USEworthy April 2003
The monthly Newsletter from The Usability Company

Welcome to April's edition of USEworthy. In this issue, we present the results of The Usability Company's report on the usability issues encountered by over 50's or "Silver Surfers" on financial sites. The report was carried out in February 2003 to determine whether this often ignored part of the online community had any specific problems finding suitable products in the financial services market.

We present Marty Carroll, Director of Usability's opinion piece on web analytics and usability research, which was carried in The New Media Age, March 27. In addition, David Bomphrey, Senior Usability Consultant at The Usability Company discusses the importance of bearing usability in mind when designing a site that uses graphics.

March was a busy and eventful month at The Usability Company with a major collaboration with the Royal National Institute of The Blind, RNIB, new business wins and a new addition to our team. We cover these events and more in the Company News section of this newsletter.

Company News

The Usability Company and The Royal National Institute of The Blind, RNIB, are now working together to offer organisations a fast track toward achieving accessibility accreditation. The See It Right accreditation has been developed by the RNIB and is the only independent evaluation of a websites' accessibility to disabled users. To date the only way to achieve the accreditation was to book an Audit through the RNIB. RNIB has been heavily involved in promoting the issue of website accessibility for a number of years and have made considerable gains in raising awareness. The amendment to the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) early in 2002 has also further brought focus to the issue by making it a legal requirement for websites to be accessible.

The fast track service will provide an alternative channel for organisations seeking to make their sites accessible by utilising The Usability Company's additional resources. Organisations can now apply for the RNIB's See It Right logo through The Usability Company and benefit from a fast track process that allows them to receive the logo faster. The Usability Company will manage the accreditation process on behalf of the RNIB to RNIB standards. This working relationship is borne out of The Usability Company's support of the RNIB's commitment to making sites accessible to all groups of people. An inaccessible site can exclude millions of people including older customers (10.7 million people according to Age Concern), customers with sight problems (2 million people according to the RNIB), generally disabled people (8.5 million people according to The Office of National Statistics). By gaining accessibility accreditation, companies are not only taking a moral and ethical stance, but they are also increasing the level of loyalty to their site, avoiding angering customers, and making themselves more competitive by reaching a larger audience. It is estimated that 15-30% of the population have some kind of functional usability that can affect their ability to use websites.

The Usability Company is delighted to announce the appointment of Funmi Tomisin as Marketing Manager.

Upcoming Events

The Usability Company is launching its Accessibility Training Course this month. This course covers the most important issues surrounding accessibility on the Internet and Intranet. It guides the attendees in negotiating the complex and changing area of accessibility. There have been several scare stories of companies being sued for lack of accessibility on their sites and the WAI guidelines have often been criticised for being overly complex and difficult to implement. Combined with the lack of practical experience and knowledge in this emerging arena, there is much confusion about whether to implement accessibility guidelines, which ones to implement and how to do this on a practical level.

The main aim of this course is to make sense of web accessibility by aggregating all of the current guidelines, issues, legislations and case studies. Attendees will gain a clear understanding of the digital accessible arena: the key issues from a business, legal, technical and moral standpoint, the key guidelines and real world examples of problems and solutions. We shall also advice on implementing a simple, practical and effective approach to accessibility within organisations and projects. Through the course, The Usability Company intends to provide sufficient understanding of accessibility issues to help managers arrive at the right questions to ask experts and understand the answers!

For more information on this course including dates and price, please email info@theusabilitycompany.com

And Finally...

Marty Carroll, Director of Usability at The Usability Company, will be speaking at the Government Internet Forum on Usability Analytics, 10 April. Marty Carroll will take an in-depth look at Usability and web analytics. Starting with a core definition of usability, he'll look at why usability is so critical, not only for meeting the needs of users but also for justifying Return on Investment. He will provide an analysis of how an Internet Strategy based on performance measurement and a focus on usability offers a justifiable Return on Investment. He will then talk about how to achieve this and what issues need to be addressed. Following his presentati on, Marty will also lead a workshop to explore these issues in more detail.

Silver Surfers Research Report - 5 February 2003

In February 2003, The Usability Company was asked to undertake usability research on three financial services sites by Financial Marketing magazine.

The purpose of this research was to gauge the usability of some of the top financial services sites and to gain an understanding of some of the customer issues for the over 50s or "silver surfers". The Usability Company was interested in understanding if this often ignored part of the online community had any specific problems in finding suitable products in the financial services market.

