Blog articles about Usability
By Ruth Ellison, 27 October, 2008
I've been a bit behind in posting about the fantastic Web Directions South 08 conference, which was held in Sydney in September 2008. I first started attending the conference back in 2004 where I experienced a great sense of 'home' and community. This year, I was given the opportunity to present about something I'm very passionate about - accessibility and the user experience.
The basis of the presentation is how we can develop accessible web products by takinga holistic approach to web accessibility. This means moving beyond the principles of web standards, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines andother accessibility guideline and looking at differentways of incorporating accessibility into the design process to produceaccessible and useful user experiences. My three key themes for the presentation were:
- Consider accessibility and usability right from the start
- Involve users throughout the process
- Accessibility is more than checklists and standards - it's about the people
It's about achieving a better understanding of how people interact with your products in the context of their day to day environments, which can be done via a range of user research techniques and testing/evaluation techniques.
You can check out the full presentation below.
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Posted in Conferences, Design, Usability,
By Ricardo Escalon-Jimenez, 10 October, 2008
Trying to start a Web business with a team of strangers and include user-centred design over a single weekend is next to impossible. But, that is exactly what I had to do last weekend at the Melbourne Start Up Camp.
About Melbourne's Start Up Camp
Start Up Camp is an initiative by Bart and Kim, from TJoos.com, to get professionals from a variety of fields to work together to create a Web business in a weekend. This process includes press releases, a business plan and a working site, all in one weekend.
Different teams had different approaches to working together and as a team ours went through the ups and downs of team formation. For my team, it was like an episode of The Apprentice, you know, the loudest person wins the argument. The argument was so heated, that one of our team members had to be re-assigned to another team. However, we pulled through and created our business idea.
On this weekend, 3 businesses were created:
MarketBeagle, marketting for the massess. A Webside that helps small businesses understand their marketing efforts better.
www.MarketBeagle.com
An SMS meeting service. At the airport? If so let them know and they’ll hook you up with a bit of pluck to talk to a stranger.
www.ABitofPluck.com
Play indoor sports? Who are you playing next week? Are they any good? Find out at iSporster.com, your indoor story.
iSportster.com
Usability in the fast lane
I was involved with iSportster.com, and I was using user centred practices, combined with agile methodologies to deliver requirements for the programmers to start coding. The question that I had to answer quickly was:
What can I do in such a short time to deliver a user friendly solution?
My approach to this question was
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Work on a problem with a familiar domain
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Around 3 of the 6 members had played indoor sports before, and one was currently playing indoor sports. They served as domain experts throughout our requirements gathering stage.
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Model the user and their goals/tasks
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If the context of how the website will be used is not understood the team would have looked at it as a set of features, with information or data driving its design. Instead, we wrote brief personas and scenarios to understand how someone might use the site. These were then used to brainstorm the features to facilitate the scenario, effectively letting the user drive the design.
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Easy to implement visual design to leave time for usability improvements
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I designed some wireframes and produced some visual designs that were modelled on an existing CSS framework. This meant that I could easily train other people how to code for it and we could implement it in record time. This left some time in the end to tackle some of the usability problems that emerged through the evolution of the product.
What would you like to read next?
There is so much more I could write about the lessons that I learnt over the weekend. But, being a user experience sort of guy, I’ll leave the questions to you. Let me know what you are interested in by leaving a comment on this post. Some ideas include:
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What did developers and business people at Start Up Camp think usability was?
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How do user experience professionals define usability?
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How did the development of iSporter turn from user centred to data centred?
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Posted in Usability,
By Di Pierce, 2 September, 2008
Ruth Ellison & Adrian Newton presented to the Local Government WebNetwork Conference 2008 on the topic of improving service delivery via the implementation of usability in Government. This presentation highlights theimportance of usability and user-centred design and provides practicaltips for improving much more than just the look and feel of yourwebsite.
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Posted in Conferences, Design, Usability,
By Lisa McArley, 2 May, 2008
An incident in a car park this week got me thinking about the nature of
signs and the importance of placing them at the right point in the
journey. I'm not talking about labeling
here, the signs made perfect sense; the problem here was timing.
Signposts are there to ultimately get us to our destinations quickly,
safely and with the least amount of wrong turns or dead ends. Sometimes however signposts send us to the
wrong destination and, in this case, literally up against a brick wall. After parking in the underground car park, I
got out of the car and took several confident steps towards the large,
prominent sign saying "lifts". Then I
stopped. As I had got closer another
sign became visible that directed people to two different lifts, the public
lifts and the club lifts. I wanted the
public lifts so I followed the arrows, and that's when I hit the brick wall. Back I went to the first sign to check the
direction. No, I was definitely following
the signs...to a dead end. Looking up the
car ramp I could see the lifts within tantalizing reach but there were large
signs prohibiting pedestrians on the ramp.
