Usability
Hospitality: beyond SEO, beyond usability
For too long, webmasters have thought of search engine optimization as if it were nothing more than a form of advertising, and usability as if it were nothing more than accessibility. SEO became a set of clever techniques to get visitors to your site, and usability became a set of rules that might be reluctantly followed.
Now things are changing. The old SEO techniques aren’t working as well or as long. To get high rankings for many competitive keywords, the most important “technique” seems to be, “Have pages that people want to link to.” As far as usability, it turns out that pages that are hard for the disabled to use are probably hard for everybody else to use. Not only are they not accessible, they’re not very usable.
These problems with websites – people can’t find us, people can’t use us – can easily get masked. Most webmasters reason to themselves, “We have visitors, we must be doing something right.” But it’s difficult to know how many more visitors you would have had – how much longer they would have stayed, and how much more they would have recommended your site to others – if you had done things differently. If your site pleases you and your boss, you may hear no complaints. But your potential visitors are not you or your boss. They haven’t even visited yet. You may not know much about your potential visitors at all.
Both findability and usability have a bad name in some circles. People see web pages where the keywords limit the writers, and where usability rules limit the designers. We need to go beyond that. Content that isn’t interesting or natural, or design that isn’t attractive or even bearable – that’s not usable. That’s not optimized. Not if visitors can’t stand to use it. As Stephen P. Anderson notes, researchers have found that attractive things work better.
Instead of findability or usability, let’s try another word – hospitality. Our visitors are truly our guests. Our websites need to say, “Howdy! Glad you’re here. Can I get you anything? Are you finding everything you need?”
Budget Usability Testing
Is web usability testing possible for less than $50, in less than 2 hours a week? That’s what Chas Grundy of the University of Notre Dame said in his eduweb conference session. So while John and Erick are at HighEdWeb, I’ll finish up with my own conference notes.
Usability testing can be as simple as sitting 3-5 users down in front of your website, and watching what they do. With screen capture software and/or a webcam, you can even record them.
Chas offered several suggestions and encouragements on web usability testing.
- Focus on the big issues. Begin today.
- Decide what to learn, how to learn, who from, when to test. Most users are similar. If high school students can’t find your “Contact Us” button, neither can rich elderly potential donors.
- Explain to the users that there are no right/wrong answers. In fact, they’re not being tested at all – the web developers are.
- Test early, test often. Don’t wait until the site is set in stone.
- You can test using paper prototypes and mockups, even before your site is finished.
- Test competitors’ websites too, to see if alternatives work better than what you’re doing.
- When you test, give users tasks. Don’t leave it open-ended.
- Encourage your users talk out loud over the tasks, but don’t offer any direction yourself.
- If you ask about something, people will create opinions where they had none before.
- What web users say is not always what they do. Ignore speculation.
- Fix the obvious, do special testing on the hard parts, then retest.
- Design once, increment forever.
- Remember: everything we do could be wrong. We don’t know until we’ve tested it.
Chas suggested several usability testing software tools…
- Camtasia – currently available for $10 for the A&M community from https://software.tamu.edu/
- Silverback – another screen capture option
- Jing Pro – creates videos, including screen captures
- Optimal Sort – free online card sorting for usability/information architecture
…and several websites on usability and usability testing:
- sensible.com – The online home of Web usability consultant Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think.
- useit.com – For usability research, many turn to Dr. Jakob Nielsen’s website. For graphic design beauty, they usually look elsewhere.
- usability.gov – A one-stop source from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services on how to make websites more usable, useful, and accessible.
eduWEB: Higher Style for Higher Education Websites
Design and usability: that was the focus of the eduWeb conference session led by Stewart Foss, a former college webmaster and founder of edustyle, a showcase for the best higher education web designs.
Here are some of the thoughts I came away with: › Continue reading
Skeptical visitors to your website
The search for information scent doesn’t end when a visitor clicks on the search result and lands on your website. Next, visitors look for answers to two questions: Do I really want to be on this site? If so, which part of this site can help me the most? They’ve come, but they need to be convinced to stay.
In her article “Top Three Basics Many Websites Miss,” › Continue reading