The Usability Company's standard and methodical approach to Usability Evaluation was used for this study. This research comprised giving the task of finding a suitable car insurance quote to over 50s, who are part of the sites' target audience. Each participant was given details of a retired person age 65 with a modern car. The Usability Specialist, when analysing and interpreting the results of the testing, also employed some Usability Audit techniques, such as comparison with best practice on the web and standard design heuristics.

The three key areas of site design identified and assessed that might affect silver surfers were:

• The categorisation of products suitable for potential customers who are over 50
• The impact of site design and data entry methods on potential customers who are over 50
• The ability to contact the organisation for help if confused

The sites covered by the study were

www.saga.co.uk
www.legal-and-general.co.uk
www.bankofscotland.co.uk

The results were highly informative, especially with regards to functionality and design. One of the most interesting discoveries was that not all of the potential customers would have successfully accessed a quote from each of the companies involved in the testing. Although the general process of each site was quite simple, small design elements caused big usability issues and in some cases caused potential customers to fail in their goals. This was either through general frustration or simple failure to know what to do next. Fashionable designs and use of technology often caused older potential customers to fail in what should be simple tasks. The Legal and General site was unfortunately let down by some design faults on the home page that would have prevented all but one of the potential customers finding the quote process at all.

The potential customers were asked to perform tasks on the home page illustrated below. It was clear from observing potential customers that the horizontal menu across the top of the screen was not noticed or thought to be navigation initially. After a while, potential customers would try to click on these words expecting pages to load into the main content area. When this did not work, potential customers tried clicking on the white options in the green drop down lists. This action also did not produce a response from the site. Confused potential customers would then try clicking on the individual small white arrows at the end of the words. It was clear by this time that the yellow rollout menu options were hard to see and even more difficult to click on. Whenever the potential customers tried to get the mouse onto a yellow option, it would disappear or the options would change. The reason for this was a lack of accuracy with the mouse, something that over 50s potential customers are consistently poor at. In this case, the design of the site and the technology used conspired to undermine the user and prevented them from achieving their goals.

Figure: Legal and General website navigation.

On the up side, companies appear to be improving the forms on their sites. Although there are still very complex forms on some sites and some aspects of each of the sites tested in this study were very confusing, the overall standard seems to be rising. This is a general observation of form element design from both this testing and previous studies undertaken in the financial services sector by The Usability Company.

The potential customers found the quote procedure on Saga simple to follow because there was generally only one thing to do on each page. This did not make it the most usable or the most liked site, however. The potential customers found the Saga homepage well laid-out and that the "shortcuts" section represented user goals. All potential customers chose this route to start a quote for car insurance.

On the other hand, the main areas of confusion for potential customers on the Bank of Scotland website were the forms and the functionality that fed back to potential customers what had happened in the last stage. It was impossible for the potential customer to tell which of the fields were mandatory. In the testing, it was observed that this caused potential customers to encounter errors.

Good use of space and labelling combined with a simple process flow and easy to follow instructions allow potential customers to easily navigate through complex quote processes. The quote process in the Legal and General site was by far the shortest of all the quote processes and potential customers appreciated that. All the information required for a simple quote is requested in one screen. This means that the amount of fields the user has to fill in is reduced and the amount of time the user has to spend waiting for each page to load is minimized. The action points (buttons to move the user back and forth in the process) were also clearly defined and well labeled.

Those sites that offered their product range in categories that reflect the way that potential customers think about financial services product ranges rather than internal business structures allowed potential customers to find out about their services whereas the others did not.

Finally, All the sites were found to be verbose with regards to copy, instructions and terms and conditions. It would be wise to cut down on copy as it is the general perception that potential customers, when attempting to get an insurance quote, do not wish to sit and read a great deal and this particular group of potential customers often found it difficult to read text on screen. Concise bullet points work better than verbose prose.

Usability Testing Leads to Better ROI

By Marty Carroll, Director of Usability Practice

There's a question that crops up time and again whenever the commercial benefits of website development are put under the spotlight: how to accurately measure ROI. While many organisations acknowledge that the Internet is a core business platform and are investing money accordingly, even in today's sober economic environment many do not assess the ROI of their site spend with the same rigorous methods of analysis that are applied to other channels. This is because until now a framework for measuring ROI on site development has proved elusive, due mostly to the scarcity of appropriate data.

A study by Forrester Research found that 98% of site owners use traffic, such as hits and unique visitors, to gauge performance. While such indicators are useful, it's impossible to draw accurate conclusions about site performance from this data. It's like judging the quality of a football match by the attendance figure.

