It’s a question of usability

Regular

posted 21 Feb 2005 in Volume 1 Issue 7

By Bill Raschen

There was a bizarre sense of deja vu surrounding the start of 2005 on more than one front. The much-hyped 1000th UK Number 1 single turned out to be the ancient (and fairly cheesy) Elvis Presley ballad, ‘One Night’. This annoying landmark (if it had to be a song by Elvis, then why not more substantive fare such as ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ or even ‘Suspicious Minds’?) coincided with the publication of a Jakob Nielsen ‘Alertbox’ for mid-January that echoed a similar theme. In this, his regular bi-monthly commentary on usability issues, the web’s best-known guru on such matters produced evidence to support the argument that almost 90 per cent of usability guidelines from 1986 are still valid.

You don’t need to be a huge scholar of modern history to raise eyebrows at the use of the date 1986. Why so far back? Doesn’t that pre-date the web as we know it by more than half a decade?

But on investigating further, Nielsen’s argument becomes clear. He is referring back to usability guidelines that were compiled for US Airforce mainframe computers during the mid-1980s: a different technology, but with many parallels to the environment of corporate intranets and large websites that we are used to today. Although there are some ‘technical’ usability guidelines that span the decades and continue to be relevant (for example, the design of online forms) the majority of these guidelines do not rely on technology at all, but instead depend on human behaviour – which changes slowly, if at all.

In the context of large enterprise-wide content-management systems, this can be translated into a paraphrase of the remark made by the Earl of Chesterfield in the 1740s: “Do as you would be done by is the surest method I know of pleasing…your target audience.” If you are allowing many members of staff to put information onto your online resources, then make sure that they are entering data of a standard that, at very least, they’d be happy to retrieve for themselves. This basic rule of thumb, of course, applies to the technical design of pages as well.

This back-to-basics approach has been reiterated more than once in recent months. Gerry McGovern, speaking at the Intranet Benchmarking Forum’s first-ever conference, ‘IBF Live’ at the British Library last October, commented that “the killer application on the intranet is the staff directory. The foundation of KM is an up-to-date staff directory”.

The mechanics of getting this right depend relatively little on technology, and far more on a disciplined approach to inputting information, checking its accuracy and spelling, and making sure it is monitored on a regular basis. Get this right, and the staff directory will act as a springboard to other parts of the resource.

Nielsen also stressed the message that “simplicity is the key” in his guise as keynote speaker at the Online Information show in the UK in December 2004. In particular, he singled out the mediocre search facilities that feature on many large websites, commenting that it was “a disgrace how bad some search can be on corporate sites and intranets”. His criticisms were directed, at least in part, at the designers who fail to implement good search engines on their sites, or who fail to inform staff how to best utilise them.

But the argument again applies just as much to the individuals inputting data. If they are cutting corners (omitting specific fields, entering data wrongly, or just plain failing to put information onto the system in the first place) then it will prove increasingly difficult for a subsequent searcher to retrieve meaningful information. This may well shake the searcher’s faith in the worth of the website, and, if accessed within a work environment, will result in time wasted at the employer’s expense. Again, the message ‘do as you would be done by’ rings clear in preparing large online resources for mass consumption.

And it really does boil down to human nature – thinking of your target audience and what they want. Do you enjoy pop-ups erupting on each web page you open, or marvel at the ingenuity of designers who fail to make their hypertext links obvious? Thought not. It’s far more likely you’ll want a clear, straightforward website that is easily navigable – and that you can retrieve the information you need swiftly and easily. In retrospect, therefore, it comes as no great shock that so many usability guidelines have proven so durable. They’ve proved to be tried-and-tested classics that have shown a capacity to survive. Which is more, sadly, than deserves to be said about ’One Night’ by Elvis.