“The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.” Joseph Priestly

When we interact with another human (hey, remember those?!) we’re in a constant feedback loop- we can see his or her facial expressions, hear variations in voice tonality, observe changes in body language, and even anticipate responses based on what we know about his or her personality. Interacting with websites (or software) is vastly different. Unless a clever engineer or smart usability consultant was involved the interaction can seem more like talking to a brick wall than a modern communication medium. 

In the old days of green screens and modal systems no news was good news. If you executed a command in unix and simply got a new command prompt then you knew all was well. But in modern times when users can do one of many differnt things (and many of whom aren’t quite as technical as one needed to be in days of command-line computing) feedback is essential.

One of the basic tenants of usability is the principle of keeping the end user of the system informed about the current state of the system. This means that the system acknowledges our actions through visual or audbile responses. It can be a subtle response, but a subtle response is better than no response. Let’s look at a few examples. 

The Brookings Institute provides public policy research. Their website is very nice looking and creates a high sense of credibility. However, when I navigate to the various sections of the website- like moving from the home page to World, or Economy- the site provides no feedback that I’m in another section.

Contrast this to the Council on Foreign Relations website. When I click the navigation item for “Think Tank” I can see that the tab stays highlighted and the breadcrumb trail shows “Home->Think Tank”. Through these subtle cues I understand that I’m in a differnt part of the site, even if the page structures are the same.

What other ways should a site communicate with an end user to keep him or her informed? 

 - When I login, welcome me and show me my username

 - When I move to page 2, show me that it’s page 2

 - When I submit a contact form, tell me it’s been successfully submitted

Keeping the user informed keeps him or her engaged in the site because it them moves from a one-way conversation to true interaction (inter- between). When the user understands what just happened he’s more likely to know what to do next. 

Is your website talking back to you?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.