Does it work?
You work hard, you build your site, it looks superb; the bells ring, the whistles toot — all’s right with the world, then? Yes, smashing… until word starts to filter back from some of the people who visit it that they can’t read the text… or figure out how to get where they want to go… or what some of the items on the page mean.
The problem is, you have built the site — you know how it works; they don’t. And some of them can’t figure out things that you think are blindingly obvious.
We’re talking about usability. In other words: does your site work?
Now, there is an enormous tussle going on between advocates of usability and advocates of design. There has been for a few years — practically since the first graphic appeared on the Web.
The most renowned advocate of usability is Jakob Nielsen. If you visit his site, you will find almost no graphics, minimal formatting and lots and lots of plain text. What matters, he says, is that the user knows where she is, and how to get what she wants. Bells and whistles — graphics, sound files, animations — only get in the way.
He’s right, too, a lot of the time. I’ve seen plenty of sites rendered almost unusable by bad or excessive use of graphics, more ruined by the use of animations or sound files. I’ve seen maybe two graphics-free, text-only sites which were at all confusing to use.
On the other hand, I have seen many, many plain text sites which were eminently usable but provided no incentive to stick around — or return. Not everyone who produces a site almost wholly constructed from text can provide the sort of content Nielsen does, content which will bring people back regularly to find out what he is saying, if only to disagree with him.
The advocates of design, of course, want sites to look good, stylish, cool, sexy, artistic — they want the freedom to express themselves, to experiment and do interesting things with the media at their disposal. There are plenty of such sites out there — I’ve picked one more or less at random (avoiding those wedded to Shockwave) as an example: nathan.com.
Yes, excessively “arty” sites can be tricky to use — but a lot of them are not particularly difficult to figure out. The biggest problem with the usability crew is that they always talk as though users are complete idiots: if you do this, the user won’t know what has happened; if you do that, the user won’t understand it.
For example, a lot of usability gurus don’t like hyperlinks which open the target URL in a new window. It confuses the user, they say. So, let me get this straight — we’ve had software for more than ten years (much longer than that if you take off the Wintel blinkers) which is constructed around the concept of windows and we’re going to be confused by a new window opening?
OK, it would be a pain if every hyperlink threw up a new window, but it can be quite useful for external links. If I’m reading a page on a web site and a link takes me to another site, and I follow that path for a while, it can be tricky getting back to the page I was reading. Not every browser provides a history, and the back button does not work ad infinitum. It is, however intensely irritating if every link — every internal link — opens a new window. Of course, there is no guarantee a user agent will support the opening of a new window anyway, or even that the concept will have any meaning for it.
There is, though, a very good argument against opening new browser windows: you don’t know what else the user’s system is doing, and opening a new window can make it unstable. Netscape 4, for example, could become very unstable once three or four Navigator windows are open; there is really no good reason why you should do something unnecessary which might crash the user’s browser or OS.
The fact is, most users are not stupid. In most sites, most of the time, they can figure out what to do even when the designer has been stupid. The exceptions don’t mean the users are stupid, they mean the designer has ignored the question of the site’s usability.
Make no mistake, every site has to be usable. That doesn’t mean the same thing for every site, though. A site wanting to sell something, such as Amazon, is quite different from a site showcasing a graphic artist’s abilities. Or the site of a rock star. Or a site centred around a game of some sort. Note that each of these has some commercial aim: buy a book; hire me; come to my concerts; get this game — but that doesn’t mean they will or should look alike or function alike.
Usability means different things in different contexts; and, fundamentally, there should be no conflict between the needs of the site owners and the users: one has a message of some sort to get over, the other needs to know what the message is (even if only to decide he doesn’t want it). However, even acknowledging that different types of sites can have, or even require, different styles, there are certain general points you can bear in mind which are relevant to the usability of almost all sites.
- Is it clear what the site is for? Is it obvious what sort of business you are in, or what your aim is with the site? Certain types of site can use a little obscurity, but this is almost never the case with a commercial company’s site. Nike and Coca Cola can get away with elliptical, arty, obscure approaches — you can’t.
- Is navigation clear and consistent? If you have modified the link colours and styles, is it still obvious to the user that they are links? Is the style and placement of links consistent throughout the site or have you changed it on every page? Have you underlined text which isn’t a link at all — that is something which will confuse users, and irritate them too.
- Is the style of the different pages in the site consistent? Graphics, fonts and layout should not change much within the site because consistency in these things keeps the user aware they are in your site.
- What would someone coming to your site for the first time want to know? Make sure that information is easily at hand. Ideally, make it no more than one click away. (Hint: in a lot of circumstances what most people really want to know is how much something will cost.)
- A crucial question: what happens if someone visits your site using a different browser from yours, or a different operating system; what happens if someone doesn’t have the latest plug-in? Can they easily access the site or are they locked out? If they are, expect them to tell their friends how crappy your site is — and probably how crappy you are, too.
A lot of making your site usable involves putting yourself in the shoes of a user. This is very difficult, maybe impossible, if you have worked away at all the nuts and bolts of your site for weeks or months to get it just right. You know it too well.
If you are running a big company, you can conduct proper user testing. If you are working solo on your own project, that is probably not an option. What you need to do is find a particular type of friend. There are two requirements: the first is that they know nothing whatever about the site and your thinking behind it; the second is that they are honest. If they will say, “Wow, that’s great!” even if your site is the suckiest of sucky sites ever to be seen to suck on Web Pages That Suck — forget them. They are no help to you.
Oh yes: there is a third requirement. You need to listen to what they say about the difficulties they have with your site. That is the really tough one.
© DC 2000, 2001. All rights reserved.
