Usability
Jakob Nielsen, principal of the Nielsen Norman Group and a leading usability exponent, points out that acting on the results of usability testingcan produce spectacular results.
When IBM addressed usability issues on its e-commerce site, sales went up by 400 percent, he says, though doubling sales would be a more common outcome.
"If the customer can't find it, they can't buy it," he observed. Similar results apply to intranets: the easier it is to find the information people need, the more likely they are to use the intranet. One client recently implemented the results of the firm's usability testing an intranet usage went up by 98 percent.
Nielsen suggests a two-phase approach to ensuring the usability of a site. The first step is to base the design of the site on established guidelines, or to apply those guidelines to an existing site.
For example, his recent book Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed provides a checklist of 113 guidelines for home page design.
"People like me have been looking for years at how people use technology...we have thousands of examples of sites that do or do not work," says Nielsen.
While he stresses that guidelines are exactly that--not hard and fast rules--they provide "a fast way of getting a first cut at which aspects of the Web site need attention."
The second step addresses site-specific usability issues through user testing. Nielsen recommends taking one user at a time and watching their attempts to perform tasks.
Even though his firm carries out usability testing for its clients, he says "it's very practical to do it yourself." While large, important projects would normally turn to professionals, "it's more appropriate to do a smaller, simpler test yourself."
Watching just five users working through some tasks is likely to produce a list of between 50 and 100 things that need changing, he suggests.
Learning the basics of usability testing only takes a few days. "It really is pretty easy to do," he says, though you get better with experience. This June, Nielsen Norman Group is running a five-day conference on the subject in Sydney, and one day is devoted to the basics of testing.
"There's no excuse for not doing usability testing," he says. Developers can't judge usability for themselves, because they know what each button means, so they never go down the wrong path. "You cannot wipe your brain...you will [always] think your own Web site is easy [to use]."
Focus groups are "worthless" for determining usability, he says; the question isn't whether people like the site, it's whether they can achieve a desired result.
Catering for people with some kind of disability is "a very important issue," according to Nielsen, and its importance is growing as the population ages and the user base widens.
Failing to accommodate the blind (through designs that are compatible with speech browsers), those with low vision, and even those who have trouble with small print is an example of showing "contempt for your customer," he says.
Similarly, the use of scrolling or drop-down menus can be a problem for those with physical impairments as minor as shaky hands. "There are well established guidelines for designing inclusive Web sites," he says, such as the Nielsen Norman Group's Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities.
As before, the next step is user testing, but although that's harder to do, the guidelines in this area are more prescriptive and so testing might not be as crucial. Nielsen recommends professional testing for large e-commerce and government sites.
Automated testing tools can be of some help. Nielsen describes the well-known Bobby Web-based service as "a nice early attempt," he currently favours the Lift software and online service from UsableNet.
However, while such tools can spot that you have provided a text alternative for each graphic, they cannot determine whether the text is meaningful.
