Adaptive Path have joined 37 signals, NN/g and UIE in selling usability reports on their site. They have a free offering to whet your appetite, but the report on Presidential Campaign Sites may give the wrong impression of their pay-for reports. Their Registration and Login report comes in at a hefty $8.17 per page (6 pages at $49) which is the highest cost-per-page in the comparison table. The cheapest at $0.34 per page is Flash Usability from NN/g (188 pages at $64).
This comparison is not really fair as the Apaptive Path reports (badged as Simple Solutions) are actually fully realised design patterns that may be more cost effectibe than buying a set a set of scatter-shot guidelines.
The most popular report is E-commerce User Experience from NN/g (which also has the most pages).
UIE are the most generous with 4 free reports, 37 signals and Adaptive Path provide one free report, whilst NN/g provide no free reports.
The e-reports comparison on usabilityviews.com took about four hours to design, build and populate. I spent half an hour discussing my decision not to put bi-directional sort options on each column with Jason Hyland, who tried to persaude me that it should work like the columns in Microsoft Outlook. I prefer the simplicity of a single direction sort where the most expensive reports appear at the top. If I then want to see the cheapest reports then I can scroll to the bottom of the page and work my way up. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I am more interested in the popularity search showing the most popular items at the top.
I think that it is laziness when the designer gives the user all the possible sorting options rather than making the interface simpler. How many times have you clicked twice on the Date Modified column in Windows Explorer because it always defaults to oldest at the top rather than using the sort order that you last used for that column.
So this report comparison sorts in one direction only because I designed it to work that way. Not because I am lazy and not because I thinks it's great to overhwelm the user with pointless choices.
Recent Comments