8 Usability Lessons Learned from Members

Over the past few months, we've seen member activity grow from kart'n 100's of new favorites to 1,000's of new favorites each month.  We think the biggest driver of the increase in activity was changes made to website usability.  

Initial Design in September 2009                               ->          Current Design in January 2010             

Lessons we've learned: 

1. Menus should be short.  We noticed that in any menu, the first item got the most clicks. The second got some clicks. And then it was very few clicks.  So, we eliminated the long top menus that were in the initial designs.  It's also helpful to add dividers to menus, whether drop down arrows or just little boxes. 

2. Top navigation should be functional.  The initial designs were driven by left hand navigation, while the top of the page was more for browsing and utilities.  We found that members would go to other members pages, and then have no easy way to return home.  Top navigation gives people a persistent feeling that is comforting.

3. Text-only links should be blue.  I have no idea why I thought green and orange fonts could work for links, even if underlined. I'm embarassed. If you really want to use green, black, or orange text links, add some type of a button-like image next to the text or use some indicator to suggest the text is part of a menu.

4. Buttons should look clickable. This is a classic from Kruge.  I thought tear away paper pieces looked cool.  However, they didn't get used. So, buttons are here to stay!

5. Lots of cool graphics are overwhelming.  We continue to remove features, bold designs and busy graphics.  Perhaps the best example is the removal of the green "Most Watched" list that had lots of links and calls to action.  We replaced that with a simple box of 2 suggestions.  This dramatically increased exploration by members.  

6. Tiny font size is ok.  I've found that members are willing to read font as small as 10 pixels.  This enables including lots of whitespace around text while also including lots of content. It's great. Enjoy this fact!

7. Have an anchor call to action on all pages, for all states of the page.  There should be one clear thing members should do on a page, whether the member is new and has no favorites in their lists or if the member has over 100 favorites in their Karts.  We're still working on this throughout the site.

8. Eliminate lots of tiny buttons. In our initial designs, every Kart and every Favorite (a Kart is a list of Favorites) had 3 visible share buttons. It was just busy and distracting to have all those repeated items.  Members felt overwhelmed.

Notice how on Gmail every actionable item is either blue, a button, or has a graphic next to it. 
They also group links and buttons to make mini-menus. 

At KartMe, we're always listening to customers and trying to improve KartMe to meet their needs.  Though we read Steve Kruge's Don't Make Me Think! and worked with veteran user experience and graphic designers, it was members who helped us identify improvements to designs we needed to make.  

We do everything from A/B testing to using FeedbackArmy to on-premise usability tests.  If you ever have a suggestion, please email it to phil at kartme.com or contact us on twitter. 

Do you have a list of links, recipes or travel tips you'd like to share or use on-the-go?  Start a Kart!