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A recent report by Gartner (Six Degrees of Failure or Success in Portal Projects, 24th Sept 2002) identified poor usability as one of the three reasons for 'B2C portal catastrophic failure scenarios'. The other two reasons were that the system wouldn't accept transactions due to requirements failure or technological anomaly and incorrect information being displayed.
A requirements failure or technology anomaly suggests that the project was poorly scoped or that the scope changed. No doubt at the time the project manager was translating the requirements of the various stakeholders into a tangible set of deliverables and something got missed along the way. Although costly to the organisation and annoying to users many organisations would put this down to the complexities of running a large integration project and deal with it in subsequent development under change control. This assumes they survive the fall out.
Displaying incorrect information, such as prices the example given by Gartner creates financial loss and is essentially lack of attention to detail in the implementation. Disappointing yes, but both this and the previous reason for failure are mistakes. They are aspects of the project scope that were considered within the implementation and simply incorrectly executed.
So why poor usability? First let us consider what good or bad usability is. Good usability can be described as a situation where the interaction between user and interface achieve the goals of both the user and the provider. For example a user wants to find information quickly and the organisations wants to provide it quickly so that the user either comes back again or doesn't use an alternative channel. A simple goal, and perhaps that is where the problems begin.
When the portal project is being scoped and the implementation process defined it is unlikely that usability is considered overtly. The reason for this is that it is a soft and largely misunderstood discipline and one, which many believe is common sense. Many vendors explain that their applications have been subject to a level of user testing during development and clients are only too willing to believe that this is all they need to do. However, and almost by definition, portals are bespoke implementations where users will interact differently dependent on the content. As the content is unique between applications there is a strong argument for adopting a user centred design approach which is becoming popular in website development.
User centred design (UCD) is an end to end process that maps onto the development cycle and insures that usability is considered at every step. The big advantage of UCD is that it not only informs about the usability aspects but also it provides crucial data about the features and functionality. This helps to avoid over-development and wasted investment during the project.
Gartner categorise the most common type of failure for portal projects as 'Teflon' portals, due to their lack of stickiness. They go on to specify the main reasons for a lack of stickiness as lack of clear vision and mission for the portal, failure to understand the user requirements, lack of usability in the design, lack of commitment to the content, no attempt to track user behaviour and inadequate information architecture. All of these are contained within the UCD approach and whilst they don't guarantee a good project, if a specialist organisation is employed, that know what they are doing, the chances of failure are certainly minimised.
Luckily Gartner also explained that the shelf life of a portal project is about 6 to 9 months due to the pace of change in the technology, so at least organisations that got it wrong this time will have another chance to get it right... quite soon.
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