USEworthy August 2002
The monthly Newsletter from The Usability Company

Welcome to August's edition of Useworthy. The RNIB has held another successful accessibility conference - we give you the low-down. Does your company have an Intranet? Or are you designing one? Catriona Campbell looks into the ideal Intranet, whilst Paul Blunden gives his opinion of the productivity and usability of Intranets.

The RNIB hosted an accessibility conference on the 5th July in Central London:

Web accessibility and web usability: what's the relationship and why does it matter?

In May 1999, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to help web designers create web sites that are accessible to everyone, regardless of ability/disability, technology or circumstance.

Since that time, many accessible sites have been created in accordance with the guidelines. On closer inspection however, while some of these sites are technically accessible, they are not always easy to use.

Are accessibility and usability different? Are accessible web sites automatically usable, or must designers also following guidelines additional guidelines to ensure usability? These are just some of the questions that were considered at this event.

The general consensus was that a usable website wasn't automatically accessible and vice versa Julie Howell of the RNIB described accessibility as a technical discipline whereas usability helps measure the effectiveness of a site. It was put forward that accessibility increases usability, as it increases the likelihood that a site will perform well, with fewer problems. If a user can't actually access the site it doesn't matter how usable it is.

The argument against creating ever more sophisticated assistive technology was expense. If a user has special equipment to adapt an application, for example a screen reader on a website, this technology should not require upgrading too often due to the enormous cost to the user.

The argument was put forward: should all sites be accessible? 'What about a high-tech skateboarding site, surely that wouldn't need to be accessible for all?'

The answer was unanimous – it does need to be accessible Peter Bosher (Soundlinks) pointed out that his son is a keen skateboarder that had been pestering his dad for the latest skateboard for Christmas. Peter wanted to research the cost and the safety of the skateboards and thus as a potential purchaser the company would be loosing a customer by not being accessible. A wider perception of accessibility and usability was called for and a business like attitude to it.

Catriona Campbell of The Usability Company responded with an emphatic 'no'.

She said, "If you research your user requirements well you should find that everyone doesn't want the same thing. The web experience should be delivered in the way the users want. A customized interface would be more efficient and inherently more usable than a generic one."

Mark Phillips (Tesco.com) explained the rationale behind the approach the company has taken in providing two web interfaces for their online shopping service. 'Tesco.com' features visual cues that enable sighted customers to place their order and 'check out' as quickly as possible. The interface features heavy use of JavaScript and frames to enable this. However, frames and JavaScript can pose problems for the technology used by some disabled customers, so the company also offers 'Tesco.com/access', a separate interface that uses neither JavaScript nor frames. As Mark explained, "Tesco's objective is to create the best user experience for everyone and also to offer a service that is inclusive. The two interfaces offer the same functionality."

Dave Roberts of IBM offered another perspective: "Bring back the design frontier away from the media of any one audience. Design for an abstract media and then take that forward to each of the audiences."

When asked how the event might shape future RNIB campaigning, Howell responded, "It is becoming clear that adopting the W3C Web Accessibility

Initiative Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is not enough to ensure that visually impaired people will be able to make full use of a web site. The inclusion of users with disabilities at every stage of the design testing cycle would seem to be the ideal way to ensure that any resulting web site is both fully accessible to and usable by people with disabilities."

The RNIB will be running a free Web accessibility tour 2002, from the 19th July to the 14th August, which is likely to be at a place near you. Visit http://www.rnib.org.uk/digital/adobesyst.htm for more information.

THE PERFECT INTRANET

The corporate intranet has been hailed as the most important business tool since the typewriter, but the track record so far has been mixed. Despite many successes, particularly in cost and timesaving, many owners of corporate intranets are dissatisfied. They have spent time and money on development, web-enabled desktops, even intranet training, but still aren't enjoying significant enough productivity or cost savings. Why? While critics often point to technological glitches, the real problem in my opinion lies in design and poor or no measurement.

Let me relate a short true story to you. A colleague of mine was working on an intranet redesign project for a top 100 FTSE Company. He is a cognitive psychologist and usability expert, so what he was doing was analysing how people actually use the existing Intranet, to inform the new design. Specifically, he was timing and analysing how people completed certain tasks using the company intranet. He had arranged to carry out the work on client site, to analyse staff interacting with the intranet in situ. He entered a workers office, and noticed that all around the member of staff's PC screen were lots of Post-it notes with notes scribbled on them – it did in fact resemble a sunflower more than a PC screen. He sat down beside the member of staff and asked him to carry out a task on the intranet, and the chap explained that each time he took a call, and had to access the Intranet, or insert some calculation into the intranet screen, he could not easily follow the design, so he collected Post-it notes and stuck them on the screen at the section on the intranet that he would have to access later, and input the data after office hours. The member of staff was so exasperated with the Intranet that he was clearly suffering from stress.

The Perfect Intranet Design

Successful intranets are built on smart information design, which means deploying Usability research throughout the design lifecycle. Secondly, they focus on tasks, not documents, and aim to integrate those tasks into distinct processes. Thirdly, the best intranets encourage collaboration by employees around content, and finally they measure what impact the Intranet is having on the business.

Think About Tasks

Thinking of the intranet as a tool means understanding it as more than a collection of documents. People use documents to complete tasks. Tasks may include logging calls, such as in the case of the “Sunflower” example above, fulfilling orders, or looking up a customer's order history. To complete these tasks, people need to have related documents and tools close at hand.

