Three Negative User Experiences and Suggested Improvements

This post will go over three negative user experiences that I have had on websites. I will define what made them negative experiences, and come up with some recommendations of how the experience could have been improved. For the first two I will use screenshots and follow up with some quick suggestions for improvement. For the third, I will sketch out the screens involved and sketch a version showing the improvement that I would apply on each screen.

DickBlick.com

Whatever the URL may look like, this is an art supplies store, I promise! Blick is one of only two art stores in DC and the brick and mortar store is a wonderful place. The staff are always helpful and friendly, no matter how many ridiculous questions I ask and how close to closing time it is. Art stores are one of those things that can not be effectively replaced by online retail. There is no substitute for being able to touch paper.

However, the store is small and they don’t always have what I need in stock. When this happens, I try to support the store indirectly by buying from their website. The web version of their website isn’t bad. It looks a little outdated and is cluttered, but it gets the job done.

It has some functions that seem archaic but are actually the best way of doing things for the products. An example is the ordering system that looks like a paper order sheet. Here is an example for Liquitex paint:

…

You put the quantity you want against the particular item, then you press “add to cart” when you are done.

At first glance this seems clunky, however, if you think about the product and how you order it, it makes sense. When ordering paint, you often need multiple colors. Ordering multiple variants of one item with, for example, the system amazon.com uses is much more cumbersome.

If you have ten different colors to order, you have to go through the process of selecting the color, size and quantity for each of the ten colors. Whereas with the archaic order sheet you just fill in the boxes and submit the sheet once.

So far I have just been talking about positives, where are the negatives? The mobile site.

Here is what it looks like on mobile:

This site has not been optimized for mobile at all. So it requires a lot of finger pinching to get around.

The order sheet is split down the middle:

And when you get to the area to add quantities, you can only just see what you are ordering:

If you zoom out, the fields become so small that they can barely be used.

Suggestions for improvement:

This whole site needs to be optimized for mobile. The lines of this order form need to be formatted so that they can be easily read and interacted with on a small screen. This will likely make the order form very long, so a return to top button should be added. At the very least making the columns smaller and removing some of the white space would make a huge difference.

LaneBryant.com

Again, I am talking about the mobile site.

Now, this is a nice looking site, it is optimized for mobile. What is the problem? Infinite scroll…

Here you have a list of 479 items:

So we scroll, and scroll. How far are we from the end of the list?

Accordingly to the scroll bar, it looks like we are nearly done.

But wait there’s more:

With infinite scroll it is near impossible to know how many results remain to look at, and to, therefore, determine whether it was worth continuing to scroll. Further, it is difficult to locate again an article that you may have scrolled past.

Now, what is even worse than the use of infinite scroll, is that the infinite scroll is buggy.

With long lists of items I have noticed that as you scroll and scroll, all of a sudden you notice that you are looking at items you have already seen. The list is repeating. But not from the top, from a seemingly random point. Have I reached the bottom so it is showing me the same stuff again? Or is there more but the site is having trouble displaying it? Who knows. You are left to literally scroll infinitely or give up and hope the bargain of the century wasn’t hiding at the bottom of the list.

Suggestions for improvement

What is better than infinite scroll? Pages! They may be old school, but at least you know where you are and how much you have left to look at. It is also easier to remember where you saw something and navigate back to it.

But if you must use infinite scroll, at least make sure it works, and doesn’t leave the user literally scrolling infinitely…

The United States Patent and Trademark Office Information Retrieval System

Before deciding to do the User Experience Design Immersive I worked as a paralegal/legal secretary in a patent law firm. I have so many things to say about the United States Patent Trademark Office web offerings but I will limit the scope of this post to a few pet peeves.

This post is going to cover the process of logging into the Patent Application Information Retrieval system (otherwise known as PAIR) and searching for a patent application.

PAIR houses all the documents related to a given patent application or patent and it has public and private versions. Public PAIR allows anyone to see the details of any patent application that is publicly available. Private PAIR allows a law firm see the documents relating to patent applications that they are responsible for that are not yet public.

Here is the URL: http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair

And here is a sketch of the home page:

It is very busy, outdated, and has complex multilayer navigation.

Our first challenge is finding where to log in to Private PAIR. Hidden under the “Patent Application Information (PAIR)” option in the side menu bar there is a “Private PAIR (Registered)” option. This link is so well hidden that I have no idea how someone new to the site would find it unaided.

You would expect this link to take you to Private PAIR. Instead it takes you to a page asking you if you want to go to Public PAIR or Private PAIR, and providing you with more information on the two.

The header, footer and navigation menus are different on this page. This is because the USPTO actually revamped their website recently. They have modernized the look, decluttered, and added useful features, such as the “you are here” navigation links, a search box, and quick links. However, they haven’t gotten to modernizing PAIR yet.

This page is a huge improvement on the previous page. And my suggestion for improvement would be to delete the original PAIR home page, which seems redundant with this page, and go straight to this portal applications home page.

Now, if we select Private PAIR on this page, it will actually take us to the Private PAIR log in page.

The first problem you will encounter with this page is Java. Chrome stopped supporting Java last year, so this limits your browser options. As most law firms are in a Windows environment, I will only discuss Windows browsers here. You can use Firefox, but it has other issues with the USPTO, so best option is, horror of horror’s, Internet Explorer.

Further, once you have found a browser that supports Java the log in process is horribly buggy (pop-up doesn’t open, crashes, reset doesn’t work…).

Before I even discuss reorganization of the page, the most important improvements that need to be made are: improve reliability and find a more widely accepted solution than Java.

Now, to log in, you have to have a PKI certificate which is saved to your computer.

You navigate to this using the browse button, which opens a pop-up.

In that pop-up (shown above), you select the file that you want, then you enter your password in the password box, check I understand, and press “Authenticate”.

It takes a little while for the system to authenticate the certificate. During the authentication time there is no indication that the system is doing anything, not even the spinning “page loading” circle in the tab, just the same static page you just enter information into until the next page eventually loads.

Here is a sketch of my suggested improved log in screen:

I have adopted the style of the updated website so that all pages are consistent. I have used titles and labels that are clearer (“log in” as opposed to “user authentication” and “continue” instead of “authenticate”). I have made all the buttons and the check box bigger, so the call to action is more obvious. I added an obvious “Help” button instead of the tiny text that was previously hidden at the bottom of the page. Next to the digital certificate field, I added an information button. Finally, I got rid of the browse button as clicking in the digital certificate field will bring up the same pop up.

The next improvement is that, instead of leaving the user wondering if the system is doing anything at all while it authenticates the certificate, I suggest adding a modal:

If you have successfully managed to log in, you should now see the search screen:

Here you can search by multiple kinds of numbers, but you have to tell the system what kind of number you are entering. Imagine you are new at this and you are given a number to search but you aren’t told what kind of number it is. What do you do?

Another issue with this search interface is that the number must be in specific formats with respect to punctuation and leading zeros, otherwise no results will be returned.

Here is my suggested improvement:

It is simple! No radio buttons, you just enter your number into the search filed. The number can be any of the numbers previously listed next to the radio buttons, and it can be typed with or without punctuation and with or without leading zeros.

I could fill a novel with further issues and suggested improvements, but for this post I will finish here. At the very least, these few simple changes could make the lives of my former colleagues still working in patents a little easier!