Penelope Rance

My UX research & design ramblings

The Issue With Overlaying Information

I recently went to visit a friend near where I grew up. As I drove round very familiar roads I saw a property up for sale and being a bit noisy made a note to have a look when I got home.

Once home I got my iPad out and pulled up the estate agents website. Not knowing the postcode I switched over to map view and that is when I started having problems.

Firstly I could not get rid of their cookie message which sat out of the way at the bottom of the page.

screenshot showing the cookie banner, chat icon and house information in map view
Too many layers

The X for closing the message sat perfectly underneath their chat icon meaning I had no option but to leave it open.

Not that big a deal, until I found the property that I wanted to look at on map view. At first when I clicked on the red pin I did not think anything had happened until I realised that there was a banner at the bottom of the page with more details. Except with the cookie banner sitting at the bottom of the page I could only see the very top of the property information and barely had room to click on it to bring up the details I was interested in.

Someone less used to websites might well have given up at this point, thinking nothing had happened.

Looking on mobile no chat icon comes up and the desktop version uses a different chat icon.

It is a very easy thing to overlook. Maybe there are several different teams working on this over a long period of time. One has created the maps functionality while another worked on the cookie message and yet another on the chat function. And of course once you have turned off the cookies message you probably will not see it again for a bit and I doubt very much that it would be included in any prototyping, but out in the real world, there it is, getting in the way.

Tablet is also a funny one for testing, but we should be able to test our designs in a responsive manner, meaning we should be able to see what will happen at many different screen sizes.

In this case the likelihood of me being able to afford anything in that area is rather slim, although fun to look at, but how much business might they be losing with this simple issue, that with a little bit of co-ordination and testing should not really be an issue at all?

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