USEworthy December 2002
The monthly Newsletter from The Usability Company
Welcome to the December issue of USEworthy. This
month Mark Ward from the BBC online chats to Catriona Campbell
about 'Why Websites are getting easier to use.'
Paul Blunden discusses the poor usability of portals as one of
the three reasons for 'B2C portal catastrophic failure scenarios.'
We take a look at one of the webs' leading retail sites www.allders.com
to evaluate its' purchase process.
Finally Arlene Kline continues the accessibility four-part
series by discussing the business issues surrounding the
development of accessible products.
Company News
Victor Chandler win
The Usability Company has signed a contract with Victor
Chandler the leading bookmaker to provide information architecture
services and usability testing for its website development.
Joe Coughlin, Project Manager for Victor Chandler said,
"The Usability Company offers a comprehensive set of services
that will meet the requirements of our project throughout the
development cycle. We are very happy with our choice and
anticipate a successful ongoing relationship".
Catriona Campbell, CEO of The Usability Company said, "We
are delighted to be working with Victor Chandler on this project.
Building in usability from the outset adds significant value to
the development cycle and will provide excellent ROI. Victor
Chandler customers will benefit significantly from this
approach."
Conferences
Paul Blunden spoke on the 14th November at 'The UK Gaming
Revolution:
The Emergence Of The UK As A Leading Online Jurisdiction'
Conference in Russell Square, London. Delegates learned the
importance of usability testing and its' lifecycle.
Catriona Campbell can be heard speaking together with a
representative from William Hill at the IBC Wireless Gambling and
Lotteries conference: Implementing Successful Mobile Gaming
Services And Maximising Revenue Potential
They will be discussing how William Hill's site was made as usable
as possible for its audience by researching their typical users
needs, desires and knowledge around online gambling.
28-29 January 2003, 76 Portland Place, London
For more information visit the ibc
Telecoms and Media website.
Why Websites are getting easier to use
Many websites ignore the basic rules of
interaction. Yet usability is at least as important as how a site
looks.
If the world resembled a website, chances are that life would
be pretty confusing.
Shops, for instance, would either be very long and narrow with
hardly any staff, or tiny booths with enormous stock rooms - and
hardly any staff. Others would look great but be impossible to get
around.
Such is the experience of many net users, and the newness of
the Internet starts to be a problem rather than a solution.
The dot.com boom was pitched as a revolution that would leave
behind the tired practices of the old world and create something
shiny and fresh instead.
But in the process it ditched some of the good things about the
old world too, such as 50 years of research into the best way for
people to interact with gadgets, be it a computer, mobile phone or
slot machine.
The results of this research are not always obvious. It is
quicker, for instance, to program a microwave to heat food for one
minute 11 seconds than it is for one minute ten seconds.
Thinking about the reasons why can help designers streamline
pages, devices and functions.
Ignorance of this work gives us the exciting gallery of
websites that we have today, many of which are created with no
higher aim in mind than to look good.
The fact that someone might actually want to use them, or
download the pages in a reasonable amount of time, does not seem
to have occurred to many creators.
"The design agencies that know HTML know nothing about
human-computer interaction," says Catriona Campbell, founder
and chief executive of The Usability Company, which helps
companies work out if a site is good or bad.
The fact that webpage design packages let designers do almost
anything they want is both a curse and a blessing, she says.
The fact that designers can do anything they want does not mean
that they should.
"Regardless of what you think a site ought to look like,
ask your users because they are the ones that have to deal with
it," she says.
There are many gurus of website design, among them Vincent
Flanders, who runs the webpagesthatsuck site. His particular
bugbear is a font that is too small to read.
He is also heartily sick of sites that practise what he calls
"mystery meat navigation" which use images on webpage
buttons that give no clue as to where, or what, they lead to.
Struggle to understand
Previously, many website makers only did research on how easy -
or difficult - a site was to use once it went live.
This created enormous problems for early users who had to teach
themselves how to navigate around it, only to find later that it
had changed.
"Once people have learned something badly they expect to
do that again," Ms Campbell says.
These "learned effects" can make it hard to convince
people to change their habits, even if the alternative is easier
to use.
Many companies now use paper prototypes to find out what works
best before they start building their sites, she says.
They also ask potential users to carry out card sorting
exercises to see how they categorise and classify the subjects on
a website.
Any site adopting this sorting system will find it gives users
what they expect, rather than surprising and baffling them.
It is worth avoiding jargon; the functions of particular
buttons should not change between pages; and give users an easy
way to get back to the start.
Instructions should anticipate what people want to do and help
them do it.
Every click that people make is effectively a decision and
users will be reluctant to click if they either don't know where
it will lead them, or they have been overwhelmed with information.
Thus as what was once revolutionary becomes mainstream, more
and more websites will become easier to use.
This story can be found on the BBC
website.
