Usability is not what everyone else does

Posted on Thursday, April 17, 2008

The more sites I've tried in the past few years, the more I've noticed who cares about usability and who uses it in their marketing slogans. Some of the biggest players on the web define usability as doing what everyone else does. That is NOT usability.

I will pick on my own application to demonstrate:

Let's say you are creating an invoice for your customer in Meiraware Business. You fill out all of the relevant fields, then it's time to put in the invoice date.

Not bad! Pretty easy to use. Standard calendar picker....  can't get much better. This is what everyone does, so it's usable!

or so I thought....

Now lets looks at Remember The Milk's date picker for their calendar

(that right button is not a calendar control)

At first impression, I was thinking "No calendar? What kind of shit is that?" ... then I realized you can type damn near anything in this box. You could type Next Tuesday, May 15 (assumes this year), Tomorrow, Next Thursday. Take a look at a brief example from their site that you can type in this box:

That is attention to detail that ALL OF US could use more of. They took the concept of "choosing a date" and truly made it 'usable'.

In my opinion, there should be a calendar added to Remember The Milk's control, some people do prefer to choose from a calendar. But besides that, it's brilliant.

Jayme

(p.s. I'm sure there are other companies with methods such as these, this is just the first i've seen)

Comments

• Karthik on 4.17.2008 at 6:33 PM

• Thats awesome...beats having to select in a calendar any day. Keeps your hands on the keyboard :)

• Rich Mercer on 4.18.2008 at 11:56 AM

• Given they accept both 4/25/2007 & 25/4/2007, I wonder what would happen if you entered 6/8/2007? Is that June or August? :)

  Sometimes fuzzy date entry can bite you in the ass. ;)

• Joakim Westin on 5.13.2008 at 6:31 AM

• I agree that usability isn't what everyone else is doing.

  Related to your datepicker, take a look at the "fare calendar" on this page:

  ip.norwegian.no/.../FareCalendarExe

  Simple but very powerful. In each day of the month the simply show the lowest fair price.

  Makes it a breeze to choose dates for travel ;-)

  most other sites that I have tried for bookings makes you first pick a date on the calendar and then they show prices for that day..

  /j

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