Using a website is like having a conversation with someone. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s like having a conversation with someone who seems to be looking at you but is really staring off into space. Or maybe when you ask, “Do you like Fridays?”, they reply, “I do like ice cream.” As far as usability goes, interactions should be so natural that they are not noticed. No one remembers interacting with their hammer. Hammers are so straightforwardly easy to use that no one even thinks to call them “user-friendly” but in fact they are extremely user-friendly. At the other extreme, everyone remembers having to think a little bit too hard while trying to pre-set their VCR to record a certain show at a certain time.
Your users are having conversations with your website and in order to look credible, your website needs to be a competent conversationalist—it needs to respond at the appropriate times with the normal head nods and “uh huh”s. One simple thing that you can do and is commonly done on many sites is to change the appearance of a link when it is hovered over. Letting the user know where their mouse is is helpful to the user because it lets them know what they’re getting into before they click on the link. This is important because it will prevent misclicks, which will save the user time and potential frustration.
Imagine that donut shops were operated by robots and when you pointed through the glass at the donut that you wanted, they didn’t ask, “You mean the chocolate glazed?”, they just took their best guess and sometimes handed you a sugar donut instead of a chocolate glazed. That would be annoying. Maybe you can return stuff at the robot-operated donut shop, but who likes returning stuff when they don’t have to? Because it’s a little hard to tell exactly where I’m pointing, they should ask me, “You mean the sugar donut?” and then I would say, “No, I mean the one behind it, the chocolate glazed.” It is also sometimes hard to tell exactly where you’re pointing in the donut shop that is the world wide web. This is especially so when links are placed next to each other in long lists. As I point at stuff, your website should be saying to me, “You mean the sugar donut? If you click now, you’re going to get a sugar donut.” Then I’ll be sure to get what I want.
The general rule is there should be some response to every action. When I press down the question mark key on my keyboard, a question mark appears on my computer screen. If it doesn’t, then I will press the key again, thinking that the system didn’t hear me. You should hear and respond to every action that your users make. Here’s an example: You try to log in to a website by entering your username and password. Your password is incorrect. You receive an error message that says, “Incorrect Password.” That’s a response—that’s good. But what happens if you now try another password and the second password that you enter is also incorrect? Something will happen but it will be unnoticeable. You will get the same error message, “Incorrect Password”, but because that was the exact same message that you just received on the previous screen, it will appear as if nothing happened. So that’s bad. You received an imperceptible response. You did something and the system didn’t acknowledge it in any way that manifested itself visibly. To remedy this, you could change the case or the background color of the error message if someone had many failed password attempts.
For example:
First bad password:
Incorrect password.
Second bad password:
Incorrect password.
Third bad password:
Incorrect password.
Fourth bad password:
Incorrect password.
I think that would be better than this:
First bad password:
Incorrect password.
Second bad password:
Incorrect password.
Third bad password:
Incorrect password.
Fourth bad password:
Incorrect password.