Integrated Web Design -- Usability: Drawing Outside the Lines

Date: Feb 20, 2004

Although one-size-fits-all usability concepts provide a good foundation for designers interested in creating usable sites, a great user experience has far more to do with what you know about your users than what the books tell you. Molly Holzschlag shows you how to draw outside the usability lines and create sites that address the true needs of your site visitors.

Usability: Drawing Outside the Lines - Title Page

As Web design and development become wider in scope, individual topics within it become equally deeper. Usability has become its own depth area over the past few years, largely due to the influence of usability "Thought Leaders" attempting to create better interactive Web sites for site visitors.

But the usability field within Web design has a little problem: It's at odds with itself. On the one hand, you have Moses-on-the-Mountain pundits making claims that there's one good way to address usability issues; on the other hand, you have real-world conundrums born of complex sites. So, it's unclear about which is the right approach to many coming into the Web design and development industry.

The right approach, as this article will demonstrate, is finding a balance between punditry and people. Usability, which is also referred to as user interface design or user experience design, has only one true goal: to help the audience quickly and effortlessly get to what they came for.

Punditry versus People

The usability field within Web design was greatly influenced by Jakob Nielsen. His seminal work Designing Web Usability and Web site (useit.com) have provided very helpful information to those individuals looking for methods to assist them in making more useful sites.

Nielsen's work is incredibly important, and the criticisms I make of his approach in this article are not meant to dissuade you from reading his work. In fact, quite the opposite, as you'll see by the conclusion of this article. I pick him out as an example because he's done so much to influence the field—and because his work is so widely known and available.

I consider Nielsen's approach to usability to be one that uses a broad-stroke approach. I consider him a pundit: He teaches, but he does so by giving opinions in an authoritative manner.

The punditry approach to sharing information can be very helpful for those with more sophisticated critical-analysis skills, but for those without a lot of experience, it can be very dangerous. After all, you shouldn't believe everything you read, right?

The pundit will be concept-driven. He or she will teach concepts that may or may not have come from experience. Concept-driven approaches to learning have pros and cons:

Broad-stroke approaches help solve a wide range of problems but may miss the needs of many individuals within the audience.
An authoritarian voice is not necessarily an authoritative voice, meaning that learning from pundits requires the learner's ability to decipher what is opinion based on ideas, opinion based on experience, and factual data.
Pundits usually espouse a one-size-fits-all concept, such as "always underline links." Once again, this approach may solve a broad question, but doesn't go deep enough to address individual needs.
The punditry approach requires less work for the less-experienced or motivated learner who will follow the rules set out by the authority—and not necessarily question that authority).
Learning from an authoritarian rather than authoritative voice means more work and research for the highly motivated learner.

The other type of learning found within the usability arena is audience-driven. This is the "people" part of the equation, and the job of the usability specialist in this approach is to study his or her audiences very closely and understand the needs of the individuals within the audience. So there can't be a one-size-fits-all approach because the individual need may result in a custom modification.

The people approach has pros and cons, too:

Specific-stroke approach helps solve very specific problems within a site, but may miss the needs of the broader audience.
The responsibility immediately shifts to the usability specialist insofar as how he or she provides solutions to problems. The information comes from observing the audience, not from reading a book.
The audience-driven approach requires more work, more time, and more money. Although not a con by definition, work, time, and money are always at a premium for people, and this can be considered prohibitive.

As you can see by this short comparison, the two approaches offer important information and methods, but they are both problematic.

Case in Point: eBay

To demonstrate the conflict in approaches more adequately, I will examine some of the punditry-versus-people issues that occur on eBay. I had the good fortune to learn a lot about the way eBay's usability and design teams approach problems while working on a book last year, and the experience gave me the cornerstone ideas for this article.

eBay is a profound example of usability needs insofar as the people approach. Although many of us enjoy eBay as a place to go find great deals and interesting goods, the reality is that eBay has become a job for many people. Millions of individuals rely on eBay as the primary means of running their businesses and wouldn't have the same opportunities and traffic without eBay. Other unique issues that affect eBay include the following:

It has an enormous visitor and user base.
It has a highly diverse visitor and user base in terms of general demographics.
It has a highly diverse user base in terms of technical skills.
It is an enormous site—one of the largest on the Web—and is growing daily.
It has been around long enough to have significant legacy concerns.

The individuals working on the eBay Web site are very sensitive to the issues confronting them. Any conceptual improvement or change to the site's interface can in fact cause significant people problems. In fact, Tom Walter, who has led multiple redesigns of eBay, sums it up. "If you want to make art, go paint a picture," he says. "At eBay, we're designing software—software that people use daily for their livelihood. That's a huge responsibility."

So what happens when John Q., who has very little computer skills or interest other than offering his handmade cabinetry to a wide audience via eBay, suddenly finds that the navigation he's used for the last four years has completely changed? Chances are that he won't say "Hey, cool!" Chances are that he'll feel frustrated that he has to now learn a different means of getting from point A to point B, causing him extra time that interferes with his ability to do what he came to eBay to do: sell his stuff.

