USEworthy September 2003
The monthly Newsletter from The Usability Company
Welcome to September's edition of USEworthy. In
this issue, Marty Carroll, Director of Usability Practice at The
Usability Company looks at what charities with limited resources
can do to make their websites compliant with accessibility
guidelines. Carl Kim, who recently joined the
Usability Practice as a Usability Specialist tackles the debate on
the effects of usability on creativity. Is usability compatible
with creativity? Does it stifle originality? How can usability
professionals and creatives work best together? Carl's article
addresses these questions and more.
In addition, we provide an article that appeared on
kablenet.com, August 6 on Catriona Campbell, The Usability
Company's Founder and Chairman, and the recently launched quality
framework for UK government website design. Catriona discusses the
basis of the framework and the factors affecting the
implementation of the guidelines including the risks posed by the
general lack of sufficient budget for web development in the
public sector.
The Usability Company News
August was a hot month at The Usability Company. We
are happy to announce that we have now held 2 accessibility
training courses from which we have received very positive
feedback from the attendees. September' s session is almost sold
out, with only three places left. If you are considering making
your website or Intranet accessible to all, accessibility training
should be your first step toward that goal.
The Usability Company's staff was invited to speak at several
usability related events last month, highlights of which were the
e-consultancy roundtable and the AIGA Experience Design meeting.
Catriona Campbell was invited to participate at the e-Consultancy
roundtable August 26 focusing on the key issues and trends within
usability. The roundtable explored what the attendees felt were
the biggest issues and challenges for the usability industry, the
main trends and their favourite resources.
AIGA Experience Design London invited Catriona to speak at
their meeting on designing for e-Government, September 3. Catriona
spoke on the meeting's themes, which included the following
questions. How do designers design for the e-government 'back
office' and evangelise user experience in government? How do
designers create and work with government-mandated standards for
user interface and usability? And where do policy agendas run up
against designer led approaches to problem-solving?
And Finally...
This year's British HCI conference will take
place in Bath, England, 8-12 September 2003 and it is set to be a
fantastic event. The conference will bring together researchers,
practitioners, educators and users with interests in the many
facets of human-computer interaction, usability and interactive
systems from all over the world. Catriona Campbell is chairing this year's
Industry Day, Thursday, September 11. Keynote speakers
include Andrew Pinder, UK Government E-envoy and Gordon Smiley,
Group Director for Microsoft's enterprise customers, partners and
consultancies. Thursday is also the day of the conference dinner, which will be held in the historic Roman
Baths and Pump Room in Bath and starts at 7.30 pm. For more information on the
conference, the conference dinner and to purchase tickets, please
visit the
British HCI Group website.
Understanding
website accessibility
Marty Carroll, Director of Usability Practice, The
Usability Company
Web and Intranet accessibility has become an
important issue for moral, legal and business reasons, so much so
that RNIB recently announced that it is to bring the first legal
cases for lack of online accessibility. Marty Carroll, director of
usability practice at The Usability Company, looks at what
charities with limited resources can do to fulfil their legal and
what some consider a moral obligation to ensure that their
websites and Intranet comply with accessibility guidelines. The
issue of website accessibility has once again come to the fore
with RNIB's recent announcement that it is supporting a number of
individuals in legal cases against organisations for failing to
provide websites that can be used by those with sight problems.
Under the Disability Discrimination Act (1995), DDA,
organisations are legally obliged to make 'reasonable adjustments'
to ensure services are accessible to everyone, and last year the
Disability Rights Commission's Code of Practice that accompanies
the DDA confirmed that this requirement applied equally to online
services. Although these are the first cases of this type to be
brought in the UK, there have been a number of successful
prosecutions abroad, the most famous of which was against the
Sydney Olympic Committee in 2000.
In the UK RNIB has done much to raise awareness of the need for
online operations to comply with the legislation, however
designing a truly accessible website involves consideration of
more than blind and partially sighted people. There are many other
kinds of difficulties that can affect someone's ability to use a
website, such as problems with hand-eye co-ordination. Despite
growing awareness of the need to address such issues though, there
still exists a great deal of uncertainty and confusion about which
steps exactly should be taken to deliver an accessible website.
Much of this uncertainty stems from the nature of the British
legal system, which means that until case law is established it is
impossible to say what level of accessibility is needed to ensure
compliance. This situation is further complicated by a number of
international and domestic accessibility guidelines. The Worldwide
Web Consortium has developed a set of guidelines for developers (WAI
- Web Accessibility Initiative) but these have been criticised for
being overly complex and difficult to implement. There's also
Bobby, a commercial tool that provides organisations with an
evaluation of any accessibility difficulties, while RNIB has
developed its See It Right logo, which remains the only
accessibility accreditation in the UK to be awarded by an
independent body.
It's understandable then that many organisations faced by the
maze of legislation, guidelines and standards are perplexed as to
how exactly to deliver a socially inclusive website, particularly
organisations with limited resources.
