Site Design - Page 2
May 4, 2001
Page design sometimes gets the most attention. After all, with
current web browsers, you see only one page at a time. The site
itself is never explicitly represented on the screen. But from a
usability perspective, site design is more challenging and
usually also more important than page design.
Once users arrive at a page, they can usually figure out what to
do there, if only they would take a little time (OK, users don't
take the time to study pages carefully, which is why we also have
many usability problems at the page level). But getting the user
to the correct page in the first place is not easy.
In a study by Jared Spool and colleagues, when users were started
out at the home page and given a simple problem to solve, they
could find the correct page only 42 percent of the time. In a
different study by Mark Hurst and myself, the success rate was
even lower; only 26 percent of users were capable of
accomplishing a slightly more difficult task which, in the case
of our study, was to find a job opening and apply for it
(averaged across six representative corporate sites with job
listings).
The reason for the lower success rate in our study relative to
Jared Spool's study was not because we had picked particularly
poorly designed sites; on the contrary, we were looking at sites
from fairly large and well-respected companies. The difference in
success rates was due to differences in the task complexity. The
42 percent success rate was the average outcome across a range of
tasks where users were asked to find the answers to specific
questions on a website-in other words, the exact task the Web is
best for. In contrast, the 26 percent success rate was the
average when users had to carry out a sequence of steps in order
to complete the task of finding and applying for a job. If a user
was prevented from progressing through any one of the individual
steps, then he or she would not be able to perform the task.
After all, you can't apply for a job if you can't find it. But it
also does you no good to find a job posting if the application
form is too difficult.
The problem is that web usability suffers dramatically as soon as
we take users off the home page and start them navigating or
problem solving. The Web was designed as an environment for
reading papers, and its usability has not improved in step with
the ever-higher levels of complexity users are asked to cope
with. Therefore, site design must be aimed at simplicity above
all else, with as few distractions as possible and with a very
clear information architecture and matching navigation tools.
Under Construction
I thought the dreaded "under construction" signs (complete with
little animated construction worker digging away) had died
sometime in 1995 after it became clear that all websites are
always under construction. But unfortunately, they keep springing
up, albeit in more sophisticated forms.
Don't tell users what you don't have; that's only frustrating.
Don't release a partially finished website; keep it under wraps
until it has enough utility that it will make sense to users. It
is fine to have a small article that talks about future plans or
upcoming attractions, but the main entry to the site should focus
on what a user can do here and now.
As an aside, what do you think the big question mark does? Never
use such cryptic interface elements. The only reasonable
interpretation of a question mark would be a help feature because
it is somewhat standardized to use a question mark icon to access
help. But the Saturn question mark leads to the search engine:
Nobody will expect this, so nobody will find it.
Designing Web Usability
Designing Web Usability
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