USEworthy September 2003
The monthly Newsletter from The Usability Company

Welcome to September's edition of USEworthy. In this issue, Marty Carroll, Director of Usability Practice at The Usability Company looks at what charities with limited resources can do to make their websites compliant with accessibility guidelines.

Carl Kim, who recently joined the Usability Practice as a Usability Specialist tackles the debate on the effects of usability on creativity. Is usability compatible with creativity? Does it stifle originality? How can usability professionals and creatives work best together? Carl's article addresses these questions and more.

In addition, we provide an article that appeared on kablenet.com, August 6 on Catriona Campbell, The Usability Company's Founder and Chairman, and the recently launched quality framework for UK government website design. Catriona discusses the basis of the framework and the factors affecting the implementation of the guidelines including the risks posed by the general lack of sufficient budget for web development in the public sector.

The Usability Company News

August was a hot month at The Usability Company. We are happy to announce that we have now held 2 accessibility training courses from which we have received very positive feedback from the attendees. September' s session is almost sold out, with only three places left. If you are considering making your website or Intranet accessible to all, accessibility training should be your first step toward that goal.

The Usability Company's staff was invited to speak at several usability related events last month, highlights of which were the e-consultancy roundtable and the AIGA Experience Design meeting. Catriona Campbell was invited to participate at the e-Consultancy roundtable August 26 focusing on the key issues and trends within usability. The roundtable explored what the attendees felt were the biggest issues and challenges for the usability industry, the main trends and their favourite resources.

AIGA Experience Design London invited Catriona to speak at their meeting on designing for e-Government, September 3. Catriona spoke on the meeting's themes, which included the following questions. How do designers design for the e-government 'back office' and evangelise user experience in government? How do designers create and work with government-mandated standards for user interface and usability? And where do policy agendas run up against designer led approaches to problem-solving?

And Finally...

This year's British HCI conference will take place in Bath, England, 8-12 September 2003 and it is set to be a fantastic event. The conference will bring together researchers, practitioners, educators and users with interests in the many facets of human-computer interaction, usability and interactive systems from all over the world. Catriona Campbell is chairing this year's Industry Day, Thursday, September 11.

Keynote speakers include Andrew Pinder, UK Government E-envoy and Gordon Smiley, Group Director for Microsoft's enterprise customers, partners and consultancies. Thursday is also the day of the conference dinner, which will be held in the historic Roman Baths and Pump Room in Bath and starts at 7.30 pm. For more information on the conference, the conference dinner and to purchase tickets, please visit the British HCI Group website.

Understanding website accessibility

Marty Carroll, Director of Usability Practice, The Usability Company

Web and Intranet accessibility has become an important issue for moral, legal and business reasons, so much so that RNIB recently announced that it is to bring the first legal cases for lack of online accessibility. Marty Carroll, director of usability practice at The Usability Company, looks at what charities with limited resources can do to fulfil their legal and what some consider a moral obligation to ensure that their websites and Intranet comply with accessibility guidelines. The issue of website accessibility has once again come to the fore with RNIB's recent announcement that it is supporting a number of individuals in legal cases against organisations for failing to provide websites that can be used by those with sight problems.

Under the Disability Discrimination Act (1995), DDA, organisations are legally obliged to make 'reasonable adjustments' to ensure services are accessible to everyone, and last year the Disability Rights Commission's Code of Practice that accompanies the DDA confirmed that this requirement applied equally to online services. Although these are the first cases of this type to be brought in the UK, there have been a number of successful prosecutions abroad, the most famous of which was against the Sydney Olympic Committee in 2000.

In the UK RNIB has done much to raise awareness of the need for online operations to comply with the legislation, however designing a truly accessible website involves consideration of more than blind and partially sighted people. There are many other kinds of difficulties that can affect someone's ability to use a website, such as problems with hand-eye co-ordination. Despite growing awareness of the need to address such issues though, there still exists a great deal of uncertainty and confusion about which steps exactly should be taken to deliver an accessible website.

Much of this uncertainty stems from the nature of the British legal system, which means that until case law is established it is impossible to say what level of accessibility is needed to ensure compliance. This situation is further complicated by a number of international and domestic accessibility guidelines. The Worldwide Web Consortium has developed a set of guidelines for developers (WAI - Web Accessibility Initiative) but these have been criticised for being overly complex and difficult to implement. There's also Bobby, a commercial tool that provides organisations with an evaluation of any accessibility difficulties, while RNIB has developed its See It Right logo, which remains the only accessibility accreditation in the UK to be awarded by an independent body.

It's understandable then that many organisations faced by the maze of legislation, guidelines and standards are perplexed as to how exactly to deliver a socially inclusive website, particularly organisations with limited resources.

