Is there a reason that helpdesk / docs subdomains rarely lead back to their main domain?

usability – Is there a reason that helpdesk / docs subdomains rarely lead back to their main domain?

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I noticed this all the time as a developer but it exists on user websites too on their helpdesks. You go to their help subdomain and when you try to click the header link it just takes you back to the homepage of the subdomain instead of the main site.

Here’s an example: https://developers.canny.io/install

On this page there is absolutely no way to get back to the main site without retyping the url. This seems like such an obvious UX failure and yet I see it absolutely everywhere.

Edit: Another example is stripe – https://stripe.com/docs – in this case their docs don’t even exist on a subdomain

asked Apr 15 at 9:10

Usually it is because the help or documentation is treated as a separate product because it does not follow the same information architecture than the home page.

In your example this is also made clear by changing the header link to CannyDocs instead of just Canny.

At a previous job we had the situation that the header link was the company logo and still people got mad when they clicked on it and landed on the company home page.

From a user journey pov it also makes sense because if you have already bought the product why would you want to go back to the marketing focused homepage of the company?

answered Apr 15 at 11:31

Nash

1,684

It’s usually because the main (marketing) site is build with different system than the documentation, and a real integration of those two systems and their web server’s and build and update scripts would be a lot harder than just treating those as separate systems. That’s why those are in separate domains too.

Another reason may be that splitting the site into separate topic domains/subsites simplifies the navigation for the tasks in that domain.

answered 6 hours ago

Not the answer you’re looking for? Browse other questions tagged usability or ask your own question.

usability – What’s the best way to present a feature as free, but only if requested

There’s this feature we have that some customers really want. And we’re going to be including it for free. However, from an economics perspective, there are a ton of savings to not having users use this feature.

What’s the best way to present a feature as included, but only if you request it. Here are some examples that I could come up with:

XYZ included when requested.
Free XYZ included upon request.

Are there other ways to make this sound better?

usability – When a client-side action needs to be validated from server-side, is it better to make the user wait or ‘undo’ the action if validation fails?

Interesting Question and Flow.
I am assuming I have understood your question correctly.

Let us check the flow in this case.
1 : User Does a change(on CMS in this example)
2 : The change is validated from server side on some conditions you need to have a check with.
3 : User should be given the +ve or -ve feedback based on validation.

It is a 3 step process happening.
Understand here the first step is action triggered by the user. In UX, the next step user is expecting is feedback for the action taken.
In this case User has made changes and he needs to be updated with what is happening after his action. So, till the validation is complete(depending on time taken for validation) do not make any drastic or significant changes to the UI. You could use some UI tricks like

Show a information message on the screen(that is feasible for your layout) as validation pending or In process.
May be changing the color of the moved item in the list that is being validated.

Use message language intuitively like “Hold on ! We are validating your changes” or “Sit back & Relax. We’ll let you know if the change can be made or any thing like this.

Better than spinner for sure coz spinner can be misunderstood as browser loading or error in network or any other system error.

Post validation. If it is successful. Display the message and mention the change along with it.
Else Show why the change was failed and say that change is not made and it is reverted to its original state.

This will leave no gap in the UX and User will not get frustrated to use your application further.

usability testing – AB test of image gallery on search results

Product description

Any kind of ecommerce site or marketplace where the primary user flow is:

A search page where the user searches / filters to find products that the user wants to buy with many product listings.
A product page that contains an image gallery and various calls to action to purchase or enquire.
A checkout or form funnel where the user converts.

Control Design

Currently the search page contains many product listings and each product has 1 image. The product page has an image gallery where users can view the rest of the product images.

Variation Design

Each product listing on the search page now has the ability to swipe or click through all the images of a product without going to the product page.

Question

I am preparing to A/B test this feature and I’m curious to see if anyone else has attempted something similar and what results you found? How did it effect your users behaviour? If you did any qualitative research how did your users feel vs the quant data you collected?

The reason I’m asking is that my gut feeling and hypothesis says that this feature overall will result in a better user experience (which we will test qualitatively later), however there is a good chance that the number of product pages a user views will decrease. I also think that it won’t effect conversions negatively, as users will find products they like sooner.

I will add that the site I’m working on is a vehicle marketplace where we’ve found that images are very important in the decision making process of the user.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

usability testing – How did providing an image gallery on search results effect your users behaviour?

Product description

Any kind of ecommerce site or marketplace where the primary user flow is:

A search page where the user searches / filters to find products that the user wants to buy with many product listings.
A product page that contains an image gallery and various calls to action to purchase or enquire.
A checkout or form funnel where the user converts.

Control Design

Currently the search page contains many product listings and each product has 1 image. The product page has an image gallery where users can view the rest of the product images.

Variation Design

Each product listing on the search page now has the ability to swipe or click through all the images of a product without going to the product page.

