.
- Which page do you like the most?
- Which would make you most want to do business with Quicken Loans?
- Anything else?
Leave your answers in the comments.
Thanks!
Thursday December 4, 2008 at 6:21 pm
We had noticed more of our users getting errors on our Quicken Loans website calculators than we thought there should be. So we took a look. Apparently some people use a period when typing a number greater than or equal to one thousand in place of the comma.
Some people were typing: $200,000
Others were typing: $200.000
Truthfully, they mean two different things, but we’re not here to debate whether a comma or period is correct. We just want to know how to best adapt to our visitors and help them along through our site.
So here’s what we told our engineers:
If a visitor types a period or a comma with three trailing zeroes, go ahead and the punctuation and we’ll take the number as is.
But – if a visitor types a comma or decimal with two trailing zeroes, drop the punctuation and the zeroes and we’ll just use the resulting number.
Might sound complicated, but it really makes a lot of sense. This way, whether you use a comma or period to denote the thousands place or the cents on the dollar, either way, we get it. We understand and we’ll do our best to get you results for your calculations.
Just another way we listen to our users and make their visit to our website just a little more pleasant.
