[Sigia-l] summary responses to violating a usability principle issue

[Samantha Bailey]

Thanks to everyone for the great (and speedy) feedback--I will be able
to mine this to come up with a much stronger solution and will be much
more confident in the approach. I wanted to reply en masse about a few
issues:

1) This didn't come up but I realized in responding to an earlier
message that I have a piece of knowledge about this kind of transition
that may be valuable to share with the group. I know from a prior
(painful) experience that it's *not* a good idea to instruct people
about a userID/password change via email--I worked for a financial
services institution where we had to conduct a username/password
change (of a somewhat different nature than the one I'm dealing with
now) and we alerted people via email and included links to where they
could go to make the change. As it turned out, we inadvertently
initiated a phishing scam panic in our customers who didn't trust
email talking about changing passwords. (Ironically we had been doing
a fair amount of phishing education with customers *because* there
were some phishing scamsbeing perpetuated asking for our account
numbers!). It's possible that you could do an email of some kind in
this circumstance but that experience with it really scared me off.

2) Many people commented on the ills/evils of popups--one thing I
mis-stated (my team gets after me about this, as well) is that it
isn't actually a "popup" (that's just how I think about it because it
"pops up" during the interaction and part of the normal flow)--it's an
interim screen  that encourages them to do the set up process starting
right there on that page but also allows them to link directly to the
site without doing the process. One thing we've been considering doing
is the version of alert where a semi-transparent overlay is put over
the screen so you can still see the page underneath (no worries that
you've lost the page) and the message is in the middle of the screen.
It looks like a popup but is unavoidable and functions like an
interstitial page. I've encountered it a few times--most recently at
Writely.com on their "should we go out of beta" survey. I'm not clear
on the technical underpinnings of how this is done but I can send a
screen shot and source code file to anyone who would like to see
it--just email me off list.

3) A couple people asked what usability principle was being violated--
I was feeling that to force users to see something over and over for a
period of time violates the spirit of the principle of user control
and freedom--that's generally raised in the context of making sure
people can back out but I have generally interpreted it as a call to
allow users to be as self determining as possible and this feels a
little draconian. I felt pretty sure we would go that route, but I
wanted other professional opinions in case it turned out that others
had compelling arguments against. I very much like Robert's suggestion
to go with the 1-2-3-forced change model, as that gives everyone the
same experience regardless of how many times they login (we have some
people who use the site multiple times every single day and other who
login once every several months).

Thanks again, this was incredibly valuable to me.


Samantha



-- 
Samantha Bailey | samantha at baileysorts.com | http://baileysorts.com