Archive for the 'Usability' Category

There seems to be a great riff these days between design and analysis. Usually the argument from the aestheticians seems to be self-preserving rather than logical. In many ill-conceived articles and posts, these authors even go so far as to question the scientific method and the unequivocally powerful field of statistical inference. To me, these arguments are plain provincial. On the other hand, the analytically inclined camp also fails to appreciate the potential and relevance of informed graphic design.

Most websites are meant to create revenue for the owner, whether directly through sales or indirectly through product promotion and brand building. It is difficult to find a web site that does not derive some kind of financial benefit for the owner. (There are of course some, but small by proportion.)

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Computerworld.com published an article yesterday about the coming and recent changes in graphical user interfaces by Robert Mitchell. The article highlights advancements which are meant to simplify the user experience based on context, whether it be technological (device used) or operational (item selected). Such advancements include voice commands for mobile devices such as PDA’s, customized layouts for different screen sizes, and menus which change based on the item being edited. The latter, most notably comes from Microsoft’s own Office applications which are renown for their feature-richness and consequently overloaded menu items. As Mitchell reports, the traditional drop-down menus will be replaced by a contextual ribbon bar in Office 2007. Therefore, if you are editting the table of contents, the menu associated with this feature would appear. This echoes the manner in which the traditional ‘picture toolbar’ now appears when editting an image.

Beyond contextual menu items, the GUI will also begin to account for screen resolutions in an even more substantial way than we are currently familiar. For the web, the need to adjust layouts to match screen resolutions has been a fundamental principle which has been tackled with elastic and fluid layouts. The desktop GUI is now set to take this principle yet another step forward to accommodate even more real estate; Mitchell states:

Tomorrow’s GUIs will adapt to bigger screens and multiple displays by rearranging the desktop and relegating different content to primary and secondary displays. Larger display acreage could also push gesture-based input devices such as touch screens, digitizing pads and the stylus into the mainstream.

Although the idea is a simple one: to adjust to a user’s perspective and technology, with the variety of devices and plethora of features in modern-day applications, this small target is an ever-changing one. Mitchell’s article presents great promise for enhanced usability for our most pervasive devices as our GUIs begin to catch up with other advancements in the field.

Last Thursday, September 7th, a federal judge ruled that a class action lawsuit brought on by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corporation could commence. (Additional coverage available here and here.) The lawsuit alleges that Target’s web site is inaccessible to people with impaired vision. Although the lawyers for Target tried to get the case dismissed arguing that the Americans with Disabilities Act and state laws do not apply to its web site, the judge ruled that the laws protecting disabled persons not only apply to Target’s web site but also to all other services offered by the company.

This ruling is a clear wake-up call for all web and mobile-based services regardless of the outcome of the trial—just going to trial is a huge cost. New web design and development must take accessibility into account, and existing services should perform audits to identify and correct accessibility issues. The case against Target Corporation is not an isolated incident; it is just the tip of the iceberg of a larger industry-wide problem. (Similar lawsuits over web accessibility for the blind were filed against Southwest and American Airlines in 2002.) Undoubtedly, the company was the target (no pun intended) of this disability lawsuit due to its size and high profile, but this certainly does not rule out smaller internet and mobile-based services. Just as accessibility laws apply equally to large corporations and your local, tiny, family-owned restaurant, so too the Americans with Disabilities Act and other state, local, and federal disability laws apply to web properties of all sizes.

Alright, but where to start?

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Much has been written about the correct placement and style for effectively integrating search on a site, yet a fundamental issue with such search remains: the results are too broad and are difficult to sift through. Alleviating this problem is a simple case of letting the user put their search query into context. That is, if we provide a mechanism for letting the user search within specific categories, the probability of that user finding information pertaining to their interests is greatly increased. This mechanism is what I refer to as “categorical search.”

Categorical search is by no means a new idea; in fact, it has been around for hundreds of years. Can you imagine searching for a book in a library or a video in a video store without genres? What if you had to search through an Atlas for a city without being able to choose the country first? How useful would the yellow pages be if business types were not grouped together?

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Often clients ask us about putting links to external sites on their pages. This is an important question that should be given a lot of consideration since a lot of money can be made or lost depending on the decision. This article seeks to help you understand how to figure out whether putting links on your pages will be a net benefit or loss.

Every link – whether a text link, image link, or banner advertisement – is a doorway. As such, every link leading away from your pages is a potential to lose users. Losing users is losing money. However, there are certain benefits to putting links to external web sites on your own pages. If there were no benefits to doing so, no web site would have external links and the World Wide Web would not be a web but rather a collection of unconnected nodes.

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Information architectures and accompanying sitemaps often illustrate page relations with single channels linking them. These architectures are sub-optimal because they do not take advantage of the principle of multiple varied access points to key destinations which can increase the traffic flow to said goals.

Providing multiple and varied pathways to key destinations is a fundamental tenant of both urban planning and building architecture, and thinking of its application in those fields can shed light on this principle’s vast potential in website architecture.

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