Usability

Three Questions every webpage should answer, #1: What can I do here?

by David Lee King on August 22, 2011

Question #1Ever visited a webpage, then looked around, wondering “what can I do here?”

If you have … that web designer failed!

I think every webpage should answer the question “what can I do here?” either visually, or by spelling it out:

  • Visually: design in such a way that the stuff you can do on a page, like clicking a button, filling in a text box, or even just reading or watching content, is extremely noticeable. Amazon does this by using complimentary colors that “pop” out on the page. They often use blue as a header or sidebar color, but the buttons they really want you to see (ie, the “buy now” button) are orange – a complimentary color.
  • Spelling it out: Use words, colors, graphics, etc to “spell it out” for people – tell or show website visitors what to do on the page. For example, we try to do this at my library’s website. The main page directs people to “Get a Library Card,” “Donate Now,” “Find Stuff,” “Ask a Librarian,” or Subscribe to our blog posts. People know what to do on our site, because we direct them.

On your library’s website, do people know “What can I do here” when they visit the main page? How about the catalog page, the “you didn’t find anything” page, or on your blog? At the comment box? On your Facebook Page even?

Think about it … and make sure to answer the question “What can I do here?”

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Our Website Redesign is Live!

by David Lee King on March 2, 2011

My library – Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library – just released our redesigned website. Check it out!

Our new main page has three main sections that are easily seen in the graphic accompanying this post:

1. Featured Stuff. The top section is reserved for our featured stuff. We have one large featured area that can rotate with multiple . The goal there is to highlight on our 1-2 “Big, Important Things.” That could mean a library event, or it could be some new database we purchased.

There are also three smaller featured boxes that we’ll change up a bit more often. They’ll point to other cool stuff we’re doing.

And of course, the nav bar is in the top section. We went with a top horizonal nav bar this time around. It actually drops down and expands for more links (pretty much a copy of NPR‘s nav bar).

2. What’s Happening Now. The middle section highlights our content that changes often, namely our blog content and our programs. Most of this stuff, especially the blog posts, will disappear off the main page pretty fast, and that’s ok. it’s meant to hightlight “what’s happening now.”

3. Social Media. This is where we highlight our latest Twitter tweets, Youtube videos, flickr and Facebook Page.

Process:

This took us us a little over a year to complete – I started meeting with staff in February of 2010. I met with most of the library, and held some patron focus groups, too – then turned the notes from those meetings into a huge list of stuff we needed to change.

Then, we had quite a few decisions to make:

  • We had to decide how to handle content (more on that in a future post)
  • We needed to assign staff to content (still working on this one)
  • We needed to choose a CMS (we’re using WordPress this time around)
  • Visual design and navigation took awhile to get right, too

Our Creative Group (a team made up of our marketing department and our web developers) did most of this work … but the whole library helped in some way, too.

So yeah – it was a LOT of work … and it never really stops. We’re still cleaning stuff up, and will probably start tweaking pages in another week or so!

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Usability Goes Halfway

by David Lee King on August 5, 2009

me on the iphoneUsability is great – you want to have a website that’s usable, right? Lots of organizations do usability studies – even pay for them. But you know what? Usability only tells half the story. And that’s bad.

Here’s what I mean. Usability deals with traffic control – it answers things like “can they click it?” or “Do they understand the signage?” Usability tends to deal primarily with real estate – with structure (or with the “actual building”). But that’s only one part of the whole problem.

Even one of the fields that usability comes from is suspect – HCI, or Human Computer Interaction. What’s wrong here? The whole focus is on human to computer, or computer to human. I’m not always interacting with the machine anymore. When I blog, tweet, send a Facebook update … when I add a video to YouTube or a photo to Flickr … Yes, I’m interacting with “the machine” to get my stuff into my account, so it appears on the web. But I’m also interacting with the person at the other end – the viewer/reader/watcher/commenter. And to me, that interaction is the goal – not the computer interaction.

Let’s go a bit further with our websites. Start working on the whole experience – not just a tiny part of it. Think of it this way: do you want a website that is functional, or one that engages people? One that maybe even “delights?” That page is designed for the experience – not just for usability.

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Nielsen Doesn’t Get 2.0

by David Lee King on July 9, 2007

At least, as far as i can tell. His latest Alertbox article is a good example. The article discusses why one should “write articles, not blog postings.” His summary states: “To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.”

