Week 10 - Usability Evaluation and Mobile Design

1.      Usability Evaluation

Usability is a quality attribute that assesses the ease to use of interfaces. It also measures ease-to-use during the design process. It is defined by five quality components – learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors and satisfaction. Utility (the design’s functionality) is also an important quality of usability. Usability studies the elegance and clarity with which the interaction with a computer program or a web site (web usability) is designed. Usability differs from user satisfaction and user experience because usability also considers usefulness.

Any system designed for people should be easy to use, easy to learn, easy to remember, and helpful to users. John Gould and Clayton Lewis recommend that designers striving for usability follow these three design principles – early focus on users and tasks, empirical measurement and iterative design. Usability is so important because on the web, it is a necessary condition for survival. Simply put, if a website is difficult to use, people leave. When users encounter any difficulty on your site, their first line of defense is to leave. If they can’t understand what your company or site is all about from the home page, or if your e-commerce website doesn’t clearly define the product you’re selling or users can’t easily find the products they’re looking for, people simply leave the site. If employers spend time pondering where to find information on the company’s website, this is productive time lost, hence money spent on paying users for doing less or no work. Current best practices are to spend 10% of a Project’s design budget on usability. This will have the effect of more than doubling a website’s desired quality metrics, and just less than doubles an intranet’s quality metrics. Improving usability leads to marked reduction in training budgets.

There are a variety of usability studying/evaluation methods. Certain methods use data from users, while others rely on usability experts. There are usability evaluation methods for all stages of design and development, from product definition to final design modifications. When choosing a method, consider cost, time constraints, and appropriateness. The most basic and useful is user-testing which has three components:

• ·  Get a sample users’ community (customers for an e-commerce site or company employees for an organization’s intranet)
• ·    Users perform representative tasks with the design
• ·  Observe users’ actions, looking out for where they succeed or fail, and where they have difficulties; let them do the talking, NOT you.

Testing the users individually and letting them to find their own problems and try to solve them, rather than redirecting their attentions to possible solutions should be the ideal process. Five users is a good sample to test with. The best way to increase the quality of the user experience is through iterative design. The more versions and interface ideas you test with the users, the better. Using focus groups is not a good way to evaluate usability design. You have to actually watch them doing it, rather them listening to what they have to say about it.

Usability is important in each stage of the design process. Formal usability studies in the form of controlled experiments aim to advance the field's understanding of how people use interfaces, to determine which design concepts work well under what circumstances, and why. They can also be used to help decide if a new feature or a change in approach improves the performance of an existing interface, or to compare competing interfaces. The main steps involved in fast and cheap formal individual studies for usability testing are:

• ·        Before beginning the new design, test the old design for elimination and improvement
• ·        Test your competitor’s design, unless you’re working on an intranet
• ·        Conduct a field study to evaluate users in their normal habitat
• ·        Make paper prototypes or one or more new design ideas and test them
• ·        Use multiple iterations to refine design ideas
• ·        Use established usability guidelines to refine the design
• ·        Once the final design is implemented, re-test it

A higher-quality user experience can only be assured by starting user testing early in the design process and to keep testing every step of the way.

If usability testing is conducted at least once a week, it’s recommended to have a dedicated usability laboratory. Conference rooms and offices are usually uses by most companies, as long as distractions can be prevented, the most important factor being to be able to get hold of the users and sit them while they use they design. All you need yourself is a pencil and notepad.

Designing a new usable search interface and convincingly assessing its usability can be surprisingly difficult. Small details in the design of the interface can have a strong effect on a participant's subjective reaction to or objective success with the interface. 

Traditional information retrieval research focuses on evaluating the proportion of relevant documents retrieved in response to a query as a measure of assessing a search interface. Three main aspects of usability are usually used to evaluate search interfaces – Effectiveness (accuracy and completeness with which users achieve specified goals), Efficiency (resources expended in relation to the accuracy and completeness with which users achieve goals), and Satisfaction (freedom from discomfort and positive attitude towards the use of the product).

Evaluation of search systems is equivalent to evaluation of ranking algorithms, and this evaluation is done in an automated fashion, without involving users. The most common evaluation measures used for assessing ranking algorithms are Precision, Recall, the F-measure, and Mean Average Precision (MAP). Precision is defined as the number of relevant documents retrieved divided by the number of documents retrieved, and so is the percentage of retrieved documents that are relevant. Recall is the number of relevant documents retrieved divided by the number of documents that are known to be relevant, and so is the percentage of all relevant documents that are retrieved. 