In the other direction, I could see stairs, but they were going down and
I needed to go up. So there I was, seemingly
literally stuck between a rock and a hard place.
This experience got me thinking about the importance not just of proper sign
labeling, but of placement and destination. At what point in the site journey do we place
the sign to the next step we want users to take? When do we give them signs to other destinations? Through testing and working with users, I
have learned to place signs (such as registration calls-to-action or related
information details) at the point in the journey where users are most receptive
to them. Sometimes this might be at the
start, but sometimes it's after they've done a little bit of exploring on their
own and are ready to look for, or be prompted with, that next step. Take the example of someone arriving at a
product site and being forced to register before they can browse items or add
them to their basket (yes, this still happens).
Forcing people to register before they've decided its worth their while
will only drive users to other sites where shopping is easier. Sites should also allow users to choose
whether to register (because there's an advantage in doing so, like saving time
on repeat purchases) or to simply make the transaction (including bill payment)
without registering.
Likewise, hitting people with information about hotels when they've
arrived at the flight search page is a little premature but showing them that
information after they've booked a
flight is helpful because they're now ready to take the next step in their
travel arrangement process.
So, did I get out of the car park?
Yes, I took my chances with the vehicles and walked up the cars-only
ramp to the lifts. The door into the
lift foyer had no affordance, but that's a whole other issue, nor did it tell
me what floor I was on (a hazard for the return journey!) but I did manage to
eventually get myself onto the street above.
Moral of the story? Don't send
your users into brick walls. If the
directional sign to the lifts had been placed after I had proceeded down a
flight of stairs, I would have found them easily instead of being deterred too
soon and sent literally up against a brick wall. So think about when and where to give
directions. When will your users be
receptive to further information or calls-to-action? When is the right time to show them secondary
directions? What would be useful to know
now and to where would they like to go?
Remember, it's a lot easier to leave your site than to exit a car park,
so make sure you use signs well.
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Posted in Design, Usability,
By Amir Ansari, 8 January, 2008
How often have you burnt your hand trying to pick up a saucepan by the handle, or touching a hot plate at a restaurant? When it comes to the web, as technologies improve and more and more people (including my mum) start to use the web, people's expectations of website usability increase and comapnies need to respond to stay in the game. Yet, when it comes to consumer products, although technologies have also improved in the fields of metals, plastics etc, we still see so many products on the shelf which could easily have been tweaked to make them more user-friendly . In the example above, it would be simple to incorporate smart materials so that a handle of a saucepan changes colour to inform you that it's hot. Some saucepan manufacturers have incorporated technologies to display a red circle in the middle of the pan telling us it's at the optimum temperature for cooking, so why don't they do the same with their handles to tell us that's it's at the optimum level for... burning your hand!
Here are a few thoughts as to why the consumer product industry has been outstripped by the web industry in instilling usability:
- With millions of websites out there, the competition for people's attention is intense, placing greater pressure on companies to improve their web usability in order to attract and retain users against the competition;
- Specialised organisations and companies such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Stamford Interactive exist, defining clear standards for the internet and embodying them in user-friendly websites respectively;
- Users can easily provide feedback to companies and webmasters regarding issues they have with websites, either via a simple email to the webmaster or the completion of a feedback form.
The above three points are not reflected in the consumer goods and manufacturing industries. Although there are many saucepans out there and we have a choice, brand loyalty, country of manufacture, and pricing force us into that choice. Secondly , there are no organisations like W3C in manufacturing of consumer good, and although safety standards exist, they are not really linked in with the usability of the product. Finally, the mechanisms for providing feedback for physical products require far greater effort, and the fact that few of our own consumer products are manufactured in Austaralia users further discourages users to provide their constructive feedback to overseas companies.
Now, I'm not saying that the web has attained a universally high level of usability and we all know there are still countless poor websites out there. It just seems that although the web is still in its infancy, it is already leading the field in terms of both expectation and delivery of usability and user experience.
So what is the solution?
I think we, as consumers, could raise our expectations of manufacturers to provide us with sensible products and be actively engaged in providing feedback for the products we use day to day. We should also learn to be more discriminating about good design, ensuring companies that have put some brain power behind their good products are rewarded for their efforts. This way we can hopefully raise the bar for other manufacturers and over time, reap the benefits of a world full of good, usable products.