Then he goes into his usual charts and graphs that show that well-written, thorough content is much better than shallow, quickly-written content.

I have a question: how come a blog posting can’t be “thorough, value-added content?”

Neilsen seems to be confusing the content with the container. A blog is nothing more than an easy-to-use CMS (content management system) – the content can be shallow or thorough. It depends on the individual author.

For example, Neilsen’s Alertbox articles, which I usually find to be “thorough, value-added content” could easily be blog postings… all he has to do is offer an RSS feed and allow comments, really (yes, I know, he’d need to use some type of blogging software for it too be a REAL blog…). If he did that – added a way to subscribe to his articles via an RSS feed – would that suddenly turn his well-thought-out articles into “quickly written, shallow postings”?

I don’t think so. Do you?

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ALA2007: Ambient Findability: Librarians, Libraries, and the Internet of Things

by David Lee King on June 25, 2007

Peter Morville – very fun to hear! Good stuff, too.

Lead-off quote: Information that’s hard to find will remain information that’s hardly found.

organize websites so people can find what they’re looking for – that’s how he explains his job to his mom

provide multiple paths to the same information

What does usable mean? His honeycomb… :
useful, desirable, accessible, credible, findable, usable, valuable

You can do a “credibility audit” instead of a full-scale redesign…

desirability – takes us to brand and visual aspects

findable: ask 3 questions
1. can our users find our website
2. can our users find their way around our website
3. can our users find info on our site despite our website

perceived credibility – people trust nice-looking, well-designed sites

users tend to trust the first hits of google – think they’re the experts

Findability = credibility for people

cancer.gov… came up first with cancer – but not first with specific types of cancer

we’re designing the legacy systems of tomorrow

ambient findability: the ability to find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime

the degree to which a system or environment supports wayfinding, navigation, and retrieval…

a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention… (quote from Herbert Simon)

ambientdevices.com… designs stuff that changes when certain things happen… ex: ambient pen: changes color when user-defined associates voicemail the user… it’s an alternate interface to digital information

mentioned the iPhone… we have the promise of having the real web in our pockets

Cisco Wireless Location Appliance – using rfid, you can find things wirelessly – wheelchair example… you look at a map to find the exact location of a wheelchair instead of hunting them down.

Book: The Transparent Society, by David Brin: will technology force us to choose between privacy and freedom? Sounds cool

rumsfeld quote – very funny – unknown unknowns…

Morville wrote a response to the Everything is Miscellaneous book… check it out

He quoted the book – the old way was a tree, now we are raking leaves… Morville then said that’s a great way to describe it… because leaves rot, turn into soil, and helop grow new trees!

John Battelle: search has become the new interface of commerce.

said don’t focus completely on web 2.0 – most of the work being done today isn’t web 2.0… ?

He likes Endeca – it works the way users work – it provides lots of possible next steps for search

harder to do, but public search engines (clusty, google, flickr) are experimenting with faceted search ideas)

everyzing – takes video and podcasting audio and translates it to text for search

delicious library – tag your stuff?

book: Everyware, by adam greenfield

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Library Catalog Usability and a Test of CamStudio

by David Lee King on December 11, 2006

I am playing with CamStudio, and needed to create a short screencast, so…

At the same time, I was looking at Sirsi/Dynix Horizon sites, and found something slightly amusing (to me, anyway) and thought I’d share.

Click the image to the right to watch the video (here’s the .mov version too, if the m4v version doesn’t work for you).

Does anyone else find this amusing? Disconcerting? Can’t we work on making those “nothing found” messages in our ILS/OPAC/Library Catalog systems a bit better? Hmm?

I certainly HOPE so!

And in other news… CamStudio works great! It’s very easy to use. The only thing I had to change right off the bat was to change the audio recording format from an mp3 file to a PCM file (whatever that is). I wanted to edit the screencast with Quicktime Pro – and I was getting silence when playing the video with mp3 audio in Quicktime. Switching to PCM (which I think is an uncompressed audio format) fixed that little problem for me.

