Ask Eric: Questions & Answers

December 28, 2001 – submitted by Sara Douglas of Novato, CA

Question: Eric, what does the term "glosses" mean? You refer to it in your recent newsletter under the Web Site Design Issues Do's and Don'ts item #27.

Eric's response: "Glosses" refers to a mechanism like tool tips for hypertext links. You hold your mouse over the link and text appears that further defines the link. In some instances actual text from the linked page appear. This helps users decide if they should chose the link. This is good. The main problem as I see it is that users do not currently expect this behavior. So until it is established as a convention I don't think it will be terribly effective.

November 19, 2001 – submitted by Chris Uttley of Toronto, ON

Question:We build Gui software for advertising order taking. Many of our users are keyboard power-users, with no interest in using a mouse. On some of our windows, we want to provide the user with the ability to jump right into a field using a keyboard combination, rather than tabbing through a large number of fields.

I've been looking around but I have been unable to find what this type of function is called and I can't find what standards should be followed. Do we use Alt or Ctrl as the base key? Is it OK for Alt-S to mean Save and Ctrl-S to mean "jump to price"? etc.

All help appreciated!

Eric's response: First a caution. I have often seen the addition of these shortcuts as compensation for lack of work on screen layout. Your FIRST attack on this issue is layout of fields in the order in which they will actually be used.

These types of combination keys are called accelerators, shortcut, or access keys. Unfortunately, there is a remarkable lack of standardization in the way they are actually used. For your purpose you can use accelerators that either go to the first object in a group box, or to specific fields. This is done by underlining the target character on the label, or if you run out of letters you can append the character (e.g., Finance(Q) with the "Q" underlined ). It is really good if you can keep consistency with accelerator selection rules and with the decision whether to use Alt or Control keys. However, with your expert user population this may be secondary to ensuring efficiency.

August 16, 2001 – submitted by Cindy Huntley of El Dorado Hills, California

Question: What is the "norm" for the number of days a user should be required to change their password? Our web app currently requires our users to change theirs every 30 days, but we're hearing that's "too often." They would prefer 6 months. Is that acceptable?

Eric's response: The practice of forced password changes is NOT commonly required at all on net sites. Even financial and banking sites generally do not require regular changes. The more often the changes are required the more load you put on the user. The more load put on the user, the more users will go somewhere else. In fact my local bank requires a changed password every 6 weeks and as a result I do not use it at all.

When thinking of security ask yourself what would be reasonable if it was NOT online. I have seen onerous double login procedures protecting data that could be obtained by walking in and asking (if wearing a nice suit). Security is critical, but needs to be reasonable. Why not let your customers change their passwords when THEY want?

August 8, 2001 – submitted by Chris Fortuin of the Netherlands

Question: Thanks for the useful newsletter. Concerning user interface design I have a practical problem which comes around each time in design teams when developing so-called workflow/document managed information systems. The situation is that end-users need to view a (scanned) document and use structured data the same time. How could a user interface design effectively and efficiently support this situation? Do you have a suggestion how to further analyze and solve this problem!?

Eric's response: It depends upon the task. In transcription, we have been able to present snippets of the scanned document next to the corresponding entry fields. So the scanned name appears above the field where the name is typed.

If you are working with full documents there are only two solutions. You can use the windowing operating system to allow positioning of windows (of course this costs time in window thrashing). Alternatively, you can provide a structured switch so the user can hit one key and switch between the documents.

Remember that the idea of "concurrently" viewing documents is a fiction. The human eye does NOT see both documents at once (we actually only see detail in about a 2 degree arc). So the question is how easy is it to switch between documents. Just moving your eyes is fastest. But a quick display change is not too bad.

April 9, 2001 – submitted by Christine Hubble of Toronto, Canada

Question: Cascading Menus (menus that expand when you mouse over them, e.g. bedbathandbeyond.com) seem to be a good idea from a usability standpoint (to reduce # of clicks), and yet are not commonly used (at least on e-commerce sites). Why are they not commonly used? I've heard that there are some technical drawbacks to their use. What are those drawbacks?

Eric's response: Cascading menus are poor from a usability viewpoint, because they hide too much. Less-experienced users may not even find these menus, since there is not a single strong cue that a dropdown menu exists. Even when users find cascading menus, we often see them losing time having to "pulldown surf" through the menus. Users have to drop down each menu searching for a link they want. Even for expert users it takes two (or more) clicks to get anywhere.

A hierarchical (Yahoo-Style) menu is far more efficient ergonomically.

As for pulldown menus, their advantage is precisely that they hide things, so that they let you fit a lot of functions into a small space. So use them for sites that will be used regularly (so users know they are there and know which item to look in) and that have too many functions to fit on the page.

March 22, 2001 – submitted by Eileen Chong of Canada

Question: What do you think of pop-up information boxes?

Eric's response: It depends on whether you're working in a GUI environment, where pop-ups can be valuable, or in a Web environment, where they rarely make sense.

In a GUI environment (Windows™, not in a browser) designers can keep good control of pop-ups. For example, they can make the pop-up support a modal taskflow, so that the user cannot do anything else until the task is completed. Or they can make the pop-up a reference tool by setting it to stay on top. But beware. Many times I see designs where the user ends up with a whole series of pop-ups on a page. It would have been better to let the user navigate to a second page full of material. I understand the advantages of keeping the user in the context of the primary page, but it isn't good to give the user the extra work of opening and closing all those pop ups.

In the browser environment, on the other hand, pop-ups are usually a bad idea. You have very little control over them, and there is a real danger that the popup will drop behind the browser and be lost. Also, many users have built up a reflex to cancel any small window opening, under the assumption that it is one of those pesky interstitial ads. Therefore you need to have a really good reason to use a pop-up.

An example of where it is probably justified is with financial sites, where normally people key a ticker. If they do not know about keying tickers, you can select a link that provides a pop-up that finds the ticker symbol. They will not have to leave the research page for this minor lookup.