The TREC evaluation method has been enormously valuable for comparison of competing ranking algorithms. This, however, comes with a lot of criticisms. However, this evaluation does not require searchers to interact with the system, create the queries, judge the results, or reformulate their queries. The ad hoc track does not allow for any user interface whatsoever. 

It can be useful to adjust the measures of precision and recall when assessing interactive systems. the measure of immediate accuracy to capture relevance according to this kind of behavior. It is measured as the proportion of queries for which the participant has found at least one relevant document by the time they have looked at k documents selected from the result set.

Informal usability testing can also be achieved through various methods, even though there’s no exact formula for producing a good user interface, but interface design indisputably requires the involvement of representative users. Before any design starts, prospective users should be interviewed or observed in field studies doing the tasks which the interface must support. This is followed by a repeated cycle of design, assessment with potential users, analysis of the results, and subsequent re-design and re-assessment. Involvement of members of the target user base is critical, and so this process is often referred to as user-centered design. Potential users who participate in the assessment of interfaces are usually referred to as participants. Showing designs to participants and recording their responses to ferret out problems as well as identify positive aspects of the design are referred to as informal usability testing. Informal usability studies are typically used to test a particular instantiation of an interface design, or to compare candidate designs, for a particular domain and context. In the first rounds of evaluation, major problems can be identified quickly, often with just a few participants. Although participants usually do not volunteer good design alternatives, they can often accurately indicate which of several design paths is best to follow. Quick informal usability tests with a small number of participants is an example of what has been dubbed discount usability testing, as opposed to full formal laboratory studies. Ideally, usability study participants are drawn from a pool of potential users of the system under study; for instance, an interface for entering medical record information should be tested by nurse practitioners. Often the true users of such a system are too difficult to recruit for academic studies, and so surrogates are found, such as interns who are training for a given position or graduate students in a field. For academic HCI research, participants are usually recruited via flyers on buildings, email solicitations, as an (optional) part of a course or by a professional recruiting firm. 

To obtain a more accurate understanding of the value and usage patterns of a search interface, (in order to obtain what is called ecological validity in the social sciences literature), it is important to conduct studies in which the participants use the interface in their daily environments and routines, and over a significant period of time.

In order to carry out a successful usability test with a paper prototype, the following should be taken into account:

·        Always remember to compensate your participants, so the test shouldn’t feel like a chore

·        Put the participant at ease, and give them control

·        Ask questions that qualify the participant, like their frame of reference (how often they go online, what websites they often visit, what are the triggers and conditions for their activity…)

·        Start with open questions, then dig deeper if the user is brief

·        Give users open-ended tasks instead of telling them what to do

·        Ask users what they expect will happen if they take a particular action

·        Use whatever medium is easiest to create

·        You can test complex interaction before investing in coding and design with a little creativity, since most of the time users are able to interact with paper prototypes as if it were the real thing, and can easily accommodate unforeseen actions

·        It helps to learn participants’ preferences, even if they don’t have to be your demographic target.

·        End with a question asking if there’s anything else we should talk about or to help improve the current state of things. Sometimes, you get great information from this.

A longitudinal study tracks participant behavior while using a system over an extended period of time, as opposed to first-time usages which are what are typically assessed in formal and informal studies. This kind of study is especially useful for evaluating search user interfaces, since it allows the evaluator to observe how usage changes as the participant learns about the system and how usage varies over a wide range of information needs. The longer time frame also allows potential users to get a more realistic subjective assessment of how valuable they find the system to be. This can be measured by questionnaires as well as by how often the participant chooses to use the system versus alternatives.

Most Web search engines record information about searchers' queries in their server logs (also called query logs). This information includes the query itself, the date and time it was written, and the IP address that the request came from. Some systems also record which search results were clicked on for a given query. These logs, which characterize millions of users and hundreds of millions of queries, are a valuable resource for understanding the kinds of information needs that users have, for improving ranking scores, for showing search history, and for attempts to personalize information retrieval. They are also used to evaluate search interfaces and algorithms, as discussed in the next section. In preparation, the following subsections describe some details behind the use of query logs. In query log analysis, an individual person is usually associated with an IP address, although there are a number of problems with this approach: some people search using multiple different IP addresses and the same IP address can be used by multiple searchers. Nonetheless, the IP address is a useful starting point for identifying individual searchers.