Question

I will add that the site I’m working on is a vehicle marketplace where we’ve found that images are very important in the decision making process of the user.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

usability – Let users choose a value’s unit next to the value input field

In our application users/developers are able to build their own web layouts via editor. Therefor, they need to define container sizes with either percentage (%) or pixels (px).
Currently, this choice can be made within the input field. I did not even know this until a co-worker told my about it – the placement of the unit choice within the input field was just not obvious to me and is difficult to learn for new users.

Current solution:

enter image description here

I came up with two alternative solutions:

(1) Choose the value’s unit via toggle switcher

(2) Choose the value’s unit via dropdown

enter image description here

One drawback I’m aware of is that the form starts to look more cluttered.

What are your experiences with use cases like this?
What are your thoughts about these alternatives?

usability testing – How do you prototype systems that are normally connected to Active Directory or other complex external systems?

I am working on a product that has a quite typical setup when it comes to enterprise software: it is usually connected to the Active Directory of the origanization and authenticates its users against it and fetches their group membership information from it. The permissions within the products are assigned to the groups that come from AD. For tiny installations and in test scenarios it is possible to add local users and groups but in production usage it is almost always integrated with Active Directory.

We are planning on making some pretty significant changes in how permission settings can be made and the mockups for the changes tested well when local users & groups were used. We would now like to see if the interface works well in a more realistic scenario when the product is connected to AD and we have thousands of users and groups.

I was wondering on whether you have any experience or insight on how to do users tests in such a situation. Creating and maintaining a fake, internet-facing AD installation seems to be an overkill for this purpose and also cause problems during the test as well as it’d be impossible to connect the real AD with the wireframe we want to test. Creating a mock AD user management interface would also take tons of time and would probably still be quite far from how that UI works normally.

Do you have any experience with this or more generally speaking on doing wireframe tests of systems that are normally connected to large, complex external systems in production?

surveys – Alternatives to System Usability Scale (SUS)

Regarding the question, “In particular…is there anything which produces somewhat similarly reliable results with fewer questions?”

You should take a look at the published research on the Usability Metric for User Experience, published by Finstad (2010). The UMUX has four items and has typically been found to have desirable psychometric properties and to have scores that correlate highly with the SUS and, in some studies, have also produced scores that track very closely with SUS scores in magnitude.

In 2013, Lewis, Utesch, and Maher took two of the UMUX items to produce the UMUX-LITE. According to the abstract of that CHI paper, “In this paper we present the UMUX-LITE, a two-item questionnaire based on the Usability Metric for User Experience (UMUX). The UMUX-LITE items are “This system’s capabilities meet my requirements” and “This system is easy to use.” Data from two independent surveys demonstrated adequate psychometric quality of the questionnaire. Estimates of reliability were .82 and .83 – excellent for a two-item instrument. Concurrent validity was also high, with significant correlation with the SUS (.81, .81) and with likelihood-to-recommend (LTR) scores (.74, .73). The scores were sensitive to respondents’ frequency-of-use. UMUX-LITE score means were slightly lower than those for the SUS, but easily adjusted using linear regression to match the SUS scores. Due to its parsimony (two items), reliability, validity, structural basis (usefulness and usability) and, after applying the corrective regression formula, its correspondence to SUS scores, the UMUX-LITE appears to be a promising alternative to the SUS when it is not desirable to use a 10-item instrument.”

There have been additional studies of the UMUX-LITE since then. Here is a list of papers to read on the topic:

Borsci, S., Federici, S., Bacci, S., Gnaldi, M., & Bartolucci, F. (2015). Assessing user satisfaction in the era of user experience: Comparison of the SUS, UMUX and UMUX-LITE as a function of product experience. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 31, 484-495.

Finstad, K. (2010). The usability metric for user experience. Interacting with Computers, 22, 323-327.

Finstad, K. (2013). Response to commentaries on “The Usability Metric for User Experience”. Interacting with Computers, 25, 327-330.

Lewis, J. R. (2013). Critical review of “The Usability Metric for User Experience”. Interacting with Computers, 25, 320-324.

Lewis, J. R., Utesch, B. S., & Maher, D. E. (2013). UMUX-LITE – When there’s no time for the SUS. In Proceedings of CHI 2013 (pp. 2099-2102). Paris, France: Association for Computing Machinery.

Lewis, J. R., Utesch, B. S., & Maher, D. E. (2015). Measuring perceived usability: The SUS, UMUX-LITE, and AltUsability. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 31, 496-505.

usability – What is the best heatmap tool for tracking multiplatform devices?

We’re looking for heatmap tool that provide analytics and can implemented in web, android, & iOS. Previously we used Smartlook for heatmap, but it doesn’t work properly in our website. The tool could be free or paid.

Could you please share what tool you use and try to present it’s strong and weak points?

usability – Full screen cookie banner on mobile, is it a bad or good approach?

I am developing a cookie banner for a company. The designer presented all the mockups, but I am not convinced whether it should be full-screen on mobile. The advantage is that the user might be seeing all the banner text at the same time, but you are forcing him to see that instead of the website he intended to visit. On the other hand, a half-width cookie banner is having the lorem ipsum text having to be scrolled down, which is also not optimal