My blogging last year was pretty pathetic, I'll admit. But with the new year come new promise(s).

My true purpose here is to quickly follow up on my earlier post on the significance of RI.gov . As I said then, high levels of usability come "baked into" the "ubiquitous platform" approach. This is one of many great advantages that this method of web and web services development. 

But...would it really? Happily, the answer is "yes", at least as far as my anecdotal evidence goes. 

I recently renewed by auto registration via the RI.gov web application. I won't go too deeply under the hood, but three key factors showed that usability was a key design criterion. 

(MORE AFTER THE JUMP)

First, I didn't know exactly where to go. After a few false starts, I decided to go to the RI.gov homepage where I saw this:

Note the way they promote this common task with a direct link from the homepage. A+

Second, the application itself follows one of the most important usability recommendation for multi-step processes of any kind: chart the user's progress. This clearly shows that I am in the first of seven stages of the process. Because I can see how far I have to go, I am far less likely to give up half-way. If you think this is important for a government web application, imagine how importantit is for an e-commerce website.

Finally - and this is just a small thing, but it means a lot - notice how the "State" field _IS NOT A DROP DOWN MENU_. Drop down menus generally represent a pro-developer / anti-user perspective. Drop downs make things easier for developers and harder for users. The drop down menu for state abbreviations is perhaps the most egregious example. 

I'm going to take a flyer here and suggest that virtually 100% of people who would fill out this kind of form know their state abbreviations. I'm out on a limb here, I know. Jokes aside, usability studies show that people's addresses and other key information becomes 'hard wired' into their muscle memory the point that filling out these forms is virtually autonomic. It's just so much easier to tab / type than to move your hands from the keyboard to work the mouse.

(Note: not all OS / browser combinations support "tabbing into drop downs". Also, a relatively small percentage of users know about those more advanced capabilities - most see the drop down and reach for the mouse.)

There it is: three ways that RI.gov loves users. And they're three good ones. 

If you want to learn more about how non-web-developer executives can make better websites through better usabiity, I'll be conduting a HiPPO training later in February. We'll post date and time on our events calendar soon.

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