Note: I am sure that I am going to stir up a shit storm with this, but it is more of an observation and a bit of a question than a complaint.
Weightwatchers.com has a feature in their meal tracker that allows customers to track important metrics each day – things like taking a vitamin, drinking 8 glasses of water, and participating in a fitness activity. Many of these like the 8 glasses a day allow you to track multiple instances of the same item. What confuses me is that for some of these items, the requirements for nursing mothers (and in some circumstances for people over certain weights) are higher than those for than for the average Joe. In these cases, the developers include enough instances of the item in the interface to accommodate the high-end of the number.
Okay, I get it, it is better to serve the high-end than the low-end, since you can just leave some blank, but that requires that you read the instructions in the tool-tip (which usability studies will show you is an activity very few people undertake). I am also sure that Weight Watchers has a larger share of nursing mothers and people over specific weight thresholds than almost any other site on the web, but I would still have to believe that these are edge cases and arbitrary ones at best. What about diabetics and those with eating disorders, why not design to their needs as well.
It is clear that Weight Watchers has put a lot of time and thought into their site design and functionality (and it has certainly come along way in the last few years), but it is usability oversights like this drive me absolutely batty. They collect a significant amount of information when customers register. Why not leverage that to customize their interaction with the site? It would be clear from a quick glance at my info that I meet neither criteria for the expanded quantities and they could simply be hidden on my screen.
Maybe I am just overly sensitive to this stuff. What is the best practice in cases such as this?
- Go whole hog and leverage existing user data to customize for all cases.
- Extend your functionality to cover a handful of minorities, but for the most part rely on a catch-all technique.
- Go for the lowest common denominator.
I don’t really know which is right, but I am pretty sure that landing in the middle is not the answer.
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