Large-scale log-based usability testing or bucket testing is an important form of usability testing that takes advantage of the huge numbers of visitors to some Web sites is large-scale log-based usability testing. In the days of shrink-wrapped software delivery, once an interface was coded, it was physically mailed to customers in the form of CDs or DVDs and could not be significantly changed until the next software version was released, usually multiple years later. The Web has changed this paradigm so that many companies release products in “beta,” or unfinished, status, with the tacit understanding that there may be problems with the system, and the system will change before being officially released. More recently, the assumptions have changed still further. With some Web sites, especially those related to social media, the assumption is that the system is a work-in-progress, and changes will continually be made with little advance warning. The dynamic nature of Web interfaces makes it acceptable for some organizations to experiment with showing different versions of an interface to different groups of currently active users. A major limitation of bucket testing is that the test can run effectively only over the short term because the user pool shifts over time and some users clear their cookies (which are used by the bucket tests to keep track of user IDs). Additionally, it is commonly observed that when comparing a new interface versus one that users are already familiar with, users nearly always prefer the original one at first.

Several concerns have been raised with the evaluation of search interfaces. Evaluating information-intensive applications such as search is somewhat different, and often times more difficult than evaluating other types of user interfaces. Some pertinent issues are discussed below, along with best practices for evaluation of search interfaces.

·        Avoid experimental bias

·        Encourage participant motivation

·        Account for participants’ individual differences

·        Account for the differences in tasks and queries

·        Control test collection characteristics

·        Account for differences in the timing response variable

·        Compare against a strong baseline

2.      Mobile Design

Designing for the Mobile Web has experienced a recent explosion due to user adoption of mobile devices. This has greatly revolutionized the World Wide Web. Though designing for the Mobile Web follow similar principles to designing websites, there are still noticeable differences - current mobile device networks don’t run in the same speed as broadband devices, there are also a myriad of ways our mobile web designs are displayed in, from touch screens to netbooks, which make even the smallest desktop monitors look like giants.

The way the mobile design is to be delivered, is one of the early elements that need to be considered. The ideal scenario would be that each device simply scales and adapts to your existing website, and some devices, such as the iPhone, are able to because of their built-in web browser. But because of so many devices out there, a cross-device mobile design is difficult to make. Designing for the mobile can be very difficult since the designer has to deal with more than one markup language (WML, iOS for Apple devices and Android for Android devices), unlike just a single language for desktop-based web designs, HTML.

One option to pushing a site to the Mobile Web is to simply create or modify your existing code and design to work well on mobile devices, or building from scratch with mobile devices in mind.

Another method for delivering a mobile design is to build an especially optimized layout for handheld devices. You can build this yourself or use a web service such as Mobify.

Whichever route you decide to take, it’s important that:

·        Visitors know that a mobile-friendly version of your site is available

·        Visitors can have the choice between a mobile version or the normal version

The next consideration for mobile web design is the Structure and Code (markup and styles) that goes behind the scenes. The following points should be succinctly analyzed

·        Use of WML or HTML for mobile profiles?

·        Build separate apps for iPhones, Androids and Blackberries?

·        What are the effects of cost and speed with mobile devices on your design?

·        Consider modern standards like HTML5 and CSSR?

Choosing the right language for a mobile-friendly website is paramount; while older devices before the smartphone revolution only support WML, the W3C produced a mobile-friendly version of XHTML.

Ultimately, whichever language you choose, the primary considerations you need to think about is speed and user cost.

Designing the layout of mobile devices can also be a pain in the neck for the following reasons:

·        Mobile devices come in all shapes and sizes

·        Mobile devices have different levels of quality and resolutions

·        Mobile devices may or may not support zooming, others scroll content

·        Scrolling in mobile devices is more difficult because of their small screen

The goal of a mobile web design’s layout is to allow the least amount of burden to the user’s ability to find (and quickly read) what they’re looking.

Simplicity is of the main concepts to an effective mobile web layout. The more information you pile into a small space, the harder it becomes to read and the more scrolling that will be required.

Even though some mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad have the ability to zoom web pages in and out to avoid scrolling, not all do. We should try to limit scrolling as much as possible during mobile web design.

The issue of navigation and clickable regions is another concern. This is predominantly a problem with touchscreen mobile devices. Ensuring that your mobile layout has large and easy-to-press links and clickable objects will be essential in streamlining the experience. Reducing the amount of clicks required to achieve an action - which is a good practice regardless of whether or not you’re designing a mobile site - is all the more important in mobile web designs.

The most costly component of a website is the content. This is due to the cost of browsing and caps on data allowances. Knowing how to reduce excess images, text and media can come in very handy and cost effective. Of all the components of a site, none plays a more vital role than the text. When working with a small screen, large CSS background images or byte-heavy infographics can be problematic. It’s inevitable in the modern web that utilizing audio and video will be needed. Even with the bandwidth issues that exist, you shouldn’t stop using these richer forms of content, as they can be great, especially on handheld mobile devices that have excellent video/audio quality such as the iPhone or iPod Touch. But just like with everything else, moderation and smart usage is key.

