Bad Web Sites Can Cause "Mouse Rage"

alphadogg writes "Badly designed Web sites may have negative effects on a user's immune, cardiovascular, and nervous systems, a study says. The study of 2,500 users was commissioned by Rackspace Managed Hosting and published by the UK's Social Issues Research Centre. It found that five technology flaws in Web sites may have deleterious effects." How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design?

Re:How long before the first class action suit in

[cloricus]

Not sure though I believe these guys [microsoft.com] know. I nearly went insane trying to work out where the Exchange 2003 patches section was yesterday; and when I got there I was told it was only accessible via a password that you get from a phone tech...

No way! Someone did "user testing" of websites?

[Infonaut]

Whoa. That's some advanced sheot!

It's hard-core science, too. Look at the scientifical results:

The report stated, "Some changes in muscle tension were quite dramatic While this was happening, the participants faces also tensed visibly, with the teeth clenched together and the muscles around the mouth becoming taught. These are physically uncomfortable situations that reduce concentration and increase feelings of anger."

I'm surprised that nobody [useit.com] has ever [websiteoptimization.com] done anything [sensible.com] like this before!

internal corporate sites

[loudmax]

The worst offenders are internal corporate sites built on expensive proprietary technology that offers a lot of heavy framework so business analysts can design byzantine workflows. While the client user interface may be theoretically "web-based" it isn't regular old HTML. It has to be client-side java, or at the very least, lots and lots of javascript, so it feels like client-side java. All this is for filling out forms and navigation, mind you, we're not talking fancy graphics or AJAX or anything. Naturally, these sites are IE-only, and very particular about which version of IE at that.

This kind of site couldn't survive for long outside a corporate firewall. Too slow, bloated, difficult to navigate, unsecure, and downright ugly. But when your paycheck depends on using a mandated interface to fill out a trouble ticket, timesheet, or expense report, you just click and bear it.

Oh yeah, in my job I support a site like this. The back end isn't any better.

Re:I'd like to read the report

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm not sure if I completely agree with the implication that hardware infrastructure and network reliability trumps usability. For me, a site that is designed badly or behaves badly on the browser side is a greater offense than a site that loads a little slower than most.

Ah, but you're not in the server hardware business. From the business name, it sounds like the guy you were quoting (whose company commissioned the study) is in exactly that business.

Navigation is but a portion of layout. Other studies have shown that the brain subconsciously identifies all the major areas of a web page (header, navigation, main content, ancillary content) in 1/20 of a second after the page loads, and that the common practice of placing navigation/secondary content a left-hand column causes people to ignore anything in the right-side column (a phenomenon known as "right side blindness"), because people have learned that most of the time, what's in the right-hand column is less related (if it's relevant at all) to their task at hand... typically third party banners or other cruft.

In one of the few articles worth reading on UseIT [useit.com] in recent years, Jakob Nielsen describes the results of their eye-tracking studies into how users read web pages [useit.com] as an "F" shape. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when you look at some real pages with the eye-tracking data, you see a combination of several effects: the user typically scans across for selected lines (headings?) but less so as they get further down the page, scans the left side of the main column and any extra column to the left (usually menus?), and will also focus on obviously relevant boxes to the right (shopping carts? menus?). IMHO it's worth a read if you're interested in this sort of thing.

I hope that the conclusion is that modern, CSS driven, user-centric designs are less stress inducing than bloated, image-laden table layouts, but I get the feeling that the reseearchers aren't prepared to commit to saying it.

I hope they wouldn't. After all, why should a user see any difference at all between CSS-driven and table-layout-driven sites, if the tools are used to generate the same effect? (Please don't tell me the research is really about accessibility, which is the only compelling reason I have so far seen for moving to CSS if you have an existing table-based layout on your site that works acceptably. The rest is mostly hype IME, usually proposed by people with a vested interest.)

Re:How long before the first class action suit in

[Monoman]

I am not defending the MS site design but you must mean patches only released to customers experiencing a particular problem. The KB article will usually tell you to contact MS Support for patches not available on their website.

If you are talking about Service Packs, Critical Updates, and those types of things then you can get most of those things by going to windowsupdate.microsoft.com (in IE click on Tools -> Windows Update).

You can also find the Exchange 2K3 downloads in a few clicks.

* www.microsoft.com/exchange
* Click Downloads on the left navigation pane
* Click Exchange 2003 Server downloads on the top right

From there I was able to download SP2 (Using Firefox) in another 2 clicks.

It may not be perfect but the MS site is much better than many other sites. Have you ever tried downloading updates or drivers from IBM? IBM Support can't even tell you how. IBM Support will give you a filename to put in their search form to find the download. It has been this way for 10 years. PATHETIC!

Re:How long before the first class action suit in

[Anonymous Coward]

What's so funny about that? I don't see it.

He answered in braille.

Re:#1 offender:

[Anonymous Coward]

Buthaving to get to the LAST step of checking out before I can see thata $10 item will cost me $15 in shipping (real example!) just drivesme up a frickin' wall.

This should be improving. Amazon is changing to display the shipping price on the page that lists offers from various sellers. Further, the page will be sorted by the combined price (i.e. the "with shipping" price). See http://www.amazonsellercommunity.com/forums/thread .jspa?threadID=125855&tstart=0 [amazonsell...munity.com] for more discussion of this.