Usability: the Site Speaks For Itself
May 29, 2002
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Know your audience, design for your audience, test for usability,
and solicit feedback from your audience.
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Overview:
37.8% of all Usability Pundits are wrong.
That's about as accurate as any other sweeping generalisation made by any other web usability guru.
This book features case-studies in usability and information architecture from the makers of eBay, the BBC news on-line site, The Economist web site, SynFonts (a flash-driven font foundry e-commerce site), evolt (fully cross-browser compatible) and metafilter.
Know your audience, design for your audience, test for usability, and solicit feedback from your audience.
There are no hard-and-fast rules for usability on the Web, which is why this book steers away from the rigid rules of gurus. Instead, this book looks at six very different, but highly usable sites. The web professionals behind these sites discuss the design of each site from inception to today, how they solicited and responded to feedback, how they identified and dealt with problems, and how they meet the audience's needs and expectations.
This book is edited by Molly E. Holzschlag, a member of Web Standards Project and author of a dozen books on web technologies, and Bruce Lawson, the brand manager of glasshaus.
- Max Gadney of the BBC talks about the trials of moving from the TV medium to the Web, and the differences in usability requirements between the main news site, and the sports and children's sites
- David Wertheimer talks of how The Economist's web site involved careful design work to ensure the branding mirrored the print magazine, and looks at implementing easily distinguished free content and subscription only sections
- eBay: Kelly Braun and Tom Walter look at the work involved in designing an e-commerce site that makes a profit each quarter, while meeting the needs of 42 million users
- Don Synstelein of SynFonts shows how he assembled a usable Flash-driven e-commerce site, which enhances his users' experience and protects his copyright. He shows that that, when used properly, Flash can be 100% ok
- Adrian Roselli, an IA guy from evolt, writes on how they needed to be on the vanguard of usability and accessibility, compatible with every browser known to man – and yet maintain branding look and feel
- Matt Haughey writes of his adventures in constructing Metafilter, a great community site, on no budget. This includes usability testing, usable advertising, and community management
This book is not 20 infallible rules of great information architecture.
Neither is it a bunch of sites critiqued from a one-size-fits all perspective that says every web site is used by the same people, in the same way, for identical purposes.
This book is about web usability of the sites you've seen on the front cover, from the designers of those sites.
The authors discuss their initial designs, their audience, how they got feedback on the sites, how they made design tweaks to meet the unique needs of that group of users. These are real life experiences-a snapshot of a point in time. As the web evolves, as broadband becomes the norm and more people come on-line, these sites will evolve. That's what makes them usable; a constant attention to the needs and expectations of the client and of the audience.
Who is This Book For:
It's for every web professional who wants new perspectives on real-world usability from their peers.
It's for designers who care about the audience but have been put off by Usability Experts' emnity to visual design, and it's for developers who want to think beyond the code and consider the client's whole experience.
Sample
from Don Synstelien's case-study of SynFonts
Information Architecture and Usability from glasshaus "Usability: The
Site Speaks For Itself" May 2002
(c)
glasshaus ltd. All rights reserved.
SynFonts.com
is a web site I use to sell the fonts I create. I'm Don Synstelien, and I started
designing type in 1994. Early on I operated via shareware, using AOL and a downloadable
e-zine I created. Back then, the Web wasn't nearly as rich in functionality
as it is now, which posed me a number of problems when I started getting the
idea that I could sell my fonts over the Net. This chapter is all about the
various iterations and versions of my web site and my downloadable type catalogs
I've created over the years. The aim is to show you how you can learn from your
mistakes, if you're willing to constantly question yourself and your work, and
make sure each iteration of a project is more and more usable.
The
SynFonts site has been the test-bed for all my web ideas over the years, and
it's here that I've experimented most. I'm sure my clients appreciate that I
didn't use their projects to try out untested thoughts! Some of these experiments
have been successful, others less so. But not one of them has really been completely
wasted. You'll see later how even the features my customers really hated led
me to better pitch my site to what my customers would accept at that point in
time.
When
I started designing this site, I knew nothing about web sites. I hadn't written
any HTML and I had no preconceptions of what it could be. None of the technology
required for the final build existed when my project started and there wasn't
anybody in the world that knew enough Flash to create any of the files that
the site would eventually require.
The
following is a brief study of the SynFonts site and the various ways that I
have displayed my type designs over the years presented in a chronological order.
Since the time spans all the way back to 1994, don't try and look at this as
a study in cutting edge web design. Try to notice the problems that I encountered
along the way, the mistakes that I made (and learned from), the successes that
I had while I was experimenting with the web during its infancy, and the different
solutions that I ended up with each time I tried to re-answer the question "what
is the best way to re-design the SynFonts web site?" Most importantly,
pay careful attention to the gradual transition that I made as I learned more
about usability and how it impacts the user experience. This chapter actually leaves off short of my final web
site. The process of creating the new, Flash-based site is covered in another
chapter.
Preliminary designs, 1994
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