Even though the availability of web-based services are fantastic, I do worry that the dependence on a constant and reliable (always on) web connection is very much going to be a problem for web apps at the current state of mobile device networks. While there have been moves towards local storage mechanisms, for now, web apps that rely on persistent internet connections could affect mobile device users due to the capabilities of their networks.

With so much diversity in the mobile device landscape, you should test your designs on as many platforms as you can manage. A long list of emulators exist that will simulate certain devices for you to be able to test your work.

For now, and until mobile network infrastructure improves and connectivity is widely available - simple, small and speedy are the three main principles we should abide by.

                                                                                                                                                                                

Week 9 - Information Architecture Strategy and Design

Information Architects do not typically have the luxury of one or many years to complete their projects. It’s usually a matter of weeks and months. Moving from research to strategy, then design follows tight schedules with specific deliverables required at specific deadlines. It’s usually a very blurry line between research and strategy, and even though the process of moving from research to administration in the IA life cycle might look linear at a high level, it’s usually a very highly iterative and interactive process with the IA switching back and forth between research and design, whilst maintaining tight budget and schedule constraints.

Putting in place of an IA strategy involves defining and realizing a high-level conceptual framework for structuring and organizing a web site or intranet. This provides any firm or organization a sense of direction or scope necessary to proceed into the design and implementation of the various phases involved in the IA life cycle. The IA strategy is typically detailed in the in an IA strategy report, communicated in a high-level strategy presentation, and made actionable through a project plan for information architecture design. It provides high level recommendations regarding:

·         Information architecture administration

·         Technology integration

·         Top-down or bottom-up emphasis

·         Organization and labeling systems (top-down)

·         Document type identification (bottom-up)

·         Metadata field definition

·         Navigation system design

Putting an IA strategy in place can meet major setbacks within the firm. The absence of a defined business strategy or content can lead to several conflicting discussions and questions from stakeholders that can easily derail the IA, like why the need of an IA strategy when there isn’t any business strategy or content in place. These questions shouldn’t derail the IA because it’s been proven that business strategies, content collections and information architectures co-evolve in a highly interactive manner. In fact, developing an IA strategy usually exposes gaps in business strategies and content collections. This can actually lead to major changes within the organization’s business strategy and content policy. In an ideal situation, the IA should work directly with the business strategy and content policy teams, exploring and defining the relationships between these three critical areas.

Moving from research to strategy shouldn’t be a clear cut, formal or isolated. Strategies for structuring and organizing the site should be considered by the IA before the research even begins. In fact, during the research phase, throughout the user interviews, content analysis and benchmarking studies, the IA should be constantly testing and refining the hypotheses mentally against the steady stream of data being compiled. The point where the IA realizes they’re no longer learning anything new by asking the same questions in the interviews , and are anxious to actually start fleshing out a couple of hierarchies, and start introducing their structures and labels to users, clients and colleagues actually defines when they should start moving from research to strategy.

Developing the IA strategy involves the transition from process to a transition between process and product, thereby creating work products and deliverables by applying methodology. Four steps usually define the IA strategy development process, TACT:

·         Think – convert research data to creative ideas

·         Articulate – diagrams, metaphors, stories, scenarios, blueprints, wireframes

·         Communicate – present, react, brainstorm

·         Test – closed card sorts, prototypes. The test results might lead to a new thinking process, hence re-initiating the cycle.

The results of the above process are strategy phase deliverables:

·         The IA strategy report – detailed strategy, direction, scope

·         The IA strategy presentation – high-level strategy, direction, scope

·         The project plan for design – teams, deliverables, schedule, budget.

The IA strategy is usually brought to life through metaphors, scenarios and conceptual designs. A metaphor can be a very powerful tool for communicating complex ideas and generating enthusiasm. The process of metaphor can be a real stimulant in working with clients and colleagues. The three most important applied in the design of websites are:

·         Organizational metaphors – leverage familiarity with one system’s organization to convey quick understanding of a new system’s organization

·         Functional metaphors – make a connection between the tasks you can perform in a traditional environment and those you can perform in a new environment

·         Visual metaphors – leverage familiar graphic elements such as images, icons and colors to create a connection to the new elements.

Scenarios are great tools for helping people to understand how the user will navigate and experience the site being designed. They also help the IA generate new ideas for the architecture and navigating system. Writing a few scenarios that depict how a certain group of people with specific needs can use the site can help provide a multi-dimensional experience that shows the true potential of the site.