In their book Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir walk through a number of Web sites and provide concept-based criticism about what was good or not about the given site's usability. From a punditry perspective, their criticisms make broad-stroke sense. In regards to eBay's design, one of the main concerns expressed by Nielsen and Tahir is the complexity and type of options for navigation. And although Nielsen and Tahir aren't wrong from a broad perspective, they didn't dig deeper into the people issue involved.

But I did. And what I found was that there was significant concern within eBay to avoid taking away navigation options and styles because of the very situation I described for our fictitious John Q. From eBay's perspective, any change made to the site must come about through a genuine need. This is clearly an audience-driven approach, not a concept-driven one.

The eBay designers have dug deep into their audience and realize that their user community wants change to go slowly, with new introductions to the interface being made with care. Sometimes, it means adding a new feature without removing an old one. Yes, it results in clutter, which Nielsen and Tahir rightly express concerns about. However, the audience is driving, and if the clutter is less important than having the options, and if we are working under the idea that the goal of usability is to get the audience to what they want, the audience-driven perspective must reign in this case.

Balancing Punditry and People

It becomes increasingly clear that a balance between concept-driven and audience-driven approaches must be taken. To do that, it's important to know the concepts of usability, which provides the opportunity to have if not an actual rule, certainly a guideline that can be followed when no audience-driven information is available.

Some of the most practical global concepts in usability include the following:

Keep content concise and clear. Clarity reduces problems with individuals understanding interface and content within individual as well as site pages.
Make it clear on every page where an individual is. (This is referred to orientation in user interface design.) Without a clear idea of where we are within a site, it becomes more difficult to know how to get where we want to go.
Make it clear on every page how an individual can go to another location, including the home page. Remember: Not every user enters from your home page, so constant orientation within the site is critical.
Use Search and place it in a location that is consistently available. Although a Search feature might not be appropriate for every site (especially those that are quite small and not growing per se), the larger and more complex the site, the more important it is to have a ready Search capability to help people get to the information they require as quickly as possible.
Reduce or remove generally known problems such as pop-up windows and excessive banner ads. Pop-up windows and banner ads are two elements we know to be problematic, and yet they persist! If you must have ads, that's understandable, but try to incorporate the ads so they do not detract from the need of your users to get to the content they're after. Eliminating pop-ups is a blessing to all users, as is evidenced by the recent proliferation of pop-up blockers in standalone software and within certain Web browsers.
Keep file sizes small to ensure quick downloading of pages. Of course, this advice has been around possibly longer than usability for the Web has, but it remains a cornerstone of good practices, even for those who have broadband.
Follow W3C standards-compliant markup and CSS for better performance and accessibility. Many of the solutions to the clear structuring of content, ability to serve one file to multiple browsers, and additions of accessibility features come directly from within markup and CSS.

Of course, these are very general guidelines, and at any time, audience-driven concerns may override them. Some of the most practical approaches to dealing with audience issues include the following:

Know your audience! This is the first rule of all aspects of design. You have to know who you are creating for if you want to meet their needs. Failing this critical first rule means potential disaster. If you're creating an on-the-edge gaming site for teenagers, and your designer wants to make it very minimalist by using images sparingly and lots of text content, you will lose the audience quickly.
Audience information comes from a variety of areas: demographic analysis, direct user feedback, and usability testing. Demographic analysis means spending time in planning to ensure that any information about the currently known and future intended audiences are clearly defined. Direct user feedback occurs once the site is up and running. This can be done inexpensively by adding polls and easily-accessed feedback links or pages within the site. Finally, usability testing will be very important for those sites with any significant user base, but costs can be prohibitive, so planning and care must be taken from the outset to accommodate these concerns.
Know the intent of the site. Although understanding the audience must be expressed first, knowing what the intent of the site is matches the audience need one-to-one. If your site's intent is to provide information and resources to individuals suffering from a certain kind of visual problem, naturally you will have to modify your site to fit both the audience and the site's intent. You may have to have larger fonts, for example, or higher contrast pages to assist your audience in getting to the intended information.

The Solution Is Balance

Aristotle told us that moderation in all things is a good way to live. The idea that balance makes for better people applies to Web sites, too. The pundits have authoritarian rules that can often be used to address big problems.

Although these ivory-tower usability beliefs can provide an excellent foundation for those of us interested in creating usable sites, a successful user experience has far more real-world application than what a pundit can tell you. You have to get out there on the front lines with your audience and draw outside the usability lines to address the real need of your site visitor: to get what they came for.

Resources

Please enjoy the following usability resources.

Books

The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web, by Jesse James Garrett (New Riders, 2002, ISBN: 0735712026).
Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, by Steve Krug (New Riders, 2000, ISBN: 0789723107).
Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, by Jakob Nielsen (New Riders, 1999, ISBN: 156205810X).
Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir (New Riders, 2001, ISBN: 073571102X).

Online Resources

Adaptive Path. An excellent resource for audience-driven design.
useit.com. Jakob Nielsen's Web presence.