I am utterly confused, it just doesn’t work.
Frustrated user
Does it sound familiar? It’s a human reaction when we encounter a system which is difficult to use or doesn’t work as we expected it to.
When usability touches a personal level the effect of a simple usability error feels like it has been multiplied tenfold. This post reminded me of one of the best usability books by Steve Krug “Don’t Make me think”. Usability is simple, it’s just common sense yet it’s also an incredible form of art.
I’ve spent more than 8 years working as an Information Architect, designing complex web-based software and many times I feel that I am still learning. Things that are obvious and logical from a technical point-of-view may be totally wrong from the novice users perspective.
We’ve just completely revamped our holiday planner application and one of our clients is currently running a beta test for the application. From a technical point-of-view the new holiday planner is much better than the old one. Some of the new features include an interactive holiday calendar, overview screen, automatic calculation, and a team/manager dashboard.
Apparently things are not going so well with our users. They don’t appreciate all of these wonderful features, what they care about is one thing and one thing only “Their holiday allowance”.
Here is a snapshot of the screen showing a user booking a half-day holiday.
Holiday request
Taking a closer look you might notice several things:
- The icon representative a half day holiday is correct, a half red square indicating that the user only booked a half day holiday.
- Duration is shown as 0.5 day, which is correct but in brackets (1 calendar day) which is causing major confusion.
- Users are very sensitive to their holiday allowance, when they book a half day they only want to see a half day, without any reference to calendar days.
Here are some reactions from the users:
- “Why is duration showing 1 day, I booked a half day only”
- “What is calendar day? How’s that different to a normal day?”
- “Does it mean if I took a half day off, the system took 1 day from my allocation?”
Again, from a technical point-of-view, the reason we display calendar day is simply to give useful information about the overall duration of a users holiday. For example you may have booked 2 half-day holidays, which means 1 day has been taken out from your holiday allocation. But you may want to know that you have booked 2 calendar days with each half-day holiday.
I can see this piece of information is actually quite useful but having to display both day types has caused major confusion to the user, after all, when a user books their holiday the only thing they care about is their holiday allowance.
I’m a little confused…
Even from a technical point of view, I still don’t understand why you would show “1 Calendar Day” when it’s actually “0.5 Calendar Days”?
If I am booking a half day holiday, I don’t want to see any suggestion that a full day might be taken from my quota. Everyone is protective of their precious holiday allowance, so even a hint that it might be calculating it incorrectly or deducting more than you’ve actually taken will contribute to a user losing confidence or mistrusting the application entirely.
This is obviously something we should be avoiding at all costs, in all of our applications.
I completely agree that showing “1 calendar day” when there is half of a day booked is wrong. The most recent code doesn’t display number of calendar days for single day and half day bookings.
So now the question is whether it’s useful and good for users to see
“1.5 days (3 calendar days)” when they book 3 half-day holidays. Or “10 days (14 calendar days)” when they book two-week holidays.
I think this highlights perfectly the need for Usability testing and client involvement all the way through the process. As you say Mike while we understand the technicalities, it’s all too easy to lose focus and overcomplicate a system by providing more information than an average user actually needs to see. Nick Petit discusses something similar to this in his UX: Fundamentals: Focus video (http://membership.thinkvitamin.com/library/ux/fundamentals/focus)
In the case above, we expect our users to learn two methods of tracking holidays. So taking Nick’s advice, if we focus on one style of day tracking won’t our users quickly adapt to whichever the prescribed method is?
Personally, I don’t find “Calendar Days” to be of any use when booking holiday. The only important thing for me is the number of work days that I am taking off (the number of days that will be deducted from my quota).
So in my opinion, we shouldn’t be displaying Calendar days at all.
Is there any reason why we are displaying Calendar days? Is this what is used in other countries?
I agree with Anthony in that users are only concerned with their personal quota. In the US, the majority of users would be concerned with hours, as allocations are based on hours, and users have the option to request vacation and sick leave by the hour. Showing a graphical representation is great in that users can see their request as a partial day, however, stating “1 calendar days” is counter intuitive and confusing at best. More concern should be placed in tracking allocation and providing segregation of allocated hours into types.
That’s great feedback Lou.
I wonder how many of our other clients would benefit from managing hours in leu. In the last 4 years, I’ve only ever heard one other client (UK based) request this, which I do find surprising.
Adding that capability to the application would undoubtedly strengthen it and give it more flexibility. My only concern at this time is how much re-factoring of the application we would have to do in order to achieve this additional functionality.
It’s certainly something that I will pass onto the development team for consideration.