Case studies and stories are a great tool to bring concepts of information architecture to life. These usually help a diversified, none-technical audience of both clients and colleagues get a clearer picture of your IA strategy by comparing and contrasting with other real life and past experiences.

Conceptual diagrams are usually pictorial representations of ideas and concepts.  IAs usually have to explain high-level concepts and systems, and conceptual diagrams come in very handy here. Their various concepts and ideas are put in the form of diagrams which can easily be visualized and understood by various audiences, including stakeholders.

The Strategy report presents the most detailed, comprehensive articulation of the IA strategy. It presents the previous results, analysis and ideas into a single document. This report is usually the largest, hardest and most important deliverable for the IA team. It forces the team members to come together around a unified vision for inform architecture, and requires them to find ways to explain or illustrate that vision so that clients and non-IA colleagues will understand their jargon. Organizing the report is one of the hardest tasks to accomplish since the IA strategy isn’t linear, but a report forces a linear presentation. A typical IA strategy report can contain the following major sections:

·         Executive Summary – a high-level outline of the goals and methodology, major problems and major recommendations

·         Audience & Mission/Vision for the site – restate the mission statement of the web site

·         Research – Includes lessons learned from Benchmarking, User interviews and Content Analysis

·         Architectural Strategies and Approach - re-define the main focus of the strategy and how it’s going to work by outlining the various strategies put in place.

·         Content Management – provides a reality check by discussing how these IA architecture recommendations will impact the content management infrastructure.

·         Recommendations – list of recommendations to be applied to the entire site.

The Project Plan for IA design should be created as a part of the strategy phase deliverables. This plan should address the following:

·         How to accomplish the various tasks

·         Time it’ll take to accomplish specific tasks

·         Responsible party/parties for each task

·         Task deliverables

·         Task dependencies

This plan forms the bridge between strategy and design and can be integrated with plans from other teams (integration design, content authoring or application development) toward a structured schedule for overall site design. Short-term plans usually define a process of design changes that can and should be made immediately to improve the IA. The long-term plan presents a methodology for fleshing out the IA, noting interdependences with other teams where appropriate.

Without any form of presentation and discussion, the best recommendations may never “Go Live”. It’s often a best practice to make one or more presentations to the stakeholders to understand your recommendations. This might be just a single presentation to the web site or intranet strategy team, or dozens of presentations to various departments to achieve organization-wide understanding and buy-in.  The IA needs to think about these presentations from a sales perspective since success is usually defined by the extent to which you can communicate and sell your ideas in a clear and compelling manner.

The landscape shifts dramatically when we cross the bridge from research and strategy into design. The emphasis moves from process to deliverables since the IA is expected to move from thinking and talking to actually producing a clear, well-defined information architecture. Ideas must be committed to paper to shape the user experience. The work in this face is so strongly defined by context and influenced by tacit knowledge. The design decisions made, and the deliverables produced will be informed by the total sum of the IA’s experience. The IA paints on a vast, complex ever-changing canvas. Although design focuses on deliverables, process is as important during design as it is during research and strategy.

IAs should follow a set of guidelines for Diagramming an Information Architecture. They rely upon visual representations to communicate their work, whether it’s to help sell the value of IA to a potential client or to explain a design to a colleague. Even though there’s limited information on how best to visually represent information architectures, there are a couple of good guidelines to follow as the IA documents her/his architecture:

·         Provide multiple views of the Information Architecture

·         Develop those views for specific audiences and needs

·         Whenever possible, present IA diagrams in person, especially when the audience is unfamiliar with them.

·         Work with whomever you’re presenting your diagrams to – clients, managers, designers, programmers, to understand in advance what they will need from it.

Communicating visually is a very important component of an IAs design job. The most frequently used diagrams are blue-prints and wireframes. These focus more on the structure of a site’s content than its semantic content. Diagrams communicate the two basic aspects of an information system’s structural elements – content components and connections between content components. A variety of visual vocabularies that provide a clear set of terms and syntax to visually communicate components and their links is now available to help IAs and other designers create diagrams. A good example is Jesse James Garrett’s. Visual vocabularies are at the heart of the many templates used to develop blueprints and wireframes.

