This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
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28 Jul 2003
The California State Fair lets you buy tickets in advance from their Web site. That’s good. But the site is a horror house of usability problems. It’s better than last year’s site, but it’s still obvious that the site is put together by amateurs with no budget. This is the largest economy in the country. The Fair is a huge production, and the Web site is a joke.
Hopefully, by studying their mistakes, you can avoid making them yourself.
In order to buy tickets, you enter the number of tickets you want into a form and click a link labeled “Add to Cart.”
Usability is important in ecommerce. It can mean the difference between a customer and a frustrated user. Frustrated users aren’t likely to give you their money.
The site doesn't work in Mac IE :-( That really sucks.
To say nothing about a flash intro that some people won't be able to use, and an introductory page table layout fixed at a 750px width for layout.
Before someone else mentions it, I realize it's not likely that someone will order 1 billion tickets or even 1000 tickets. The problems caused by those examples are probably never going to happen. But the problems are very easy to fix. It would take only a few minutes to set things up so that the system only accepted reasonable inputs. Something as simple as setting the maxlength of the form fields on the product page would take care of the vast majority of problems.
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey takes the California State Fair webmaster to school, covering every bug, display problem, and user experience issue during the process. The level of detail is great, I often find myself stuck in similar forms and situations but can...
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey takes the California State Fair web site to task over problems with usability. I’m forever amazed that web sites get put into production without, it seems, having ever been tested from the customer’s standpoint. Before I’v...
No mention of the fact that the image tags are all missing height and width tags? Why has this fallen out of vogue, even with people who get so finicky about usability? Futhermore, your "remember me" checkbox is broken, as it is on almost every single MT blog. Those who live in glass houses should not... OK I'll stop being a dick now :-)
I don't think that the lack of height and width attributes hinders basic usability. Someone will be able to use a Web site even if the height and width attributes are missing. Regarding the "Remember Me:" The MT JavaScript sets the cookie path to blank, which means the current directory. Since each entry lives in it's own directory (not really, but that's a different story), this causes the cookie to only be used in the current entry. I knew about the problem long ago, but I was too lazy to add six slashes to my cookie code. Six months ago no one commented on my entries. Now I get several comments a day, many from repeat posters. So I've fixed that. The Remember Me should now work.
Excerpt: Could someone tell me why height and width attributes are needed for images? It's silly to require people to add metadata to HTML when it's something easily calculated.
I went to the state fair site to look up the calendar and NOTHING came up, just a lavendar background. Because the Bee's Fair guide this year was not really a guide, just a few event highlights, I feel really, really helpless. Worse, I'm a fair volunteer and I've told people that for certain info, they could look it up on the website. WRONG!!
My husband and I own a state-of-the-art recording studio here in Sacramento. I could not believe it when I went to 'bigfun.org' web site!! It won't even come up in our computers. We use the best, Macintosh. What is wrong with our state?? Not only is the site run by amateurs, but our State is too! Shame on us!!! Come visit our site!
Any idea who designed the site? I cannot find any mention in the code or otherwise. I just love sites based on ASP..
thanks yo all. it's cool to come to ur site.
Stop hatin' brutha'!
This discussion has been closed.
Jesper
July 29, 2003 5:47 AM
Woah. Great stuff. The second point under Picking a Product didn't get transformed to a list point. No space between the * and the text, I guess. "*The form fields are too long."