Of course, the ideal scenario would be to incorporate
accessibility considerations into the design process from the very
beginning. A good design methodology should balance all of a
project's requirements - good usability, accessibility, aesthetic
considerations, as well as the organisation's needs - to create
websites that deliver on all of these fronts from the outset.
Building accessibility into a website is not as complex as it
sounds, but requires an awareness on the part of the developer of
the tools and software that are used by those with physical
disabilities. Steps to consider for instance include adding
keyboard functionality to websites for users who have difficulties
using a mouse, or adding concise and comprehensive tags for blind
users who use screen readers.
For organisations with limited resources though, creating an
accessible website may be a new consideration and building from
scratch is simply not an option. Admittedly, it may be necessary
to retrofit prominent and frequently used parts of the site,
adding new features to improve ease-of-use for the disabled.
However, a fruitful and long-term approach to ensuring
accessibility should be incremental, whereby accessibility becomes
not a one-off solution, but is integrated into a design approach
aimed at the slow evolution of the site towards increasing
accessibility. Once designers are aware of the steps that can be
taken to improve accessibility, these considerations should form
an integral part of design processes as the website continues to
grow and be modified. A useful benchmark here is perhaps the WAI,
which suggests three increasingly advanced accessibility
standards, offering organisations a road-map over time to greater
accessibility.
As mentioned, until the first test case the exact nature of the
required 'reasonable adjustments' will remain unclear, but an
organisation that has embarked on this route, and whose fixed goal
is increasing accessibility, can safely be said to be erring on
the side of caution. It should be remembered too, that the
significance of website accessibility goes way beyond fulfilling a
set of legal requirements: the case for accessibility is simply a
recognition that IT and the internet have revolutionised the way
we work and communicate. It is vital that as technology advances
in its complexity and reach, and continues to play an ever more
important role in our working and home lives, nobody is excluded
from the immense possibilities this brings.
For further information see:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp
http://www.theusabilitycompany.com/
www.rnib.org.uk/digital/
Creativity
vs. Usability
Did you hear the one about the usability
specialist who is also a poet? His poems are in bullet points and
devoid of metaphors.
Moreover, they are half the length of the original draft, and
half the length of that again. The language is succinct and in
layman's terms; there's one proposition per stanza, and each
stanza is short. To avoid subjectivity, lest it create ambiguity,
his poems are preceded by a conclusive summary. And of course, as
always, his pieces of prose must also rhyme, as that is what his
readers expect to find. You can see what I'm getting at: Is
usability incompatible with creativity? Does it stifle
originality?
As a usability specialist I often find myself being acutely
aware of the implications of my recommendations to those in new
media who are creative by vocation, such as graphic designers.
This is because one of the basic tenets of usability is minimising
cognitive processing by users, 'the need to figure out what they
need to do'. Thus, many of my recommendations are premised on the
pursuit of:
- Abiding by standards and following conventions
- Minimising relearning
- Consistency
- Catering to the lower common denominator
- Avoiding marketese (promotional marketing style with
subjective claims)
In contrast, one of the many aims of graphic design is creating
something new, something fresh, vis-à-vis being creative. So you
can see the potential conflict between two disciplines:
- One wants to call the shopping basket for a car dealership
'the shopping trailer'; while the other wants to keep it as
'shopping basket'
- One wants to use the image of a dog eared page and the label
'turn overleaf' as a link to the next screen of an online
annual report; the other recommends a button labelled 'next'
- One wants to have a paragraph of copy as a bitmap image in
order to ensure the text is in a specific size, in the
corporate typeface of New Baskerville, which is a typeface
that does not come standard with an operating system, and with
correct leading, kerning, and tracking. The other wants it in
HTML text in sans-serif, left aligned of course
- One wants an animation in Flash on the homepage, which takes
up most of the screen, as this will present the business as
being dynamic and progressive. The other recommends using a
smaller image in .GIF or .JPG. with a two line text summary
The above examples are real life examples from my and my
colleagues' experiences.
And it's not just graphic designers - I have also experienced
marketing people and programmers respond in ways that suggest they
see usability as curtailing their professional creativity.
Stereotypically, the former wants to use colourful (but
potentially ambiguous) language to convey information; the latter
wants to showcase the latest 'cool' technology, but which doesn't
work on some browsers. The usability specialist evaluates the
prototype and grants neither of the wishes.
So is usability destined to be a thorn on the creatives' side?
Certainly not. The aim of usability is not about suppressing
creativity and originality, but more about knowing the target
audience and addressing their needs while simultaneously
addressing the client's business needs. Simply put, it's horses
for courses.
Therefore, for a website dedicated specifically to web graphic
designers I would expect the page to be designed for viewing at
1024 x 768 since almost all web graphic designers will be using at
least this resolution instead of the 800 x 600 resolution that is
more common with the greater online population. On another site
whose primary objective is to service architects I would expect to
find technical terminology pertaining to architecture. If another
site were to be promotions based, perhaps consisting of a
competition, then it is likely (and appropriate) that the copy
would be written in 'marketese' style.
