http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/6171/2006-spring/rentacoder contains a usability analysis of www.rentacoder.com. The ideas were compiled from MIT student answers to a mid-term exam.
4 thoughts on “Usability Analysis of Rentacoder.com”
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Yet despite all the glaring problems with rent-a-coder’s usability, the site is a huge success. Score one for the Disconnect Between Usability and Success Crowd? 🙂
Just curious what level is the typical student in this course (freshman, sophomore …)?
The 6.171 crowd is mostly seniors majoring in CS at MIT.
I think there are three reasons for the disconnect between usability and success, as mentioned by Deangelo. The first is lack of something better, the second is foothold in the market and the third is that many people using rentacoder are probably geeks and are able to figure out – and put up with – the quirks more easily than the average 9-year old myspace user.
Even if you provide a competing product with better usability, it is hard to dislodge the dominant player, especially if you go it your own. This means that Yahoo! can set up a successfull online auction business to compete with eBay because they have so many users who visit their site already but are new to the whole auction idea. If I built a better eBay I wouldn’t stand a chance, why would anyone use me as the first user?
Still, it saddens me that usability on many web sites is so poor. What’s worse is that many sites with a poor UI design have a habit of throwing errors left, right an centre when using them. But then again, how on earth could you create a consistent, solid back-end code without a consistent user interface?