Categories: Software Part 1: Making Software Easier Through Usability Testing Part 3: Talkback: Tell us about usability gaffes you've found Related Stories: 1999 Software Sneak Preview Next: Paralyzing dialog boxes

Continued from Programs that take over the foreground

This is too broad a category to deal with in detail, so we'll simply look at the way a specific interface is handled in three similar programs. Microsoft Outlook 98, Eudora Pro Email 4.0, and Calypso E-mail 2.4 are all e-mail packages that feature a three-pane window. By default, the folder list appears down the left side, the basic message headers appear in the top-right pane, and the message itself displays in the preview pane at bottom right (see Figure 3 below).

All three programs present a simple usability difficulty that relates to the preview pane. When you click on a header in the message pane, several lines of the message appear in the preview pane. To see the remaining lines, you must either use the preview pane's vertical scroll bar or click in the preview pane and use the Arrow, PgUp, and PgDn keys. All this is fine. The difficulty is that the method of deleting a message changes depending on whether the message pane or the preview pane is currently active.

Figure 3: Eudora Pro's three-pane view, with the message pane at top right and preview pane at bottom right.

When you click on a header in the message pane in any of the three programs, the message pane becomes active, and you can press the Delete key to delete the message. But the Delete key functions differently, or not at all, if the preview pane is active. In all three programs, if you click in the body of the preview pane, Delete will no longer do anything. In Outlook 98, the Delete key will still delete the current message as long as you scroll with the preview pane's vertical scroll bar but not if you click inside the body. In Outlook 98 and Eudora Pro, Ctrl-D deletes the message in such a case, although in Calypso you simply can't delete the message from within the preview pane. The purpose of these examples isn't to declare one package more usable than another in this regard, but to suggest that all have usability problems here. Deleting a message should be simple and consistent across the two panes.

Another usability point creeps in here in Eudora Pro. If you select a header in the message pane, the program will automatically make the preview pane active and route subsequent keystrokes to it. In one way this makes sense, because presumably you want to read the message all the way through, and you might need to scroll down to do so. But this technique is clumsy because it eliminates the ability to use the arrow keys to scroll through the list of message headers, something that eases the use of a folder with many messages.

As in all usability cases discussed here, these are problems that aren't devastating. You can find ways to work with them, and after a while you simply adjust. But the question for usability testers is how effective, efficient, and easy to use a feature is; the action of the Delete key and the active status of panes affect daily use of the package. Many other usability issues become apparent as you work through all three packages, but this little one demonstrates how a small thing can affect usability significantly.

Next: Paralyzing dialog boxes

Published as Tutor in the 10/20/98 issue of PC Magazine.