Web Site Usability

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Web Site Usability
Trent Mankelow Sam Ng
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Agenda

• Human Characteristics
• Technology
• What is usability?
• The importance of usability to government
• Costs and benefits
• Usability Guidelines
• Case study

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Wasting time

• Think about the top time wasters in your life
• Here are some things that have annoyed me since
  Monday
• Being put on hold
• Scrolling Microsoft Word
• Mozilla crashing
• How much time do we waste with technology?
• Information we cant find 70 of searchers
  couldnt find what they wanted
• Futzing with our PCs 5 hours a week

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Analog vs digital

• We are analog creatures
• Our inputs are analog
• Our processing is analog
• But we live in a digital world
• Digital vs. analog watches
• Precision
• Pattern matching

vs
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Our office phones

• How to use phone banking?
• Redial
• Save Redial
• Dial number
• Press StoreN via key under the screen
• To dial press StoreN (this is just to store one
  number only)
• Redial
• Via key under screen or preprogrammed key

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What is Usability?
Usability is the measure of quality of the user
experience when interacting with
something. - Jakob Nielsen

• Easy to use
• Useful
• Satisfying
• from ISO 9241

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What is usability?
from Wickens, Gordon Liu (1998)
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Political usability
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Importance of usability

• Increasingly websites are the face of government
• In the US
• 70 increase in the use of government websites
  during the past two years
• 55 of adult Internet users have visited a
  government website

Source Pew Internet American Life Project
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State of government usability

• New Zealand government websites

• 50 dont have consistent look and feel
• 60 have spelling/grammatical mistakes
• 40 have hard to use online forms
• 80 have broken links

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Costs of bad usability

• Monetary
• Wasted (and doubled) time
• Increased (and doubled) costs
• Social
• Opportunity cost
• Credibility and satisfaction
• People lose out

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Benefits of good usability

• More effective websites that allow for
• Better service for the public
• Enhanced visibility and image
• Foster greater accountability and increased
  public trust
• Repeat use which enables agencies to
• Build ongoing relationships
• Receive greater public feedback
• Encourage greater participation in government

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Usability guidelines

• Guidelines are prescriptive not rules
• Examples from our usability assessment of NZ
  government sites

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Navigation

• Differentiate and group navigation elements

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Headings and labels

• Use unique and descriptive headings

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Text appearance

• Emphasize importance

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Lists

• Format lists to ease scanning

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Forms

• Distinguish required fields and detect errors
  automatically

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Graphics and images

• Limit large images above the fold

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Write for web

• Avoid jargon

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Search

• Ensure usable search results

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Case study

• Redesigned local government portal
• Less time to complete tasks
• Reduced average task time by 62
• Approximate US1.2m in savings
• More successful in finding what they want
• Increased task completion by 23

Source www.diamondbullet.com/egov.txl
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Case study (continued)

• Other benefits
• Increase the number of people who choose to
  interact with government
• More people do business electronically rather
  than on the phone or in person
• Extends the reach of government to places that
  are too expensive to provide services in the past

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Summary

• Usability is about designing for people first
• People have characteristics and goals
• Technology should support these
• Government websites have be responsibility to be
  usable

The most sacred of the duties of a government is
to do equal and impartial justice to all its
citizens. Thomas Jefferson
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Questions
Trent Mankelow trent.mankelow_at_optimalusability.c
om
Sam Ng sam.ng_at_optimalusability.com
Saving money with usability "Sun Microsystems
has shown how spending about 20,000 could yield
a savings of 152 million dollars (in redesign).
Each and every dollar invested could return
7,500 in savings." (Rhodes, 2000)
Making money with usability IBMs massive site
redesign with usability quickly paid off. In the
month after the re-launch Shop IBM online store
traffic increased 120 percent, and sales went up
400 percent." (Battey, 1999)