Week 1 Usability and the Web: An Overview

Since our course is about the Web Usability Design, I chose an article, called “Usability and the Web: An Overview” and share it with you. Here is the link:

http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/202/301/netnotes/netnotes-h/notes61.htm

The first thing you may ask is that, “what is usability?”. It means the site is both useful and usable for the intended audience. Hence, in the audience’s point of view, a usable web interface should be accessible, appealing, consistent, clear, simple, navigable and forgiving. Also, the web site is useful, e.g. the users are able to find the information they need in informational sites. Then, the remaining question is, how to define the intended audience, i.e. target users?

It’s easy to define a web site target audience. For instance, a software company target audience is developers. However, we still don’t know something about user needs, characteristics and abilities. The article provides that user survey is the most common way to use for audience definition. The survey may collect any or all of the following information:

• user profile (demographic information, job or recreational preferences),
• surfing profile (how do they use the Web),
• site usage (likes, dislikes, task requirements), and
• level of technology (hardware, browser type, connection speed).

From the survey, we know the needs of them and these help us to determine how to structure our content, message, and design. But it may not result in a representative sample, may be those dissatisfied with current site. Then the article also provides other sources which can be supplemented with the survey. The informal way is to use “quick and dirty” tests to provide some fast results, we can find the acquaintances or colleagues. In informal way, the following sources may be used:

• customer lists (including marketing mailing lists or records of sales),
• related organizations or associations,
• e-mail discussion lists or newsgroups,
• conferences and events,
• temp agencies or focus group companies.

From this article, I learned that there is a close relationship between the usability and the web design. Since it’s the user to come to our site, it’s important to know their needs first and then we can have our design. So, it's useful that this article tells us how to define these target audience and find their needs.