Portals, Shmortals
A recent report by Gartner (Six Degrees of Failure
or Success in Portal Projects, 24th Sept 2002) identified poor
usability as one of the three reasons for 'B2C portal catastrophic
failure scenarios'. The other two reasons were that the system
wouldn't accept transactions due to requirements failure or
technological anomaly and incorrect information being displayed.
A requirements failure or technology anomaly suggests that the
project was poorly scoped or that the scope changed. No doubt at
the time the project manager was translating the requirements of
the various stakeholders into a tangible set of deliverables and
something got missed along the way. Although costly to the
organisation and annoying to users many organisations would put
this down to the complexities of running a large integration
project and deal with it in subsequent development under change
control. This assumes they survive the fall out.
Displaying incorrect information, such as prices the example
given by Gartner creates financial loss and is essentially lack of
attention to detail in the implementation. Disappointing yes, but
both this and the previous reason for failure are mistakes. They
are aspects of the project scope that were considered within the
implementation and simply incorrectly executed.
So why poor usability? First let us consider what good or bad
usability is. Good usability can be described as a situation where
the interaction between user and interface achieve the goals of
both the user and the provider. For example a user wants to find
information quickly and the organisations wants to provide it
quickly so that the user either comes back again or doesn't use an
alternative channel. A simple goal, and perhaps that is where the
problems begin.
When the portal project is being scoped and the implementation
process defined it is unlikely that usability is considered
overtly. The reason for this is that it is a soft and largely
misunderstood discipline and one, which many believe is common
sense. Many vendors explain that their applications have been
subject to a level of user testing during development and clients
are only too willing to believe that this is all they need to do.
However, and almost by definition, portals are bespoke
implementations where users will interact differently dependent on
the content. As the content is unique between applications there
is a strong argument for adopting a user centred design approach
which is becoming popular in website development.
User centred design (UCD) is an end to end process that maps
onto the development cycle and insures that usability is
considered at every step. The big advantage of UCD is that it not
only informs about the usability aspects but also it provides
crucial data about the features and functionality. This helps to
avoid over-development and wasted investment during the project.
Gartner categorise the most common type of failure for portal
projects as 'Teflon' portals, due to their lack of stickiness.
They go on to specify the main reasons for a lack of stickiness as
lack of clear vision and mission for the portal, failure to
understand the user requirements, lack of usability in the design,
lack of commitment to the content, no attempt to track user
behaviour and inadequate information architecture. All of these
are contained within the UCD approach and whilst they don't
guarantee a good project, if a specialist organisation is
employed, that know what they are doing, the chances of failure
are certainly minimised.
Luckily Gartner also explained that the shelf life of a portal
project is about 6 to 9 months due to the pace of change in the
technology, so at least organisations that got it wrong this time
will have another chance to get it right... quite soon.
Introduction
This month we take a look at one of the webs' leading retail
sites to evaluate its' purchase process.
Allders website homepage layout reflects their new 'Fusion'
shopping concept. This new way of shopping has been created
exclusively for Allders and presents zones, based on the way 'we
live our lives today'. The main headings – content labels –
present options such as 'Living', 'Giving' and 'Electrical'. All
seem intuitive and are presented neatly in different coloured
boxes, although the lighter shades could cause reading
difficulties for some users.
The home page doesn't convey any messaging about what sets
Allders apart from its competitors and in fact there was, at the
time of writing, a promotion for Tesco club card points that drew
attention. The lack of messaging is probably explained by the high
focus on Christmas, which is too be expected at this festive time
of year.
Objectives
Our review was based on finding and purchasing that seasonal
favourite - a dressing gown for a man.
Findings
From the headings we selected 'Sleeping' as this seemed the
most appropriate section for our purchase. However on clicking
through we were presented with bedroom products (Bed linen, Beds,
Duvets, Pillows) and not bedroom clothing.
Our next selection was living where we found a wide range of
homeware but alas no dressing gowns. Finally and probably we
should have tried sooner, we looked at 'Giving'. Here we instantly
found the category we were looking for and selected the 'For Him'
option. Unfortunately here we were presented with two options or
sub-categories, gadgets and grooming, neither of which was
suitable. We were however advised to use the Quick Search facility
and also note that this was available on the home page. A good aid
to usability would have been to make the instructional text
clickable, but the Quick Search box was clearly visible in any
case.
Putting 'Dressing Gown' in the quick search facility provided a
range (5) of options, each with a clear graphic and price.
Instructional text was provided that invited us to click on the
image for more details. We selected the Polar Fleece dressing gown
and were taken to the next screen.
Allders site provides a breadcrumb that allows us to establish
where we are in the site. At the dressing gown selection page we
are in the 'Giving' zone.
The breadcrumb trail is very helpful but starts to raise
questions about how intuitive the category labels are. Perhaps a
further category titled 'Wearing' would be helpful? In any case
the quick search facility was very helpful.
The selection screen we are then presented with is very good,
easily understood and clearly labelled.
From this screen we can enlarge the image for a closer look,
find out about washing instructions and the fabric content. There
is a nice sales message too, albeit below the fold.
