The following are some long notes after cracking yet another book on a topic I want to know more about in general terms, and hopefully be more likely to remember some of these principles when I am in a position that it would be good to be applying them, when I do my web things. Hopefully, the kinds of conclusions and insight that you see in my notes will help tell you whether you want to go out and get this or a similar book for yourself. This is what I got out of just one chapter of a book. I may be doing this sort of thing with other chapters later.
I mention several people's web sites in this article, in which I note some thing they have been doing that I do not want to emulate. These web sites have great collections of information. I would not be mentioning them if I did not think they were worth while places to suggest that other people go. So when I mention something I not like, that is an eye speck blemish from the perspective of what I seek in making my site better, when learning from them. If you go to their site and not find the evidence of which I speak, then that will tell us that they saw my observations (or someone brought it to their attention), and applied these lessons of usability that I am struggling to learn.
Website Usability, according to the introduction in the book Usability for the Web by Tom Brinck, Darren Gergel and Scott Wood, is a collection of goals that can conflict with each other, so we have to prioritize which are applicable in any given circumstance. This concept also applies to any documentation we have that teaches someone something, and our design of software outside of the web.
- Functionally Correct
- The software is user-friendly, and performs flawlessly.
- Efficent to Use
- Get the job done fast and hassle free.
- Easy to Learn
- Minimal steps for the end user.
- Easy to Remember
- Ideally, the end user not need any cheat sheets.
- Error Tolerant
- How are errors discovered and dealt with?
- Subjectively Pleasing
- Think graphics, color combinations, content arrangements. Is the color contrast one that works for people of all ages?
- My personal preference is maximum visual contrast (light background, dark text) without assaulting the eyeballs (avoid bright stuff except to make an occasional emphasis).
Common Problems of Usability with many web sites today include
- Human Perceptual Issues
- We should give serious thought to how best to arrange data to serve the needs of the people who will be accessing it. Data organized efficiently according to ruies of underlying data base structure is not good enough when end users not familiar with that structure, like people on highways without maps or road signs.
- Think menu structures such that it is obvious for a user where to look first, using subheads on lists. I have barely begun doing links on my web page, and I have seen tons of examples how not to do them, where people have columns of links that scroll off the page before we get to another topic of linkage.
- Ernie the Attorney, has sub-headings for Personal, then Law stuff, but I not see any link from his home page to his stories
- or categories (which have some software redirecting anyone who tries to explore them, so from that I conclude that he has applied software to successfully get privacy in some categories - for more info on that concept see in my Radio Doc Sources - look up Rick Klau),
- of which he has many interesting to explore, and once there, there is no obvious link back to his home page. Thus, to successfully navigate Ernie's site, you have to Understand the Radio url number system, and also recognize that Ernie violates hyperlinking standards (more on that below). I want to do my site so that users do not need to know any secret system to get around.
- Alison Fish, for example, has sub-headings for Radio Docs, Development, Web etc. but I can see that any one of those can begin to get like the long winded lists of older sites. She also has no lonk back to her home page from a story. This could be deliberate.
- My friend Julian Goh (whose site is not yet open to the public) saw some navigation tools that he saw no need for, and he deleted them. This was a Manila site in which we discovered that once you delete some things, undeleting them is not always available, especially after the learning process got to the point of realizing that we did have a need for what he deleted.
- I eventually want to have an easy site navigation structure, in which from any page a user can get to my home, then from there to any of my content - categories, stories, archives. At some point perhaps I should move all the home stuff to some new category name, and leave the home page for site navigation aids.
- Navigation
- Is there a logical architecture to the information on a web site, that is obvious to any casual visitor?
- Links should have a clear indication of where they are going, without being urls that run across the page. Think about phone menus when we call some business and there are a string of vague categories that drill down to more specific except most of the time it is guess work which is best and we often end up not where we want to go, so let's avoid that sort of thing in what we design.
- There are standards. Use them.
- Blue text with underline is a hyper link - do not use that for something else. Purple means my browser remembers me being there once before. Some folks whose weblogs I subscribe to via News Aggregation (see Understand Radio News Aggregation for explanation of that topic) who habitually violate this standard, such as Ernie the Attorney. Do not emulate them, in that respect.
- Cory Doctorow's Boing Boing uses bold black headings for items, which are rendered to my Radio News Aggregation like Ernie's abuse of purple underlining. This is a potential glitch to bring to the attention of Radio Userland. However those links do work to get to the permalinks involved, where Ernie's purple words are just that, with no linkage.
- I want the same standard that we get with Radio Free Blogistan. Incidentally, look at the arrows at the top of the page. No ambiguity. That is a standard to emulate with arrows.
- If clicking on something goes some place and it is inappropriate to use the blue text underline, then make the fact of the hyperlink obvious, such as a raised 3D image that looks like a button. HOW to accomplish that is something I will need to learn in future lessons.
- Human Memory
- Too much to remember means something will be forgotten.
- Too long to remember means something will be forgotten.
- Too many similarities in what is to be remembered means confusion invited.
- Don't require users to have to remember stuff between web pages. They will stop to look at something interesting and forget what they needed to remember. The book gives some examples of financial sites that make it far too easy for a human being to enter what is a valid financial transaction, and not in fact know that one did a transaction, but is in fact a human keying error, made all the more likely by the design of the site.
- Database Integration
- Many businesses use their live data as output to a web site where the end users interact with the data. There is a great risk that the data changes rapidly while the user is trying to do the transaction, so there needs to be some way to let the user know that this is happening and can affect them.
- It should be well known to developers how web design is different from traditional software. In pre-web programs, the data dictates the flow. Different kinds of data need to be processed in different but similar ways, and the bulk of the data can be organized to process similar transactions together for overall efficiency. In web-processing, the end user could do any random thing, and each input needs to be resolved rapidly, so as not to keep the user waiting.
- If a user returns to a page we recently we were on, are we seeing the latest information, or something from our Browser Cache?
12:15:25 PM 
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