School - I026: XI - Bring one positive and one negative example of usability in web.

Bring one positive and one negative example of usability in web.

This lesson focused on people and computer communication, ergonomics and usability.

Jakob Nielsen mapped down definition of usability and it is defined by 5 components:
Learnability
Efficiency
Memorability
Errors
Satisfaction

I am anayzing the same component with two different newspaper webpages regarding to the Satisfaction component.

The BAD Example

Postimees Web - http://www.postimees.ee/

First if I open the webpage I get notifications about cookies. I guess it is standard nowadays. This is one time click on "I Understood" button. I instantly get 11 cookies in my browser, all are either to domain www.postimees.ee or .postimees.ee. First seven are not directly linked to host only, none of them are secure or they will not die when session is over. All cookies expire in a long time in the future, only one is set to expire today. Others are at least one year, until ten years. This makes me very sceptical and causios what they try to track from my browser activity and my movements. They should at least introduce session based cookies.

Webpage is sending constant ping requests to Amazon WebServices and chatbeat analyics service with different parameters which are somehow hashed. Ping is encrypted to 1x1 image. 43B. It is sent every 1.2 minutes. Seems like Chartbeat is using Amazon Elastic Search to store the metrics and then generates audience graphs over those parameters.

They also want to access https://secure.pmo.ee/api/me/ but it always keeps error if you are not logged in - 401(unauthorized).

If we move forward to the webpage itself it is full of ads. On the main page there are now 3 different ads:
 * On the background
 * On the footer
 * On the left side

Footer in the bottom is really annoying and constantly upgrading scroller div style.

I was assuming that when I login then those adds and trackers will be removed, but they still remain. I am expecting that when I pay some money to them then I will get ad free environment, but I only get some paid articles where I am not very sure about quality of the article.

Conclusion, only way how to use Postimees.ee satisfactory is to use adBlock and uBlock.

The Good (not perfect) Example

The Sun Web - https://www.thesun.co.uk/
Same story here, standard cookie policy check. 15 cookies in this webpage, where 5 are session only cookies, 4 are related to host only and rest are available for other sites as well. 3 cookies expire by session and rest of them are mostly with maximum age for 2 years.
Tracking parameters are being sent to www.parsely.com, in every 1 minute and 2 sekunds again 43KB as Postimees.ee. It is similar to Chartbeat, most likely same kind of functionality but different providers.

One resource is not found https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/simgad/6337765394029551775.

On the website layout, it is bit better, it only has one add on the top of the page, which is being tracked back to my location most likely by IP. This website has focused more on images than getting news name to catch the attention, but I already like it better than Postimees.ee due amount of "spam" it is displaying to me.

After I created an account and logged in, my user experience didn't change. Looked for a place to pay, but couldn't find one, so I guess that they are actually living from the ad's and it is not so abusing as Postimees.ee has, I even could live with that.



Do you know any online newspaper which is focused on news? I would be willing to subscribe if I get an ad free environment.