There are, though, a number of tools on the market, referred to collectively as Web analytics tools, which allow organisations to gauge site performance on far more useful criteria, such as purchases per customer or conversion rates. These afford a business a valuable insight into its site's weak spots and provide a concrete basis for improvement, Identifying which areas of the site are performing below par is only part of the solution. Web analytics tools may tell us what visitors are doing, but not why they're doing it. This is where usability research comes in.

With usability research, specialist practitioners observe and talk with participants as they try to accomplish true-to-life tasks on a site. This allows them to form a detailed picture of the site as experienced by the user.

Until now, businesses wanting to ensure they got the most from Web site spend faced two main difficulties: identifying which areas most need improvement and assessing ROI after improvement has been carried out. Using Web analytics tools and usability research overcomes both these hurdles, identifying a site's weakest areas so that resources can be targeted most effectively, then making it possible to quantify ROI. For instance, if improvements are made to a site area with a low conversion rate, then ROI can be calculated according to any sub-sequent increase in that rate. Decisions on Web site spend have until now been based more on intuitive or vague market.

Web analytics tools and usability research identify a site's weakest areas so that resources can be targeted most effectively research than on a patent under-standing of the ROI. With Web analytics tools and usability research, we now have a framework for accurately evaluating the relationship between budget spend and commercial gain.

If you'd like to read more on this subject, please use the link below for Marty Carroll's report: 

Usability and Web Analytics: ROI justification for an Internet strategy (PDF, file size 264KB)

You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this document. If you're using access technology software on your computer, visit http://access.adobe.com/ for more information about using PDF files.

The Importance of Bearing Usability in Mind When Designing a Site That Uses Graphics

By David Bomphrey, Senior Usability Consultant

" All too often in web design the experience of the user takes lower priority than other considerations, such as the appearance of the site. An attractive website may impress visitors initially, but this will be short-lived if the site doesn't allow users to accomplish their goals easily- a fact worth bearing in mind where the use of graphics is concerned." Marc Sparrow – Midnight communications.

Many people still browse websites via slow dialup modems, especially home users. Graphics are very "heavy" with regards to k size. This means that the bigger and more complicated the graphics and the larger the number of graphics, the slower the download speed for each page. As many people who have dialed up at home will tell you, this can be extremely frustrating and can lead to people browsing with pictures switched off or worse, going to competitors' sites.

The use of pictures in some sites is inevitable however. There would be little point offering a service such as www.multimap.co.uk or www.streetmap.co.uk if you were not going to use pictorial maps for example. In these cases a picture paints a thousand words and the circle or the arrow they use to pin point the exact area of search is an extremely valuable guide for users finding the area they are looking for.

In other cases such as news sites, pictures could be used to illustrate rather than describe. A good example of this is the following page on the BBC's website http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/2813477.stm where the tone and the general topic of the story can be gained through a brief glance not only at the headlines but also via the main picture.

In a more detailed look at the current situation in the Gulf on one of the BBC's news page, however, a more detailed map can convey an enormous amount of information. http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/middle_east/03/v3_iraq_key_maps/html/default.stm In this case, the map is many layers deep and although this type of information could be described in words, it would be a lengthy article and would not give a clear understanding of the relative positions of each of the elements and strategies. This particular implementation can be used as not only a good example of where interactive maps can provide real power to the web builder and the consumer, but also examples of where implementation can cause usability problems.

On this BBC news page, some of the colours used (contrast) and the fact that bitmap graphics (fuzzy edges to words) are used make reading some elements on some of the views more difficult than it should be. (The most readable colour combination has been found to be yellow on black)

It may not be intuitive for users to actually click into the various areas of the site. Although it is interactive, the interactive elements do not stand out that much more obviously than the non-interactive ones. This is because the common experience is to look for something obvious (blue underlined on white background instead of black text, or something button-like (i.e. beveled etc) to press on. This information is then displayed in text underneath the picture itself and could easily be missed by users.

Furthermore, in this case, the layers of the map are displayed in tab like buttons. In general this is a good idea, as it is becoming a web standard but in this case they look a little detached from the map and are also placed on the right hand side. Users are beginning to expect tabs at the top of a screen or screen element or as a menu bar on the left side.

Overall, interactive graphics are very inaccessible to the visually disabled. Although Alternative Text, and Title Tags can be employed to help mitigate these issues with flat images the same cannot really be used to help blind or partially sighted users understand the interactive maps and charts and the information they contain. Flash also falls into this category. There is currently no comprehensive solution to this problem because maps are inherently and have been historically a visual medium. Macromedia, the manufacturers of Flash, are attempting to make this technology accessible by allowing screen readers access to the text embedded within it and the navigation but the technology is still being ironed-out. It will be interesting to discover if and how this will make interactive maps more accessible.

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