Blueprints or site maps show the relationships between pages and other content components, and can be used to portray organization, navigation and labeling systems. High level blueprints are often created by IAs as part of a top-down information architecture process. During the design phase, high level blue prints are most useful for exploring primary organizational schemes and approaches. They map out the organization and labeling of major areas, usually beginning with a bird’s-eye view from the main page of the web site. They are great for stimulating discussions focused on the organization and management of content as well as on the desired access pathways for users. Detailed architecture blue prints communicate detailed organization, labeling and navigation decisions to colleagues on the site development team. They map out the entire site so that the production team can implement the plans to the letter without requiring IA involvement during production. They must present the complete information hierarchy from the main page to the destination pages. They must also detail the labeling and navigation systems to be implemented in each area of the site. Of course, they’ll vary from project to project, depending upon the scope.

Wireframes depict how an individual page or template should look from an architectural perspective. They stand at the intersection of the site’s information architecture and its visual and information design. They describe the content and information architecture to be included on the relatively confined two-dimensional spaces (pages), hence they themselves must be constrained in size. Developing wireframes also help the IA decide how to group content components, how to order them, and which groups of components have priority. Wireframes are usually created for the site’s most important pages – main or home pages, major category pages, and the interfaces to search – and other important applications. They present a degree of look and feel, and straddle the realms of visual design and interaction design. Several best practices are available when creating wireframes.

Content mapping and Inventory bring another dish to the plate during design and production. Here, the IA completes the bottom-up process of collecting and analyzing content. Content mapping is where top-down IA meets bottom-up. The process of detailed content mapping involves breaking down or combining existing content into content chunks that are useful for inclusion in your site. A content chunk is the most finely grained portion of content that merits or requires individual treatment.  Since content is often drawn from multiple sources and in various formats, it must be mapped into the IA so that it will be clear what goes where during the production process. A byproduct pf content mapping is a content inventory describing available content and where it can be found. Depending upon the size and complexity of the web site and the process and technology in place for production, there are many ways to present this inventory.

Content models are micro information architectures made up of small chunks of interconnected content. They support the missing piece in so many sites (contextual navigation that works deep within the site). They rely on consistent sets of objects and logical connections between them to work. They are as much an exercise as a deliverable. While the primary output is a useful IA deliverable that informs the design of contextual navigation deep within a site, the process also generates two invaluable secondary benefits – first, content modeling forces us to determine which content is most important to model. Second, it also forces us to choose which of the many metadata attributes are the ones that will make your content model operational.

The development of controlled vocabularies is associated with two primary types of work products – metadata matrixes that facilitate discussion about the prioritization of vocabularies and an application that enables the IA to manage the vocabulary terms and relationships. The IAs job is to help define which vocabularies should be developed, considering priorities and time and budget constraints. A metadata matrix can help the IA walk clients and colleagues through the difficult decision-making process, weighing the value of each vocabulary to the user experience against the costs of development and administration.

Design Collaboration brings together all parties involved in putting everything together toward developing the site – IAs, visual designers, developers, content authors, or managers. Design sketches and web prototypes are two of many tools used for merging different ideas.

Week 7 – Research in Web Information Architecture

It might not look very obvious some, but Research plays an integral part in an optimal Web IA design. The design of complex websites requires an interdisciplinary team that involves graphic designers, software developers, content managers, usability and database engineers, and many other experts. Hence, in such cases, integrating IA into the web development process is simply the norm. There needs to be effective collaboration between all parties involved, which in turn will require agreements on a structured development process. This process will thus involve Research, Strategy and Design at the earlier stages, followed later by Implementation and Administration. The research phase usually begins with kick of meetings with the strategy team and a review of existing background materials in a bid to garner a high-level understanding of the goals, business context, the existing IA, the content and the intended audiences. Research then continues with a series of studies, employing a variety of frameworks and methods to explore the information ecology. When done, the research actually provides a contextual understanding that becomes the base for the development of an IA strategy. Design is where you shape the high-level strategy into an Information Architecture, creating detailed blueprints, wireframes, and metadata schema that will be used by graphic designers, programmers, content authors, and the production team. This is where IAs are most involved. Implementation is when your designs are put into test as the site is built, tested and launched, involving tagging documents, testing and troubleshooting. At the end of the program/project is Administration which involves the continuous evaluation and improvement of the site’s IA. It includes daily tasks like tagging new documents and wedding out old ones, monitoring site usage, and identifying opportunities to improve the site through major or minor redesigns.

Research in IA involves paying due diligence and seeking as much information as possible in the areas of Context, Content and the Users. A conceptual framework of the broader environment involving these three key entities is usually necessary to realize this phase of the IA web development process.

The Context of your IA research will involve a thorough investigation of the business goals, funding and their various sources, organization politics and culture, the existing technologies within the environment and the various human resources that will be engaged in the effort. Researching the context by the IA will be achieved, first by getting a buy-in from the stakeholders, background investigation, meetings strategy meeting, content management meeting and IT meeting), and presentations, interviews with stakeholders and an assessment of the technologies in place.

