Spirituality and Usability

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Spirituality and Usability

• Aaron GarrettJacqueline HundleyDavid Thornton

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Introduction

• Preliminary case study to enhance the usability
  of an existing religious website
• Experiment compare original and enhanced site
• Users evaluation of sites
• Sites dealing with religion and spirituality
• Created by believers with little experience due
  to low financial profit by designers
• Possible high customer base

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Background

• Few resources on spiritual/religious websites
• View users ethnographically like elderly or
  disabled
• Community design and social interaction
• E-commerce
• Cognitive factors

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Community Design / Social Interaction

• Important to developing web-based community of
  believers
• Require honest social interaction
• Share personal experiences
• Facilitate empathy
• Privacy and trust
• Bobs ACL Bulletin Board
• Shared common injury needing rehabilitation
• Common love of sports
• Need for empathy frustrated and depressed

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Community Design / Social Interaction

• Four-components of design criteria for online
  social interaction systems (Girgensohn and Lee)
• Common ground
• Shared understandings among collaborators
• Use of personal profiles
• Awareness
• Good orientation and navigational cues
• Differentiate unread/new posts from old
• Enablers
• Opinion polls, rating systems, or discussion
  boards to self-determine groups course of action
• Place-making
• Discussion board policies may emerge over
  time...self regulating

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E-Commerce

• Spiritual and religious organizations are
  entering the world of online business
• Profitability not necessarily a goal of spiritual
  websites, but a strong business model allows
  flexibility services offered
• Many factors contribute to the success and
  failure on an online business
• Traditional retail activities may not be the same
  online

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E-Commerce

• Fong presents a model of how fundamental
  personnel work together in an online business
• Marketing, content, transactions, customer
  service
• Attract customers into the primary site
• Advertising via mailings, emails, banners on
  other sites
• Sales gt temporarily change of information on the
  site
• Interact customers interest in the information
  on the site
• Static or dynamic information
• Act capturing and processing an order
• Shopping carts, order tracking, taxes, shipping,
  payments
• React customer service
• Help desk or webmaster email

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E-Commerce

• Customer assurance
• Small unknown online businesses at a disadvantage
• Methods
• Assurance protocol
• Timely acknowledgement of transaction by seller
• Known trusted third party vouches for
  trustworthiness of small business
• Umbrella assurance
• Known entity acts as a host for the small business

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Cognitive Factors

• Website developers should utilize a user-centered
  design process
• Meaningful items vs. unfamiliar jargon
• Concrete words vs. abstract words
• Retrieval cues and standardization
• Humans use known problem solving strategies and
• Can block solving a problem by using wrong
  interaction
• Design should allow for correction without penalty

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Seacoast Ministries Case Study

• Local Christian group Seacoastministries.org
• Educational materials for churches
• Community interaction
• Training for custom certifications

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Design Goals

• Look and feel
• Wow
• sea coast motif
• Not business-like or too religious
• Clearer navigation
• Accessible to large demographic (many types of
  users)
• Easily maintainable and modifiable

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Cascading Style Sheets

• Simpler, more manageable HTML code
• Documents look good at any resolution
• Finer and more predictable control over
  presentation
• Define the look of a site in one place, modify
  whole site by changing just one file
• Older browsers can still see pages
• People with disabilities have better access
• Simple syntax uses a number of English keywords
  to specify the names of various style properties

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Original Design

• Dull
• Confusing

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Modified Design

• Cleaner
• Simpler
• Unified color scheme
• beachy

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Experimental Setup

• Each site was evaluated to determine how long it
  took users to complete a given task.
• Participants were asked to perform the same five
  tasks for each site.
• Times for each task were recorded.
• Tasks were chosen to represent typical
  information of interest to most users.

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Experimental Setup

• Participants also responded to a questionnaire
  about each site.
• The questionnaire attempted to measure user
  satisfaction using several Likert scales.

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Results
How much does it cost to receive a year's
subscription of the Baileys' newsletter?
What telephone number should be called to reach
Seacoast Ministries?
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Results
This website provides enough information about
the services offered.
The purpose of this website is always clear to
me.
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Remarks

• Seacoast Ministries requested that specific
  design features be included.
• Dealt primarily with look-and-feel
• Time-consuming to implement
• Two design considerations had to be omitted
• Empathic communities
• E-commerce

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Conclusions

• Modified site was successful in decreasing users
  times to complete tasks (easier navigation)
• Users felt that modified site made information
  accessible and clear (consistent design)
• Anecdotally, users generally felt that the
  modified site was more aesthetically pleasing.

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References

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