Of course, the ideal scenario would be to incorporate accessibility considerations into the design process from the very beginning. A good design methodology should balance all of a project's requirements - good usability, accessibility, aesthetic considerations, as well as the organisation's needs - to create websites that deliver on all of these fronts from the outset. Building accessibility into a website is not as complex as it sounds, but requires an awareness on the part of the developer of the tools and software that are used by those with physical disabilities. Steps to consider for instance include adding keyboard functionality to websites for users who have difficulties using a mouse, or adding concise and comprehensive tags for blind users who use screen readers.

For organisations with limited resources though, creating an accessible website may be a new consideration and building from scratch is simply not an option. Admittedly, it may be necessary to retrofit prominent and frequently used parts of the site, adding new features to improve ease-of-use for the disabled. However, a fruitful and long-term approach to ensuring accessibility should be incremental, whereby accessibility becomes not a one-off solution, but is integrated into a design approach aimed at the slow evolution of the site towards increasing accessibility. Once designers are aware of the steps that can be taken to improve accessibility, these considerations should form an integral part of design processes as the website continues to grow and be modified. A useful benchmark here is perhaps the WAI, which suggests three increasingly advanced accessibility standards, offering organisations a road-map over time to greater accessibility.

As mentioned, until the first test case the exact nature of the required 'reasonable adjustments' will remain unclear, but an organisation that has embarked on this route, and whose fixed goal is increasing accessibility, can safely be said to be erring on the side of caution. It should be remembered too, that the significance of website accessibility goes way beyond fulfilling a set of legal requirements: the case for accessibility is simply a recognition that IT and the internet have revolutionised the way we work and communicate. It is vital that as technology advances in its complexity and reach, and continues to play an ever more important role in our working and home lives, nobody is excluded from the immense possibilities this brings.

For further information see:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/

http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp

https://theusabilitycompany.com/

www.rnib.org.uk/digital/

Creativity vs. Usability

Did you hear the one about the usability specialist who is also a poet? His poems are in bullet points and devoid of metaphors.

Moreover, they are half the length of the original draft, and half the length of that again. The language is succinct and in layman's terms; there's one proposition per stanza, and each stanza is short. To avoid subjectivity, lest it create ambiguity, his poems are preceded by a conclusive summary. And of course, as always, his pieces of prose must also rhyme, as that is what his readers expect to find. You can see what I'm getting at: Is usability incompatible with creativity? Does it stifle originality?

As a usability specialist I often find myself being acutely aware of the implications of my recommendations to those in new media who are creative by vocation, such as graphic designers. This is because one of the basic tenets of usability is minimising cognitive processing by users, 'the need to figure out what they need to do'. Thus, many of my recommendations are premised on the pursuit of:

• Abiding by standards and following conventions
• Minimising relearning
• Consistency
• Catering to the lower common denominator
• Avoiding marketese (promotional marketing style with subjective claims)

In contrast, one of the many aims of graphic design is creating something new, something fresh, vis-à-vis being creative. So you can see the potential conflict between two disciplines:

• One wants to call the shopping basket for a car dealership 'the shopping trailer'; while the other wants to keep it as 'shopping basket'
• One wants to use the image of a dog eared page and the label 'turn overleaf' as a link to the next screen of an online annual report; the other recommends a button labelled 'next'
• One wants to have a paragraph of copy as a bitmap image in order to ensure the text is in a specific size, in the corporate typeface of New Baskerville, which is a typeface that does not come standard with an operating system, and with correct leading, kerning, and tracking. The other wants it in HTML text in sans-serif, left aligned of course
• One wants an animation in Flash on the homepage, which takes up most of the screen, as this will present the business as being dynamic and progressive. The other recommends using a smaller image in .GIF or .JPG. with a two line text summary

The above examples are real life examples from my and my colleagues' experiences.

And it's not just graphic designers - I have also experienced marketing people and programmers respond in ways that suggest they see usability as curtailing their professional creativity. Stereotypically, the former wants to use colourful (but potentially ambiguous) language to convey information; the latter wants to showcase the latest 'cool' technology, but which doesn't work on some browsers. The usability specialist evaluates the prototype and grants neither of the wishes.

So is usability destined to be a thorn on the creatives' side? Certainly not. The aim of usability is not about suppressing creativity and originality, but more about knowing the target audience and addressing their needs while simultaneously addressing the client's business needs. Simply put, it's horses for courses.

Therefore, for a website dedicated specifically to web graphic designers I would expect the page to be designed for viewing at 1024 x 768 since almost all web graphic designers will be using at least this resolution instead of the 800 x 600 resolution that is more common with the greater online population. On another site whose primary objective is to service architects I would expect to find technical terminology pertaining to architecture. If another site were to be promotions based, perhaps consisting of a competition, then it is likely (and appropriate) that the copy would be written in 'marketese' style.

