Andrea Richeson

As usual, Peter Morville delivers great content in his January 27, 2009 post about User Experience Deliverables.

Included is this Treasure Map of deliverables, to remind of us the great variety of tools we can use to develop durable information architectures:

• Stanford University – Human Computer Interaction Seminar 
• Carnegie Mellon University  – School of Computer Science

Jana Tate and I completed our review of the iSchool website.

Our report and presentation are included below.

This was our first usability study using tools and techniques learned from Dr. Randolph Bias in his Spring 2009 Introduction to Usability class. We learned several lessons along the way about study design, survey design, testing tools, presentation techniques and more.

The study is by no means perfect or complete, and we hope that we have the opportunity to  further refine the review of the site as we continue in our degree and certificate programs.

Executive Overview: Usability Review of the iSchool website (pdf format)

Usability Test Results -  the iSchool website (pdf format)

The student project to design a mobile website is complete. Whew!

See the sitemap, class presentation, & XHTML comps of the Whole Foods mobile site  »

Resources:

• On the readability of inverted color schemes
• Light text on dark background vs. readability
• 10 colour contrast checking tools to improve the accessibility of your design
• WebAIM’s Color Contrast Checker

Primary Readings

• Morville, Peter – Ambient Findability Chapter 1
  • What a delightful read. Clear, informative, insightful.
  • I particularly enjoyed the success story about the National Cancer Institute site and the importance of optimizing sub pages for search engines.  People don’t navigate the way you might like them to — best to ask the questions: What do people need? How are people getting to that information on my site? And how can I support findability given actual search strategies? Brilliant to re-work both the IA of the site and to tackle search optimization.
  • Morville’s attention to credibility and authority is a key point. With massive information overload – how important is it to project authority on a site? How do people determine authority?  He notes that the 97% literacy rate in the US is not enough to navigate today’s information-rich world. Information literacy is a related and core competency.
  • The stats on the long tail were compelling: size of a then average Barnes & Noble store (130k titles) dwarfed by the sales on Amazon of titles not in their top 130k list.
• Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility
  • Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
  • Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.
  • Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.
  • Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site
  • Make it easy to contact you.
  • Design your site so it looks professional
  • Make your site easy to use — and useful.
  • Update your site’s content often
  • Use restraint with any promotional content
  • Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.
• Fogg, B.J., Marshall, J., Othman, L., et. al. (2001) What Makes A Web Site Credible? A Report on a Large Quantitative Study. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2001 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, v. 1, 61-68. New York: ACM Press.
  • Convey the real world aspect of the organization
  • Make websites easy to use
  • Include markers of expertise
  • Include markers of trustworthiness
  • Tailor the user experience
  • Avoid overly commercial elements
  • Avoid amateurism
• McCray, A. and Gallagher, M. Principles for Digital Library Development. Communications of the ACM. Vol. 44, No. 5. 2001. pp 49-56.
  • Expect change: plan/design for it
    
  • Know your content: spend time on planning the metadata; remember to plan for document types and the units they will be stored as on the site: implications for metadata and retrieval
  • Involve the right people: multiple perspectives & executive support yield more effective results
    
  • Design usable systems:follow established accessibility & usability standards
    
  • Ensure open access: a public policy issue; avoid proprietary systems 
  • Be(a)ware of data rights: be aware of and plan for intellectual property protection
    
  • Automate whenever possible: be efficient
  • Adopt and adhere to standards: for scalability, interoperability, portability
    
  • Ensure quality: define and implement QA methods
    
  • Be concerned about persistence: plan for preservation of the record
    
• Balasubramanian , V., & Bashian, A. (1998). Document Management and Web Technologies: Alice Marries the Mad Hatter. Communications of the ACM, 41(7), 107-115.
  • The move to make content providers the content publishers is fraught with difficulty, as was pointed out a number of ways in this article.. The learning curve for the publishing tools, accessibility and coding standards, writing style standards is steeper than most realize.  There is no shortcut to quality.  Content management can only get you so far.  Technical expertise in web development, writing, editing, design is still necessary.

Secondary Readings

• Abrams, D. Baecker, R. and Chignell, M. Information Archiving with Bookmarks: Personal Web Space Construction and Organization. Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Human Interface. 1998. ACM Press.
• Peters, R. (2001). Exploring the Design Space for Personal Information Management Tools. Paper presented at CHI 2001, Seattle, WA.

Recently seen on the IxDA list:
Heuristic Evaluations – A Personal Approach by Liam Greig

Student presentation for Information Architecture class, 20090420:

eCommerce Best Practices – a literature review (pdf format)

Rosenfeld, Information Architecture: Chapter 19

• Centralization is not always the best approach. Adopting a shared metadata can be a significant roadblock.
• Guerilla EIA examples: folksonomies & wikis, creating cross-departmental content
• Take a phased approach.

Albers, M. and Kim, L. User web browsing characteristics using palm handhelds for information retrieval.

Whereas people using the Web tend to engage in open-ended, exploratory behaviors,exploratory behaviors, PDA’s are intended to support task-specific use. Thus user ability to retrieve information–including locating and relocating information, building mental models of the website, and remembering the information once the user has found it–may differ in substantive ways.

…reading behaviors supported by PDA’s need to focus more on “direct access strategies” than open-ended browsing.

Kim, L. and Albers, M. Web Design Issues When Searching for Information on a Small Screen Display.

Overall, users took more time to perform the tasks on the small screen interface, with the break in efficacy appearing between 225 and 350 word-lengths. Finally, contrary to our hypothesis, participants were similarly accurate across conditions.

The high variability of PDA search times in this study suggest the complexity of factors contributing to effective design.

Kamba, T., Elson, S. A., Harpold, T., Stamper, T., & Sukaviriya, P. N. (1996). Using small screen space more efficiently. Paper presented at the Conference on Human factors in computing systems, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

In this paper, we will propose that a variable delay in the response of overlapping widgets and text improves the effectiveness of the semitransparent widget/text model. We assumed that varying the delay by which objects in different virtual layers of the screen responded to users’ attempts to select those objects would make it possible for users to select partially obscured objects without having to resort to a toggle to switch between layers.

Buchanan, G., et. al. Improving Mobile Internet Usability. 2001

Design guidelines for WAP usability:

From our analysis of the perceived WAP problems, user views and our case-study work both with commercial and our own user interfaces, we have identified a set of development principles forWAP service providers:

1. Develop phone based WAP services that provide direct, simple access to focused valuable content. Usable and useful WAP services on phones will be ones the give the user key, summarised information with very few keystrokes or text entry. WAP developers that try to simply convert their conventional Web material to the phone platform will fail.
2. Trim the page to page navigation down to a minimum; use simple hierarchies which are similar to the phonemenus that users are already familiar with.
3. Reduce the amount of vertical scrolling by simplifying the text you wish to display (avoid wordy messages; go for action oriented keywords).
4. Reduce the number of keystrokes you expect the user to do. You can do this by simplifying navigation and by replacing text input with other types of interaction
method (e.g., list selection).

… We achieved improvements almost doubling user performance.

Nielsen, J. “Accessible Design for Users with Disabilities”. 1996

Making the Web more accessible for users with various disabilities is to a great extent a matter of using HTML the way it was intended: to encode meaning rather than appearance.

 A couple of my favorite explanations:

Chris Coyier’s What Beautiful HTML Code Looks Like

Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience