When someone is diagnosed with cancer, that person and all the people around her are desperate for information. They want the facts quickly--especially details about the specific cancer, the prognosis, the courses of treatment, the clinical research, and so on. The trauma they've just been handed is mind-boggling. It shouldn't be compounded by the frustration of a Web site that's supposed to help but is instead difficult to use.
CancerNet, the dot-gov site that is the online offshoot of the National Cancer Institute, is often the first Web stop for cancer patients, patients' families, health-care providers, and at-risk individuals. Although the site doesn't sell anything, it understands the concept of customer service very well. In fact, because CancerNet is in the business of dispersing valuable information--something far more precious than any commercial product or service--it felt compelled to listen to its own "customers" more closely. CancerNet now stands as a model for its dot-com cousins, showing the importance of focusing on what visitors need when they use a site.
"Building sites around the way users work, whether that is looking for information on cancer research or buying a CD, as opposed to around a company or organisation's view, is unfortunately not the norm," says Eric Schaffer, president of Human Factors International, a usability consulting firm that worked with the institute on its site redesign. Designing a site according to how people will use it may sound like a common-sense strategy, but it turns out to be extremely unusual--not only for a government agency but for all Web sites.
More than a year ago, the institute, which is one arm of the US federal government's National Institutes of Health, realised it was receiving far too much negative feedback from people who were not able to find what they needed. One doctor clicked and clicked but couldn't find information about Hodgkin's disease in children. The institute's leadership issued a directive: Right alongside research, communication is now a primary goal.
"Our problem was never a lack of information," says Sanjay Koyani, group leader, Web design and usability. "There are millions of pages of peer-reviewed information at our site. People just couldn't find what they were looking for."
This meant a redesign of CancerNet. Koyani and his team were handed the assignment in late 1999, and they knew they had their work cut out for them. They had research from firms such as Forrester and Jupiter Media Metrix, which indicated that across all sites, visitors couldn't find what they are looking for as often as 60 percent of the time.
