On Sunday, I experienced the joys of Virgin Media’s website. Today, at work, I sat through a presentation of the results of a usability study on the product I work on. What surprised me were not the results of the study, but that our bad documentation and lack of usability seem to come as a shock to so many. Hopefully it will spur some improvement.

Finally, this evening Symantec Client Firewall popped up this handy dialogue

Symantec Usability Fail

The path is very often a field which proves useful; it tells you where the file resides. “setup.exe” is a bit non-specific, and that information would have helped me arrive at a decision. No scrollbars, and no resize conspire to make this a thoroughly useless window.

Virgin have an online add-to-your package facility. First you enter your postcode, and then choose your number from a list. Pretty simple from a usability perspective, you’d think?

Virgin Media usability fail

That took me far too long to find my number. I missed it on the first 2 scans through the list.