Of course, for the majority of websites it's not as clear-cut as these examples. So the question remains: Why is there a greater emphasis on usability in new media (for example the web) compared to other forms of communication such as books, magazines, radio, and so on? I do not presume to know a definitive answer, but I will point out some explanations.

The Web is ubiquitous: a user can access a website without the temporal and physical constraints, especially those of a specialist journal that can only be attained through a subscription or in a library. The individual pages of such a journal, or even of any book, can be considered in the context of the entirety of the publication, in its physical bound entity between the front and back covers, and where quick reference can be made by flipping through the pages.

In contrast, a user can directly access a page within a website via a deep link for example, from a search engine or another site. Unlike the individual page in a book the individual web page must shoulder the responsibility of representing the overall site. A user deep linked into a site needs to be contextualised: the web page must faithfully represent the brand, the business' or the site's reason for being, offer assistance to users, provide orientation and similarly provide access to other areas of the site. Therefore, an individual web page needs to be a self-sufficient entity at the same time as being a congruent part of the overall site (think of a regiment that forms part of a battalion). That this is a significant burden for one screen to shoulder is evidenced by the amount of screen real estate taken up by elements, such as navigation and brand space that are not part of the main body content. According to one analysis by Jakob Nielsen such elements account for 43% of the space on a webpage.

It's a pain looking at a web page

Another fundamental difference between the web and a medium such as television is that the former tends to be task driven and this includes looking for information, whilst the latter is generally for leisure. I won't elaborate on this as it has been widely commented on, other than to state the obvious: tasks require effort and people want to expend as little effort and time as possible, unless it's for pleasure.

This goes to the heart of usability. By definition usability is the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which users can achieve tasks (to paraphrase ISO 92411). The need for efficiency and effectiveness is much more important on the web because it can be an uncomfortable medium to interact with:

• Screen resolution: computer screens have a resolution that is 1/4 to 1/8 that of print, making onscreen viewing tiresome. As well, computer monitors generally have refresh rates between 60 and 95 Hertz which again can cause eye strain
   
• Virtual space: the user's interaction is confined to a 2-Dimensional interface, and which is therefore limited in so many ways compared to a 3-D physical world
   
• Speed: although Internet connection speeds are improving and a greater user base is now on broadband, it is still not instantaneous. The processing speed of computers is another determinant of response time

These are some of the reasons why usability has such an impact on interface design. Objectives needs to be much more focused and stringently followed mainly because there is more at stake with the Web from bad usability. The currency of usability carries much more weight online and website builders need to be canny with visual design, language and other forms of content. Such an approach is not exclusive of creativity, but it is about how to best meet the carefully identified objectives, and creativity may be one of them rather than a given by-product. I will end with a quote from Mark Twain, who was indeed a very creative individual!

'I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead' - Mark Twain

Pushing for access

Kablenet.com, 6 August 2003

Plans to improve the UK's public sector websites will need more money, says an industry expert.

The e-envoy's plan to make government websites more accessible risks being shelved because the public sector doesn't have sufficient budget for web development, according to internet usage experts.

Catriona Campbell, chair of the Usability Company and a contributor to the e-envoy's website design framework, warns that improvements may never emerge due to the lack of funding.

The plan, Quality Framework for the UK Government Website Design, was published last month as part of the e-envoy's campaign to boost take up of online public services.

Campbell told Government Computing News on 6 August 2003 that the document, which took close to a year to develop, is based on "seven steps" set out in the International Standards Organisation's "ISO 13407" internet guidelines.

The "steps" aim to ensure usability through design and management processes, in particular by gaining a good understanding of how a site will be used and by implementing a system of regular checking to ensure high standards.

"To carry out the seven steps properly requires people who are well skilled and sufficient budget," Campbell explained. "Public sector organisations will find it difficult to find the necessary skills in-house. Outsourcing to professionals is the best thing they can do."

At the launch of the plan, e-envoy Andrew Pinder said: "It is vital that government websites are accessible and easy to use as possible". Making this a reality will involve the redesign of the 800 or so official websites. But as Campbell points out, it is not cheap to test for accessibility and usability.

"The e-envoy's office has done a wonderful thing by highlighting usability needs and in the next financial year perhaps the government will put the budget aside to do this properly," she said.

In July 2003 the Usability Company judged a Central Office of Information competition for the government websites with the best usability. It chose Opportunity Wales ; MMR the facts; National Statistics and the army's recruitment site.

Source: Kable's Government Computing Publication date: 06/08/2003 01:15:07 PM

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