Usability

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Usability

• By John Sullivan

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Why Usability?

• Now, users experience the usability of a site
  before they have committed to using it and before
  they have spent money on potential purchases.
• Main goal is to make it easy for customers to
  perform useful tasks.
• Remember that innovation is 10 inspiration and
  90 perspiration.
• Usability changes less rapidly than web
  technology.
• Place the customer needs at the center of your
  web strategy.

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Why Everybody Designs Websites Incorrectly

• Business model of treating the Web as a brochure
• Managing the web project as it if were a
  traditional corporate project. Lead to internal
  focus
• Information Architecture structuring site to
  mirror corporate structure
• Page design creating gorgeous pages and evoke
  positive feelings. Internal demos do not suffer
  response time delays. Keep user in mind.
• Content Authoring writing in the same style as
  youve always written. Hypertext
• Linking strategy treating your own site as the
  only one that matters, without proper links to
  other sites and without well-designed entry
  points for others to link to.

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Page Design

• When visiting MapQuest, most of the screen space
  ends up being used for distracting machinery that
  is extraneous to the content the user came for.
  Of the 480,000 precious pixels on an 800x600
  display, only 20 are used for the content of
  interest to the user (green). Additionally, 31
  of the pixels are used for operating system and
  browser controls (blue), 23 are used for site
  navigation (yellow), and 10 are used for
  advertising (red). The remaining 16 of the
  pixels go to unused (white) because coding does
  not allow reformatting.

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Larger Screen

• MapQuest on a bigger screen results in an equally
  bad utilization of the pixels. Of a 700x1024
  pixel area, only 14 is used for content (green).
  More acceptable 16 is used for the operating
  system (blue), 51 used for site navigation
  (yellow), and a reasonable 6 is for advertising.
  13 unused.

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1999 vs 1997

• New design introduces a new type of advertising
  pollution in the form of special buttons to add
  map listings for selected companies. It is
  fairly useless for anybody who travels to London
  to have a feature map location of the nearest
  Dennys or Fairfield Inn. Some new features are
  useful, such as the capability of Quick Maps to
  get the location of an airport.

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Whitespace

• Avoiding wasteful amounts of whitespace should
  not lead to extremely dense layouts like the
  February 1997 version of Pathfinders home page.

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Rules

• Do not consider whitespace wasted when it is part
  of the content design or navigation design.
• As a rule of thumb, content should account for at
  least half the pages design.

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Too Much

• The June 1997 version of the home page feels less
  stressful, although it is still somewhat
  confusing and overwhelming. The lines separating
  the feature headlines do not seem necessary as
  an experiment, I tried to delete the lines and
  move the headlines closer to the magazine logs to
  more clearly denote which magazine goes with
  which story.
• Jakob Nielsen

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The End

• By John Sullivan
• Fall 2000.