Poor corporate intranets can drain corporate finances in two ways, says Jakob Nielsen, an intranet usability expert who in the mid-1990s was a lead designer of SunWeb-the original intranet at Sun Microsystems—and is now a principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, a consultancy in California. Firstly, searching on a poorly organised intranet is a huge time waster. " [Think about] every time you have to download a change of address form or any of those small things that take half an hour rather than five minutes," he says. "When you multiply those 25-minute periods across a big company, there is a very direct and very explicit loss."

Ignore the user at your peril!

The best way to determine your employees' needs is to go right to the source. At Allied Van Lines, Senior Manager of Strategy and Development Annette Pierson emphasizes the importance of involving Allied's 600-plus agents in every new intranet product. Before introducing a move-management system, the company beta tested the new service with a core group of move coordinators in the field. "They helped us identify functionality that needed to be changed or enhanced," says Pierson. Last year, Allied redesigned the user interface based on coordinator feedback.

Content is King

When intranets lack fresh, relevant content, managers have usually failed to entrust content ownership and management to those closest to it. To encourage topic employees to contribute and maintain content (within guidelines) companies should consider offering incentives for contribution.

At Chicago-based Accenture, where the ability to capture and retain the knowledge gleaned in consulting work is central to the company's expertise, contribution to the intranet is an element of each employee's performance review. "There is often a disincentive to share knowledge," points out Mark Allen, Director of Internet services at Accenture, "especially in a weakened economy when employees worry that if they put everything online they'll reduce their own relevancy and importance."

Measure

Many companies neglect to build metrics into their intranets, so they have no way of knowing what kind of content is being accessed or which tools are used. Before Occidental added its first site analysis tool in 1998 to measure intranet usage, the company's best guess (based on the number of calls when the site went down) was that a few hundred employees out of a few thousand were visiting the site. In fact, more than half of all employees were visiting the site at least daily but weren't staying. Until then the company hadn't realised the tool's strategic potential.

Intranets, productivity and usability

Anyone who has worked for, or with a large organisation over the last 10 years has probably experienced the implementation of the corporate intranet as it has been rolled out to the organisation. Many will have also been totally bewildered by the vast array of links and areas within the Intranet with apparently meaningless titles. The 2-hour training session, given by HR, was more of a sales pitch about how the organisation was investing in its employees than real training and in any case, as a result of geographic location, most of the organisation received it months in advance of the roll out and can't remember the details.

Organisations invest in Intranets in order to save money. Unfortunately most of the savings as a result of implementing an Intranet are so called 'soft savings': that is savings where you never see the cash. It is therefore extremely difficult to calculate the ROI of an Intranet project. Paul Chin at Intranetjournal.com claims that some managers don't even bother trying to measure the ROI. "An in depth ROI analysis will end up taking more time than actually building the Intranet itself."

The investment made in the Intranet technology can be vast with Gartner estimating that even a 5,000 user organisation would spend in excess of $1m on planning, implementation and operation. So when you look at the three main expense categories (Technology, Information, Personnel) it is little wonder that the one that gets squeezed is the latter: Personnel. It is difficult to build an Intranet without infrastructure or content, but employees, well they will find there way around it!

Economists already agree that a significant factor in the expanding economy have been productivity improvements as a result of IT investment. InformationWeek reported that in the US economists such as Robert Reich and Laura Tyson point to IT as "perhaps the most significant factor in the countries prolonged economic expansion". InformationWeek Research also found that the most important technologies that help boost worker productivity were collaborative software tools such as email and Intranets.

So why haven't organisations looked for improved employee productivity as a result of improved usability? Jakob Nielsen suggests that during the 90's "corporate Intranets were severely under funded". Given that productivity gains were being achieved in any case, through the deployment of technology, further gains were perhaps not sought out. In fact many organisations still argue that usability is not required in the corporate Intranet. This is no doubt driven by the lack of data available about how employees are actually using the Intranet and the assumption that they will learn as they go. In reality large parts of the Intranet remain unused and unexplored.

So what is the argument for carrying out usability on corporate Intranets? Research carried out by Jakob Nielsen for 'The 10 Best Intranet Designs of 2001' suggested that on average use increased by 98% after redesigning the Intranets to make them more usable. This is dramatic providing that the use of the Intranet equates in to benefits for the organisations. There are a number of areas where increased use can lead to productivity improvements and also to increased employee satisfaction.

For example, employees spend a significant amount of time looking for information on the Intranet. If the content is arranged in an illogical manner, perhaps reflecting the organisations database structure or vertical market orientation, it can lead to employees wasting considerable amounts of time either searching for themselves or helping colleagues search. A usable User Centered Design that increased use does transform into greater employee productivity. This may be an obvious example but what about organisations empowering employees to manage their own careers? The HR Intranet, built on applications such as Peoplesoft, is being introduced to free the role of HR from its administrative duties and also to provide managers with more effective tools for managing employees. Employees are given access to their personnel records online, and can review benefits, appraisals and even plan their future career and development requirements from a PC.

According to CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) "the more sophisticated systems attempt to appeal to employees by offering direct links to associated web sites so that, for instance, an employee could arrange a hospital appointment under his or her healthcare cover without having to refer to the HR department beforehand. Some companies are going even further in their attempts to retain employees by offering such services as online grocery shopping facilities."

Although some commentators believe that 2002 will be the year that companies start taking their Intranets seriously it seems unlikely that usability will play any sort of role in the immediate future. Organisations do not have a clear grasp on the benefits from their Intranets and further investment will not be granted without a more sophisticated ROI business case being presented. Given that this is difficult to produce it seems that employees will have to continue to struggle.

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