This article was originally published in the August 2009 issue (Vol 14, No. 3)

STC UUX Community Newsletter
Usability Interface

Editorial

By Sherri Martin-Hutchins, Newsletter Editor

As web users we are trained to expect certain behavior from certain functions. For example, checkboxes imply the ability to choose multiple selections, whereas radio buttons enable you to select only one option.

Over time conventions like these have contributed to usability. I hadn't realized exactly how strong these visual cues were until recently.

This summer I partook in a book blogging group. It was the first time I had been a part of a group like this and it proved to be an adventurous time. We all worked through a book and wrote about our experiences on our individual blogs every week. The host provided a venue for all the participants to share links to their latest posts, so every week I added my own link and visited the other participants' sites. It was amazing to share an experience and hear what others were doing.

While many of the participants had English language blogs, a few people in other countries posted (usually in English) to blogs hosted in their native language. This meant visitors' actions, such as leaving comments, required navigating field labels and buttons with foreign directives.

Here are a few examples:

In such cases I relied on visual cues and what I knew of standard blog commenting forms. The large field is likely for comments. The drop down menu presumably offers choices on what profile I would like to use. In the case of the German blog, once I made a selection from the drop down menu, a pop-up box appeared with prompts in English even though the title of the box was still in German.

On this particular blog, there is only one button to pick after entering a name and URL, so that removes a lot of guesswork.

When it was time to submit my comment, depending on the blog I was on, there were two buttons: "Kommentar erstellen" and "Vorschau" or "Objavi komentar" and "Predogled". In these cases, I thought the "post comment" option was usually in bold, so I simply chose the button whose text was bold.

If another pop-up box appeared with distorted jibberish, I recognized that I was expected to type that text in the field beneath it to prove that I am not a robot.

Voila! Comments were successfully submitted. Had the blog format differed dramatically from what I am accustomed to, I would have been hard-pressed to comment.

I remember quite vividly a presentation given at the 2008 STC Summit by Daniel Szuc. He began by showing pictures of physical buildings and then of foreign web sites. For each he asked the audience what they thought that business did and what made them think that. This demonstration showed the weight that visual cues carry.

As humans we rely on all sorts of visual cues to perform our daily tasks. If a faucet has two handles, we recognize the red handle is for hot water while the blue handle is for cold water, or that the left handle is hot and the right handle is cold (though I've heard the latter is reversed in some locales). Restroom doors display stick figures, one of which wears a dress, so that we know which door to use.

On a computer, we know it is processing when we see something spin, whether it is an hourglass or a beach ball.

Online we recognize links by their different font color and sometimes an underline. Our suspicions are confirmed when we hover over a link and the cursor changes to a pointer finger.

Visual cues are extremely helpful for user comprehension. What cues are you using? What cues could you implement?

(If you're curious about my summer book blogging adventure, you can visit my blog at http://sherrileigh.wordpress.com/?s=wreck+this+journal or go to the book host's site at http://tnc-wreckthisjournal.blogspot.com. We left a wake of destruction.)

Do you have an article you want to submit to Usability Interface? Email me at sherrimar@gmail.com.