Usability Assignment: ARTstor (Bad Design)
I was recently introduced to ARTstor in my Visual Resources Class. ARTstor is a subscription database of digital images pertaining to art, architecture, photography, and other humanities subjects. The two main features that make it difficult to use are the search function and the collaborative sharing/image management tools, which are available to registered users.
The ARTstor interface is not intuitive. Even for a website the caters to an academic audience, it contains a lot of jargon and interface-specific terms that the user must learn to distinguish between in order to use the system. For example, “Collections,” “Image Groups” and “Folders” sound like they could refer to the same or similar things, but on ARTstor the terms refer to specific tools and are not interchangeable. To help the user learn the language of ARTstor, they have an entire wiki just for help topics and instructions.
The advanced search menu on ARTstor.
The advanced search tool has a poor conceptual model: it does not act the way user would expect. To search by a keyword, the user has three options: “in any field,” “in Title only” or “in Creator only.” The options are confusing–does this imply that the only fields available to search are Title and Creator? What are the other fields, and why can’t we limit the search to them? There is a filter to search by geography, however it seems to only search by modern geography. This is not helpful if the user expects to be able to search by nationality, culture, or ancient locations (e.g. Sumeria), which are common categories in art history. Furthermore, if we find the image results we want, it is unclear how the search function retrieved them because the search fields are poorly mapped onto the image caption information. “Geography” isn’t included in the image captions of the digital images: sometimes the field is Culture, sometimes it’s Location, sometimes no geographic or location information is given–so what is “geography” searching on? It is not clear to the user if it was a coincidence or if the search performed correctly. If a given search returns more than 1,000 results, the results simply cut off after the 1,000th item. Yet the interface does not give the user any warning or explanation of this: I only know that the results stop after 1,000 because someone told me. There is also no way to determine how many more results there are after the 1,000th image or how to retrieve them. The search tool demonstrates the problem of a wide gulf of evaluation. It is difficult for the user to understand how to best set up a search to retrieve the desired results, and then difficult to determine how the search tool came up with the subsequent results.
Clicking on the image caption brings up a window for additional image information and adding notes.
Working with the digital images is also difficult because the constraints on the digital image interface are confusing. Certain actions produce specific results, but they are very similar to each other and it is easy to confuse these distinct choices. Clicking on an image thumbnail once selects it, double-clicking it opens an Image Viewer in a pop-up window, and clicking on the image caption opens a dialog window to view the caption and add notes. Why does a single click do two different things depending on what part of the digital image you click? It is also easy to accidentally click the wrong part of the image by mistake. The first time I opened up the caption/add notes feature was by accident–I only clicked once so thought I was just selecting an image. I didn’t understand why it gave me a different result.
To share image groups, there is a wide gulf of execution as it is not readily apparent how to perform this task. The user has a few ways to share image groups: exporting to a zip file, exporting to a powerpoint, or allowing other ARTstor users to view, comment and manipulate them. Although these seem to belong in the same broad category of “sharing,” they are split into two different menus. Exporting images is categorized under the Tools menu, but not under the Share menu, which seems like a more appropriate place to put export options. The visibility is poor, because the location of these tools is not obvious and the user has to search multiple places to find the tool she needs. To share an image group with other ARTstor users, the user cannot simply send the selected group. He must first create a folder (which takes multiple steps) and move the image group into it (several additional steps). In ARTstor, an “image group” and a “folder” are two distinct tools with different properties and functions, but because the terms are so similar, it is unclear which is to be used for which purpose. I still don’t entirely understand the difference.
The ARTstor mechanism for providing feedback is almost wearisome. Instead of clueing the user about changes or tasks to perform, the interface has written instructions pop up. For example, if the user adds a note to an image and clicks save, a line of text appears that states “Your notes have been saved.” If the user clicked save but hadn’t actually made any changes, the text reads “No changes were made to your notes.” So, while the feedback is explicit it is annoying and inelegant. Many interfaces indicate unsaved changes by using icons or symbols like an asterisk, whereas text instructions make the user pause to read instead of wordlessly and simply communicating what needs to be done.
While the content and mission of ARTstor is great, the interface to use it is clunky and poorly designed. It forces the user to learn a complicated interface that is overburdened with terms and interactions specific only to ARTstor, and provides little intuitive understanding of how its search and tools work.
NB: This was originally posted to Norman Doors, a blog for my usability class. The post can be found here: http://normandoors.wordpress.com/2014/02/06/artstor-bad-design/