Usability Feedback 1

Task 1

I want to find plastic surgery in Estonia and preferably in English language.

Step 1.1 – Dmoz homepage

http://www.dmoz.org/

1. Dots after a word actually means there are more actions to take. If you open Firefox File menu you will see three dots after Print… for example.
   • Suggestion: Three dots should be links separated by comma from the last word and linking to the same place as the heading.

1. World or Regional. Which one I should choose? Takes too much time in your head to understand.
   • Suggestion: The easiest fix would be renaming “World” to “Non-English sites” and give rest of the groups heading “English sites”.

See my suggested http://www.kristjankure.com/dmoz/home-after.gif

Step 1.2 - Subpage

http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/

1. Countries (0). Okay, there is 0 after countries, so probably means no links – so I shouldn’t click there? Okay, I will click and see what’s there. Surprise – all countries are listed. Maybe the number means there are no subcategories? But the next row Africa (15,670) has 15,670. Wrong assumption again. Inconsistency is not good.
   • Suggestion: I think it’s a quite big problem displaying 0 – you should find a constant meaning of 0 numbers. Also countries should be below the region section, because we are on the regional page.
2. A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M|N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|Y|Z] – now I understand that this is actually country list – but why is it on a separate row?
   • Suggestion: Please move this under countries.
3. See also section - actually I wouldn’t display any see also section, because you are not able to give enough relevancy with it.
   • Suggestion: I would remove – too much noise.
4. This category in other languages section – Ok I assume if I click on Estonian language the Regional list is translated? Wrong! I get 3 instead of 10. So what’s the point displaying it? I understand there might be editor involved who has not translated them. But I don’t understand why subcategories are not consistent through the directory. So I really don’t see the point in displaying it in other languages. People will find the links under their language anyway.
   • Suggestion: I would remove – you are not able to provide what you promise through these links.
5. Uncategorized links section– One thing that I could think about is tags. Currently it’s hard to separate the links based on topics. I would need to read through all the link descriptions to find a subject I could be interested in.
   • Suggestion: You could think about categorizing the links anyway somehow. I would remove – you are not able to provide enough relevancies through current structure.

See my suggested http://www.kristjank...ional-after.gif

Countries (0).
Sorry, I understand it still means no subcategories - it should say (no subcategories). Currently it leaves the impression 0 links instead.

It means that it's a link farm with no subcats or listings of its own.

As to your other suggestions, we're stuck with what we have for the time being. Only AOL staff have access to the code and the development resource they've allocated to DMOZ is minimal at best. Before we start fooling with the ergonomics (which could do with some improvements) most editors would prefer that the back end and search bugs are given priority. There is then a long queue of back end improvements that editors would like to see to improve their efficiency. Features such as tagging are probably some way away.