In Usability Little Things Make the Difference

I was shocked today when I clicked on a link titled Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer. I thought surely this is just a funny story on The Onion poking some fun at Windows Vista. Boy was I wrong the article tells the woes of Charles Walling trying to get his Dell printer to work with Windows Vista.

Mr. Walling bought a new Vista computer and tried to install his old Dell printer mistakenly using the Windows XP drivers. Doing this made it nearly impossible to remove the old XP drivers and impossible for the new Vista drivers to work for Mr. Walling. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer told of his plight in a January 30th article and the test manager for documents and printing at Microsoft contacted Mr. Walling and made multiple trips to his house to try and fix his computer.

While this was admittedly an edge case that hasn’t happened to many people where was the breakdown in usability? Windows Vista is a very different system from Windows XP. So when an installer tries to put multiple files into directories where it doesn’t have access in Vista when it would have that access in XP you could reasonably assume this installer was meant for the old system. How hard then would it be to let the user know that they probably need to find an updated driver. I think Vista can handle putting another dialog box in front of users.

Dell also could have done a few things to improve the problems Mr. Walling faced. Maybe clearly labeling the CD as an XP only CD could have helped. Providing a way to check for new driver updates before you install would be a nice touch too.

I’ve found through my years of building websites that usability is all about the little things. The things we don’t really pay attention to in the big picture. One poorly worded label can change a forms completion rate, or a poorly named navigation item could result in people not finding what they came for. It’s important to spend time on those little things, test them and get them right.