As they say, "It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease!"
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Posted in Design, Usability, Innovation,
By Susan Ingram, 11 October, 2007
With the implementation of a new or re-designed intranet, attention should always be paid to managing the introduction of the system across the organisation. Some organisations do not understand or value change management and expect employees to accept changes with a willing and altruistic attitude. However, most people dislike change. Even if the change involves something that is undisputedly better, change is still uncomfortable and often resisted.
Change management should be considered at the outset of all intranet design and development phases. Change management should be run concurrently to design and development rather than as an add-on obligation at the end of the phase, just prior to the change being released.
Change management
The change management and communications process can be broken into the following stages. Change is not always a linear process and it is possible to move back a stage at any time. Planning and knowledge of these stages should enable the intranet team to see what obstacles may be encountered and how to navigate through to a successful implementation.
The stages of change management are:
- Change awareness - intranet users are made aware of upcoming changes to the intranet.
- Change resistance - change is resisted by some and this change is anticipated by the intranet team. Resistance is discussed and issues resolved.
- Change acceptance - the change is accepted and managers and staff begin to work with the change.
Change awareness
Staff must be made aware of impending intranet changes and how the change will impact them individually and how it will impact the organisation. The more significant the change, the more important it will be to ensure that full awareness of this change is communicated. Top-level information architecture changes, search interface changes, visual design changes and homepage changes are considered more significant for intranet users than changes to low-level information architecture categories, content pages and "backend" changes.
Many organisations utilise email, the intranet or a newsletter to inform intranet users of an upcoming change. For significant changes and those changes which affect the way that people work, this will not be enough (introduction of collaboration work tools is an example of a change that will affect the way that people work). There must be a commitment within the organisation to ensuring that staff fully appreciate the nature of a change and that they then have opportunities to address the inevitable resistance and questioning that is likely to occur. Awareness campaigns can include not only email or intranet updates, but also information sessions, poster drops, and presentations at divisional staff meetings. User-centred design can be an early part of a change awareness campaign. User-centred activities involve staff by asking for their contribution in the analysis and design of an intranet feature or tool.
Change awareness will not only be important for intranet users, but also intranet content managers and authors. If changes are being made to the publishing workflow used to publish content on the intranet this will affect current intranet authors and content managers. This will change the way that content managers and content authors work and will, in some instances, result in current content managers no longer having content management permissions in the Content Management System (CMS). Change awareness with these individuals must be carried out to help the transition to change. This is could include learning sessions, guidelines and possibly even one-on-one discussions.
Change resistance
Resistance can happen when individuals and groups perceive that a change is a threat to them. Intranet teams should listen, empathise and respond openly and authentically to resistance. Strategies for managing resistance are:
- Involvement - one of the best methods for getting people to support the change is to get them involved. Again, user-centred activities can certainly help to make people to feel involved, heard and valued.
- Facilitation - a good approach to dealing with resistance is to openly engage with people who display resistance and help them achieve goals that also reach the goals of the changing intranet.
- Education - once people understand a rationale for the change, they may decide to support the change realising why the change is needed and what is needed of them.
- Negotiation - when a resisting person or group cannot easily be persuaded, then negotiating may be the best solution. Discuss what they are seeking and what they want and find out what they will never accept. Work out a mutually agreeable solution that works for them and for you.
Intranet teams should prepare themselves to recognise signs of resistance. Gossip, grumbling and complaints are early signs of resistance. Others include failure to co-operate at meetings, failure for people to follow through on tasks assigned to them, and open arguments and attack.
This stage can be lengthy, intense and exhaustive but if there isn't adequate consideration of the resistance issues raised and thought given to potential modifications to the proposed solution, it can forecast the failure of the ultimate implementation. Ignoring or failing to recognise any resistance may pose a risk for the success of the change. Resources and time must be allocated to address concerns and realistically look at some of the impacts and issues that may have been overlooked.
Change acceptance
With careful management, resistance will gradually dissipate and acceptance that the change is going to occur will increase. Some staff may still not like or agree with the change, but they accept that the change is going to happen. If the solution is strong and awareness and resistance are effectively managed, intranet users should come to accept the change.
Acceptance is typically visible by people taking ownership for both themselves and their responsibilities. They will appear increasingly happier and more content as they find their way forward using the new intranet. People may need support or training to help establish themselves permanently in their new position. Congratulate people and groups on getting through the change and celebrate the successful transition.
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Posted in Usability,
