Match Wits With the Wit of Web Design Usability
and Develop Your Critical Eye With
Vincent Flanders' Two-Minute Offense
The
Two-Minute Offense is a concept featured in my new book, Son
of Web Pages That Suck. The goal is to help you develop an eye for design
by looking at and analyzing web pages quickly. This
link is if you want to skip the rest of the page and go to the "real"
explanation.
The Concept:
In American football when a trailing football team gets the ball with two minutes or less playing time, they need to score points quickly. There's no time to huddle; just execute a well-rehearsed series of plays. They need to score quickly. In usability, it's amazing how many glaring problems go unnoticed -- errors that can be discovered in two minutes or less. We're going to set the clock to two minutes and see how many mistakes we can find.
Why? Well, In the last six years I've discovered a lot of people "aren't getting it." If I had five dollars for every time I received e-mail like the following, I wouldn't have to write Son of Web Pages That Suck:
I've read your first book, "Web Pages That Suck," and I read your "Daily Sucker" column on WebPagesThatSuck.com every day. Here's the URL for my web site. Could you please tell me if it sucks?
The Two-Minute Offense is the first and only (until the concept is "borrowed") site where you are interactively forced to participate in the critique process. (Remember, the web is about interactivity.) The Two-Minute Offense is not intended to be an in-depth usability study. After all, we're only giving ourselves two minutes to look at a page. Obviously there are subtle usability issues that can't be detected in two minutes. The goal is to get you to look critically at other sites so that you can look critically at your own site. Try it out.
Reaction from a designer:
I think this is a helpful tool. It makes usability seem less intimidating and more instinctive. Lots of people are scared of it (usability), I think -- this exercise helped point out that fixing the big problems (the ones you see in the first 2 minutes) can go a long way. It's more interactive than the Daily Sucker and could be a helpful little exercise for professionals, to help get their brains moving in the morning and keep their skills sharp. And also remind them to consider the big picture as well as the tiny little details of usability.
Caveats:
- The site has been tested extensively on IE5+, NS4.x, and NS6 -- on Windows platforms. Opera 6 doesn't work. Sorry. It probably won't ever work.
- The Two-Minute Offense is set up for 1024 x 768-pixel screens. Sorry.
- Some types of sites will screw up the Two-Minute Offense. Culprits include programs that use Java and certain types of Javascript.
- If something breaks, let me know. Be specific. Don't say, "It broke." Tell me Browser/version, etc.
Copyright © 2003 Flanders Enterprises. All Rights Reserved