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Find the Title of this Page

by David Lee King on November 11, 2006

teen pageWhat’s the title of this page? Here are your options, by just taking a quick glance at the page:

  • Teens News (title tag, small type under large "start pages" text in orange box)
  • Start Pages (highlighted text in both orange areas, highlighted text in blue menu)
  • Teens’ News (highlighted text in left-hand menu and in larger orange box breadcrumb link)
  • Teens’ News Detail (phrase found by carrot – underneath orange box)
  • Teens Feature Highlights (text dropped in an outlined box)
  • Teen (largest text on page – but also most difficult to see)
  • audience_teens_features (from the URL)

I’m not picking on Seattle – just using them as an example (I’m sure I’ve made similar pages!). Good, simple IA practice would tell us that:

  • we need to pick one of these titles for the page, and name everything else the same
  • this page needs fewer words that look like titles
  • the page file name (audience_teens_features) needs to match the title of the page
  • The breadcrumb link (if you must include one) needs to match the name of the page
  • The title, breadcrumb link, page file name, etc should all match
  • Most importantly – anything in a larger font size looks like a title – you need to make sure it IS a title!
  • Also important – anything you highlight will look like a title – make it so

Now – take a peek at your own website – how does it fare compared to this example? What improvements can you make?

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Steve Krug’s New Book

by David Lee King on May 2, 2005

From the Boxes and Arrows blog:

They did an interview with Steve Krug, who wrote a most eye-opening book on web usability, Don’t Make Me Think…

“But in the meantime I’ve had a change of heart, and decided to do an updated edition of Don’t Make Me Think first, then write the how-to testing book. The second edition of Think is due out later this year.”

So, two books:
1. Updated version of Don’t Make Me Think – should be a good one to pick up
2. He’s planning to write a how-to book on low-cost/no-cost usability testing.

When they come out, READ BOTH OF THEM.

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Help in Question Writing for Usability Tests

by David Lee King on April 27, 2005

I just read this – DonnaM’s Writing memorable scenarios for usability testing. Good stuff!

To sum it up… when you do a usability test, you usually ask a bunch of scenario-type questions. Your test participant then tries to answer the question by finding an answer on your website. Easy enough, right?

The hard part is writing those questions! When doing a general test for the whole website, your questions have to cover lots of territory – you want at least one question for each “important thing” on your website, while at the same time realizing that no one’s going to sit through a grueling 200 question test (well, not unless you pay them actual money…)

And you want those questions to make sense to the participant. Librarian lingo should be removed (think monograph, reference, ILL, ILS, etc.), hints should be removed (no “go to this page, look in the upper left hand corner, and see if you can find such-and-such”), and
the question should be easy to read.

And DonnaM goes one more step – her post discusses giving the question a real-life scenario. That way, you make the question more vivid and emotional to the test participant. This helps the participant visualize the scenario, thus making it easier for the participant to remember. And ultimately helps the test participant add some realism to his/her answer (thus providing more useful information during the usability test).

Wow – lots to think about for those embarking on usability testing!

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Jakob Neilsen isn’t a web designer

by David Lee King on February 23, 2005

From someone’s comments on a previous post -

From Anonymous:
I have found Nielsen to be the most overrated web site design “guru” out there. I read his book “Designing Web Usability” and found it to be pretty far from what I would consider good advice for a web designer, at least in the library world. Maybe if you’re designing a site for the movie “Troy” or some other site for entertainment, Nielsen is the one to turn to. I’m not pointing to specifics, admittedly, but as everybody seems to fawn over Nielsen, I needed to stand up and say that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.

Actually, I’d call it a case of trying to stuff the emperor into farmer’s clothing. Annonymous doesn’t like Neilsen’s ideas – that’s fine. No problem there. But from the comment, I’m not sure this person understands what Neilsen does. Neilsen doesn’t do Web Design – he does Usability. I find the two concepts to be very different:

  • Web design – making a nice-looking website, involving graphics, colors, content, css and other standards, etc.
  • Web usability – making sure that people can use the website.

Neilsen really focuses on usability. Even in his articles about web design mistakes, he mainly discusses usability issues. Now obviously, a usable website will probably be a well-designed website. But from the above comments about Neilsen’s web design book, it seemed to me that the concept of web design vs. the concept of usability could get sorta mangled – because Neilsen usually doesn’t talk about CSS positioning, Flash-enabled layouts, or drop-down menus. Instead, he focuses on making what you have placed on your website into a very usable website – so website visitors can find information quickly and painlessly, and get on with their lives.

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