lecture 6: ease of use

I tried on an earlier slide to suggest that "dis-ability" is not an either/or state. There is not one set of people who are "disabled" in every way, and another who are perfectly able to make their way through the world in whatever way they want. There are degrees of disability. In fact there are many ways in which people have less ability to use IT and the WWW than others which are nothing to do with "traditional" disability as is usually understood. People may simply lack confidence with IT, for example. This is why it is never a good idea to demand that people upgrade their browser or adjust their screen size to view your page. They may simply not know how to do so.

Navigating an unfamiliar environment... (Image from http://www.fictionalworlds.com/)

Web sites are also unfamiliar places. As a designer, you cannot assume that when people arrive at your site for the first time that they will know exactly where they are going. The reverse will in fact be true. Just as when you arrive in a new city, or step into a large office block, or enter any other kind of new environment for the first time, there is in fact no intrinsic way of knowing which is the right way to go. You may well feel like the figure in the image on the left: knowing he/she is close to the object of desire, but completely unaware of the best way to reach it. Labyrinths are, of course, designed to confuse and disorient visitors. But this is hardly a design model worth adapting for web sites or any other environment where ease of use is a factor in the success or failure of the design. When arriving at the aforementioned new city, or office block, or (more significant to you) university campus, the visitor looks for signs, landmarks, or anything else which allows them to orient themselves and then find the desired place within that environment. So it can be with the well-designed web site.

A lot of work has recently been done on how to make web sites a navigable, helpful environment for visitors. This is the field of usability. I have listed some general conclusions on the handout, as well as some good online resources. You might think, however, that they are somewhat mundane (especially bearing in mind the current prominence of usability amongst the web design community). This is partly because of one crucial factor with usability, however - that every site is written for a different purpose.

If you've followed my advice and really thought about why your site exists and whose needs it serves, you will have a good initial idea of the answers to questions such as: which parts of the site are most likely to be significant to users? Is there an order in which they should best visit the site? How can both page layout and site structure be exploited to direct users to those links, pieces of information, images etc. which they have come to find?

Note, however, that I deliberately stressed the word "initial" in that last sentence. The main way to improve the usability of your site is not just by following generic guidelines like those on the handout, but by asking your users. You can do this in advance, by recruiting people to test the site before release: even better, you should be constantly monitoring how your visitors feel about your site whether by soliciting feedback by e-mail or, possibly, through more sophisticated techniques such as log file analysis and visualisation. Those not already terrified by these long words could check out some books on the subject, for instance, Melody Ivory's work on automated web site evaluation.

You might think all this is far too involved for your little course work site of half a dozen web pages, though even here, it might (particularly if you are keen to get a good grade) be worth asking a couple of friends to try using the site before you submit it. Anyone writing a "serious" site, however, for any kind of business or other formal organisation, should take the issue of usability very seriously.