Content is actually what end-users see on and get from your web site, like data, documents, applications, e-services, images, audio and video files, personal web pages, etc… Users need to be able to find content before they can use it – findability precedes usability. Researching the IA content will involve finding out what types or kinds of content (listed above) will be included, and from what sources. This will involve judicious content analysis (gathering and analyzing metadata and content), content mapping (what data, document or image goes where), and benchmarking (both Competitive and Before/After). Heuristic evaluations are very effective in testing a website against a formal or informal set of guidelines. They come in very useful in content analysis. The heuristic evaluation will analyze the Visibility of current System Status, match between the system and the real world, user control and freedom, consistency and standards, error prevention, recognition rather than recall, flexibility and efficiency of use, aesthetic and minimalistic design, how the system helps users recognize, diagnose and recover form errors, as well as help and documentation.

Users are visitors to your sites, respondents, actors, employers customers, etc…They are why you’re employed and why you’re a building a web site in the first place, hence they’re the ultimate designers. That’s just how important they are to your web IA project. Carrying out end-user research involve finding out the very audiences we’ll be serving, the tasks they’ll be performing on the site, their needs and information seeking behavior, their various experiences and vocabulary used. This research can be done by carrying out usage statistics, search logs and clickstream analysis, i.e. accessing data from the web server logs and analyzing this information, use case and personas analysis, contextual inquiry, as well as surveys, focus group meetings, face to face interviews, card sorting, questionnaires and user testing. Google Analytics is a great tool for gathering web usage statistics. When gathering information and analyzing the usage statistics, the IA should be focused on various characteristics of the various web visits (popular pages visited, length of the visits, most popular pages visited), who the users are (country or region of origin, the various platforms and Operating Systems used for their visits, browser choices and screen resolution. Most, if not all of this information should be present in web server logs and can be analyzed using google analytics.

Week 6 - User Needs and Behaviors in Web Information Architecture

The end-user usually proves to be the most important asset in any Information Systems design process. IA starts with users and the reason they come to a site in the first place: they have information need.  IAs need to understand those needs and behaviors, and their designs should correspond accordingly. There is no goal more important to design IA than to satisfy users’ needs. Users usually have two information-seeking behaviors, searching for what you know and searching for the unknown. Distinguishing between these needs and behaviors and determining which are your users’ highest priorities is an extremely valuable pursuit; it helps you determine where to invest your efforts, resources, time and money as you design your architecture.

Different models exist for what happens when end-users are seeking information. The “too-simple” model is the most common, and unfortunately, the most problematic. In this model, the user asks a question, something happens (searching or browsing), the user receives an answer, finish. i.e. input, output, end of story. There’s a major problem here because it rarely happens this way. There are exceptions, e.g. when users know what they’re looking for and end up having the wrong the information. This model is also widely disliked because it essentially ignores any context and narrowly focuses on what happens while the user is interacting with the IA. This model is dangerous because it’s built upon a misconception that finding information is a straightforward problem that can be addressed by a simple, algorithmic approach. The misconception by many user-centered design that the process of finding is simple enough to be easily measured in a quantifiable way, has led to the wasting of millions of dollars on search engine software and other technological remedies that would indeed work if this information were true. The assumption that the data retrieval challenge has been solved with database technologies like SQL which use facts and figures is very dangerously misleading.

Information needs vary amongst various end-users/information consumers. Database searching seems to be the most familiar model of searching. However, websites store more than highly structured data. They store text as the most common data type, and text itself is made up of ambiguous, messy ideas and concepts, e.g. when we’re seeking information on the latest happenings within Arsenal FC football club in London, we’re essentially looking for ideas and concepts that inform us and help us make decisions, which might actually end up not having an answer, or if there’s one, is an ambiguous moving target. Sometimes, however users are actually looking for the right answers, and do actually end up having them, hence the perfect catch. Other times, users are actually looking for more than just a single answer, like in the case of Arsenal FC above. They don’t really know what they’re looking for, and aren’t ready to commit to retrieving anything more than just a few useful items, or suggestions of where to learn more. This is a typical case of setting out a lobster trap – you hope that whatever slowly walks in will be useful, and if it is, that’s good enough. There also comes the time when the user is actually indiscriminately drift netting, like in the case of researching for your medical condition or master’s thesis. Here, you want to catch every sea creature , so you cast you driftnets and drag up everything you can. This might actually lead to useful consumable information that you’d prefer never to lose again, and can actually bookmark.

