usability

A prominent landmark: the Parkinson Building, Leeds University

Web site usability is an increasingly important field of study and this page can only scratch the surface. Basically, as use of the WWW and specific web sites becomes a more and more significant source of revenue for the corporate world, money has been found to study how it is that people actually like to use web sites. To put it in its simplest possible terms, how can web browsing be made as easy as possible? What page designs, web site structures and so on are more likely to make people stay on, and come back to, a particular site? Web sites, particularly very large ones, can be disorienting places in which it is easy to get lost. When we move into any kind of new environment, we usually try and orient ourselves by noting the location of prominent landmarks (I bet most of you learnt the location of the Parkinson Tower very early in your time at Leeds University) or places which are already familiar to us (railway stations, for instance). Online, it's similar. We like to know that we can easily get back to a site's home page, we don't want to hunt around for links, and so on. Working out the best ways to help visitors with this kind of thing is the subject matter of usability studies.

I will use this page to give some very general guidelines, but be aware of two things. First, that these are only guidelines, and not laws. A book I own called Used 3.0: The Internet Design Project contains a longish essay complaining that some usability guidelines are followed so slavishly that truly innovative web design is being crushed under their weight. I think that's a slight exaggeration, but it's a fair point nevertheless. A usable web site is one that's easy to use, whether it follows the recommendations or not. And on that topic...

...the only real way of finding out whether your web site is easy to use is to ask your users. If you ever get involved in any major web design project (say, something the size of this site), you could gather the opinions of users before, during and after the implementation of the site. Beforehand, you might ask friends or colleagues to try out a draft version of the site as a visitor would and tell you if there are any problems. (Earlier versions of this site were tested out by such a "proxy user" - a student who did not previously know about web design and followed the course materials as a student would. She got paid quite well for it too!) After implementation, you could solicit feedback from visitors by e-mail. More sophisticated techniques are also available, such as monitoring how visitors move around the site using other software, although you'll need specialist technical knowledge (or help) to do so.

The point I'm trying to make is that, in the end, it's your site. Each web site is different, therefore, the criteria by which its effectiveness can be judged are different. With those reservations in mind, however, here are some general guidelines for usability:

• most of all, be consistent with the layout of each page on your site. Don't have your main menu sometimes appearing on the left of the screen, sometimes on the right and sometimes not at all. People don't want to hunt around for "landmarks" on each new page they visit. Don't change styles from page to page either.
• a general recommendation is that menus should be placed on the left. There are other reasons for this - to do with the linearisation of tables (see the page on text-only browsers - but it has generally become the convention and is worth thinking about.
• keep a good contrast between your text and the background. Some people recommend that you only use black-on-white, but this is, again, rather too restrictive.
• don't underline text that is not a link
• don't force the user to scroll to see important information - remember, keep it all "above the fold"
• have a link back to the home page on every page of the site and remember the "three-click rule"
• DON'T OVERDO THE USE OF ITALIC, BOLD OR CAPITAL LETTERS - which reduce readability (as I hope you can see).

Some usability guidelines are, however, written only with the corporate web in mind, characterised as a viciously cut-throat place where you have about twenty seconds to convince a casual visitor that your site is the bee's knees otherwise they will go away again, never to return. That may indeed be true sometimes but in other cases you know more about your audience. This site is a good example as you guys are something of a "captive audience" and are far more likely to spend time exploring this pretty large and complex site, finding your own "landmarks" and preferred routes to bits of information. This is why I said that the best way to work out whether a site is usable is only by actually implementing it and then seeing what people think.

For more information on usability try the site http://www.usableweb.com/ which will open in the second browser window.

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