Slow Operations - Page 33

Applets that communicate back to the server should show a progress indicator while doing so. Progress indicators (often shown as percent-completed bars) are necessary in any user interface for any operation that has slow response times (more than 10 seconds). Applets that connect back to the server will often experience highly variable delays due to the weakness of the Internet. It is thus doubly important for the progress indicator to show the actual progress of the operation and its expected duration. For example, the progress indicator could show the proportion of a database that has been searched or the steps in a sequence that have been completed (while avoiding system- oriented terminology). Such progress indications may require a trickle of info from the server to the applet as it is servicing the request.

Applets also need a cancel button to allow the user to interrupt any slow operations. Interruptability is particularly needed for any server connections.

Conclusion

It is tempting to hope for a technological solution to the problems of site design: a great natural-language search engine that will allow users to find the exact page they want in a single attempt. Or the perfect document management system that will enforce design standards so that all pages have a unified look and feel, no matter what department they are from.

I am hopeful myself that the technology will get better, but the biggest issues in website usability still require manual intervention. A website will not feel like a unified whole unless all the designers and writers agree to actively work for the greater good of one face to the customer. And no search can find pages that are poorly described or that don't have the information the user is looking for.

Information architecture is getting much lip service, and it is indeed a huge advance that many projects acknowledge that they need to design the structure of the navigation space and not simply let it evolve randomly. We still need more sites to base their information architecture on the customers' needs instead of the company's own internal thinking. Once this happens and people become better at writing good links that support navigation and good headlines that work in search engines, there is hope that users will finally be able to navigate the Web.

Today, the dominating web user experience is that on the average, you are on the wrong page. Users expect trouble on the Web and they expect to waste time looking at irrelevant pages before they find the one they want. This will hopefully not continue to be true. Once it becomes easier to navigate the best sites, users will revolt against the sites that make them spend most of their time on irrelevant pages.

User-Contributed Content - Page 32
Designing Web Usability