We select a grey dressing gown, size large by selecting '1' in
the quantity drop down menu. The site provides two choices now, to
continue shopping by 'add to basket' or to 'proceed to checkout'.
As this is all we want we click 'proceed to checkout'.
We then find we needed to add the dressing gown to our shopping
basket before proceeding to checkout and use the back button
located by the breadcrumb trail to return. Unhelpfully the
quantity field is now blank but as we are only interested in one
item this is not a big problem. It would have been frustrating if
we had selected multiple products.
We then select 'add to basket' and are presented with the
following screen.
The quantity has been reduced to zero and the site tells us 1
item has been added to the basket. From a usability perspective
users could miss this and we have seen it happen in the lab. Best
practice would be to show the basket at this point so that users
can confirm what they have added before proceeding.
When we do proceed to the checkout we are presented with a very
clear shopping basket page, which provides the ability for us to
check delivery, amend the quantity and have another look at our
selected product. The links that are clickable are very clearly
clickable, adopting the convention of underlined text.
The only criticism of this page is that the process bar has
replaced the breadcrumb trail so that at first glance users may
not be aware that there is a process indicator available. There
would be usability benefits in presenting the process bar in a
different way to the breadcrumb trail.
At the checkout screen a really usable feature is that you do
not have to register to purchase, and in fact we have not been
asked to register at any stage until now. We are asked at this
stage but we are made aware of the benefits of registration with a
simple sentence:
Sentence reads: You don't have to be registered to shop on allders.com, but if you are, enter your email and password here to help us to fill in your details automatically
If you want to register you are presented with the option
further down the page and find that most of the work you have done
in completing the checkout form goes toward the registration, with
the user only needing to select a password.
As we complete the form all seems straightforward, however as
with most forms on the web there are issues. In the address field
we are presented with a delivery type box. The default is 'Special
Delivery' and the alternative is 'select'. We have to assume that
the delivery we are getting at £3 is special but this makes us
look more than once. At the delivery screen we are provided with
alternatives for delivery to billing address, which saves some
legwork, or to an alternative address. Even a work address field
is available!
Submitting at this point uncovers a usability issue. Although
the form is apparently complete the second line of the address is
missing. This is not highlighted clearly as a mandatory field as
shown below:
The error message that was presented however was very clear and
instructive, and we feel that most users would be able to follow
the instructions and correct any mistakes they may have made.
Error message reads: Either the following data was entered
incorrectly or is missing: Please enter the second line of your
customer address.
Finally we were presented with a clear and friendly
confirmation screen and a reference number that was followed up
almost instantly with email confirmation.
Summary
Although there are some usability issues the Allders website
contains some nice usable features and a very clear and easily
read style, once you get beyond the home page. It is unlikely
that many customers would fail to purchase once in the process,
although they may become frustrated at the early stages. We
consider the key usability issues that could be improved are the
category labels and the screen that follows – add to basket.
All we can do now is await the arrival of our new dressing
gown!
Accessibility:
Four Part Series
Part Two: Business Issues
There are 2 million people in the UK who are blind and
partially sighted. (Royal National Institute For The Blind). In
The United States there are estimated to be 6 million disabled
people. Given the number of disabled users this is a largely
untapped revenue source.
As technologies become pervasive and less expensive more people
are able to gain access to the Internet and online
shopping/transactions will become more important. Being able to do
this from the comfort of their home environments is especially
useful to the disabled users. Those companies with accessible
websites will benefit from increased customer patronage.
Companies who provide for their disabled users will benefit
from a more positive brand perception.
Disabilities tend to increase with age, for example, serious
sight loss is an age-related disability with two-thirds of
sight-impaired people being over 60. As these "Silver
Surfers" (those around retirement age with time and
disposable income) are one of the fastest growing user groups of
the Internet it makes good business sense to provide facilities
for them to transact online. Already 20% of people aged 50 and
over use online shopping sites (Age Concern England, 2000).
"Accessibility is a competitive advantage," says Election.com
CEO Joe Mohen. "It's an economic opportunity to broaden our
mission and differentiate ourselves, and it's solid, logical
business that improves the value of our service. It's a good thing
to do from a Wall Street perspective."
According to Karen
Solomon of Wired magazine the more conservative estimate
states that there are up to 6 million disabled Internet users in
the United States alone, according to statistics from the NUA
Internet Surveys.
Obviously conforming to all 66 accessibility guidelines is a
huge undertaking for any business, which is why the WAI have
included priority ratings. That said the guidelines could still be
ambiguous and difficult to interpret. Even then there is still the
issue of making appropriate recommendation to rectify the
problems. This is where expert advice is invaluable. The Usability
Company works closely with the Royal National Institute of
the Blind (RNIB) and are able to steer businesses through the
RNIB's proprietary "See It Right" accessibility
conformance program or indeed through gaining conformance to Bobby
or WAI guideline.
Next Month, Part Three: Technical Issues
Click here to print
Back to The Usability Company website
|