Of course, for the majority of websites it's not as clear-cut
as these examples. So the question remains: Why is there a greater
emphasis on usability in new media (for example the web) compared
to other forms of communication such as books, magazines, radio,
and so on? I do not presume to know a definitive answer, but I
will point out some explanations.
The Web is ubiquitous: a user can access a website without the
temporal and physical constraints, especially those of a
specialist journal that can only be attained through a
subscription or in a library. The individual pages of such a
journal, or even of any book, can be considered in the context of
the entirety of the publication, in its physical bound entity
between the front and back covers, and where quick reference can
be made by flipping through the pages.
In contrast, a user can directly access a page within a website
via a deep link for example, from a search engine or another site.
Unlike the individual page in a book the individual web page must
shoulder the responsibility of representing the overall site. A
user deep linked into a site needs to be contextualised: the web
page must faithfully represent the brand, the business' or the
site's reason for being, offer assistance to users, provide
orientation and similarly provide access to other areas of the
site. Therefore, an individual web page needs to be a
self-sufficient entity at the same time as being a congruent part
of the overall site (think of a regiment that forms part of a
battalion). That this is a significant burden for one screen to
shoulder is evidenced by the amount of screen real estate taken up
by elements, such as navigation and brand space that are not part
of the main body content. According to one analysis by Jakob
Nielsen such elements account for 43% of the space on a webpage.
It's a pain looking at a web page
Another fundamental difference between the web and a medium
such as television is that the former tends to be task driven and
this includes looking for information, whilst the latter is
generally for leisure. I won't elaborate on this as it has been
widely commented on, other than to state the obvious: tasks
require effort and people want to expend as little effort and time
as possible, unless it's for pleasure.
This goes to the heart of usability. By definition usability is
the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which users
can achieve tasks (to paraphrase ISO 92411). The need for
efficiency and effectiveness is much more important on the web
because it can be an uncomfortable medium to interact with:
- Screen resolution: computer screens have a resolution that
is 1/4 to 1/8 that of print, making onscreen viewing tiresome.
As well, computer monitors generally have refresh rates
between 60 and 95 Hertz which again can cause eye strain
- Virtual space: the user's interaction is confined to a
2-Dimensional interface, and which is therefore limited in so
many ways compared to a 3-D physical world
- Speed: although Internet connection speeds are improving and
a greater user base is now on broadband, it is still not
instantaneous. The processing speed of computers is another
determinant of response time
These are some of the reasons why usability has such an impact
on interface design. Objectives needs to be much more focused and
stringently followed mainly because there is more at stake with
the Web from bad usability. The currency of usability carries much
more weight online and website builders need to be canny with
visual design, language and other forms of content. Such an
approach is not exclusive of creativity, but it is about how to
best meet the carefully identified objectives, and creativity may
be one of them rather than a given by-product. I will end with a
quote from Mark Twain, who was indeed a very creative individual!
'I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long
one instead' - Mark Twain
Pushing
for access
Kablenet.com, 6 August 2003
Plans to improve the UK's public sector websites will need more
money, says an industry expert.
The e-envoy's plan to make government websites more accessible
risks being shelved because the public sector doesn't have
sufficient budget for web development, according to internet usage
experts.
Catriona Campbell, chair of the Usability Company and a
contributor to the e-envoy's website design framework, warns that
improvements may never emerge due to the lack of funding.
The plan, Quality Framework for the UK Government Website
Design, was published last month as part of the e-envoy's campaign
to boost take up of online public services.
Campbell told Government Computing News on 6 August 2003 that
the document, which took close to a year to develop, is based on
"seven steps" set out in the International Standards
Organisation's "ISO 13407" internet guidelines.
The "steps" aim to ensure usability through design
and management processes, in particular by gaining a good
understanding of how a site will be used and by implementing a
system of regular checking to ensure high standards.
"To carry out the seven steps properly requires people who
are well skilled and sufficient budget," Campbell explained.
"Public sector organisations will find it difficult to find
the necessary skills in-house. Outsourcing to professionals is the
best thing they can do."
At the launch of the plan, e-envoy Andrew Pinder said: "It
is vital that government websites are accessible and easy to use
as possible". Making this a reality will involve the redesign
of the 800 or so official websites. But as Campbell points out, it
is not cheap to test for accessibility and usability.
"The e-envoy's office has done a wonderful thing by
highlighting usability needs and in the next financial year
perhaps the government will put the budget aside to do this
properly," she said.
In July 2003 the Usability Company judged a Central Office of
Information competition for the government websites with the best
usability. It chose Opportunity Wales ;
MMR the
facts; National
Statistics and the army's recruitment
site.
Source: Kable's Government Computing Publication date:
06/08/2003 01:15:07 PM
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