Searching (enter queries in search systems), browsing (browse from link to link), and asking (through email, chat interfaces, etc….) are all methods for seeking information, and are the building blocks of information-seeking behavior. Two other major aspects to seeking behaviors are integration and iteration. Searching, browsing and asking are often integrated within the same finding session. You might go through several iterations within the same finding session since we don’t usually get things right the first time, or our information needs may change along the way leading to different approaches with each new iteration. Each iteration of searching, browsing, asking, and interacting with content can greatly impact what the end-user is seeking. The various components of the information-seeking behaviors come together in complex models, such as the “berry-picking” model - users start with an information need, formulate an information request (a query), and then move iteratively through an information system  along potentially complex paths, picking bits of information ("berries”) along the way, the “pearl-growing” approach in which users start with one or a few good documents that are exactly what they need, they want to get more of the same. Google and many other search engines allow users to do just that. Corporate portals and intranets of utilize a “two-step” model, in which users first need to know what they need, they find a good candidate or two within links and sub- sites, and then perform the second step – looking for information within those sub- sites.

The IA can actually learn about their users’ information needs and seeking behaviors by using search analytics (reviewing the most common search queries on your site, stored in your search engine’s logfiles as a way to diagnose problems with search performance, metadata, navigation and content),  and contextual inquiry (uses ethnography, allows you to observe how users interact with information on their “natural” settings, and, in that context, ask them why they’re doing what they’re doing). The IA might also consider other research methods like task analysis, surveys, and might be focus groups.

A better understanding of what users actually want from your site will definitely help you, as the IA determine and prioritize which architectural components to build.

Designing web sites for seniors can be very challenging, as well as also very rewarding. Research has shown that users aged 65 and older are 43% slower at using web sites than users aged 21-55. In the U.S today, more young users definitely use the web, but the number of older users is growing very rapidly as a result of an ageing society and an ever-larger percentage of old people who go online. E-commerce purchases, online banking and brokerage are a few of the opportunities that exist in designing for the old. Also, most modern websites ignorantly discriminate against seniors, so by embracing this population in your design, you’re actually opening up new avenues for income generation. Some of the typical design issues the IA might face in incorporating the ageing in their design is Readability and Clickability since reduced visual acuity is probably the best-known ageing problem, hence sites should incorporate functions that let users increase text size as desired, especially if the site’s default is a normal small font size. Hypertext links are essential design components to ensure readability and make hyperlinks more prominent targets for clicking. Senior behavioral issues like hesitation and discouragement actually affect designing the web for the old and ageing. Research has shown that 45% of seniors show behaviors that indicated they were uncomfortable trying new things.

On the other side of the landscape is designing teen-targeted websites. Even though teens tend to be over-confident in their web abilities, but they perform worse than adults. Lower reading levels, impatience, and undeveloped research skills reduce teens’ task success and require simple, relatable sites. Technology is so integrated with teenagers’ lives that creating useful and usable websites for them is more critical than ever. Today, the good news is that teens are becoming more successful at navigating websites and finding what they need. The success rate for teens has improved 16% during the 8 years between the old and new studies, for an improvement rate of 2 percentage points per year. This is slightly better than the improvement rate of 1.7% per year for adults using websites over the past decade. However, the bad news is that although teens might feel confident online, they do make mistakes and often give up quickly. Fast-moving teens are also less cautious than adults and make snap judgments; these lead to lower success. Several tweaks on your website can actually make it more attractive to teens

·         Write well since nothing deters younger audiences more than a cluttered screen full of text. Teens can quickly become bored, distracted, and frustrated.

·         Avoid boring content and entertainment overload since teens usually complain of sites they find boring and dull. Even though they fancy and appreciate aesthetics, teens detest sites that appear cluttered and contain pointless multimedia.

·         Make it Snappy – the website should be fast, slow-loading slides are not for teenagers, period.

·         Avoid condescending statements that talk down to teens on your site

·         Give teens control over the social aspect of the site

·         Design for smaller screens and portable gadgets like tablets, laptops and mobile devices

Designing web information systems for individuals with disabilities might be a major challenge. Individuals might experience varying degrees of auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual disabilities. For instance, some may have disabilities from birth, an illness, disease, or accident, or they may develop impairments with age. Some may not consider themselves to have disabilities even if they do experience such functional limitations. People with disabilities access and navigate the Web in different ways, depending on their individual needs and preferences. Sometimes people configure standard software and hardware according to their needs, and sometimes people use specialized software or hardware that helps them perform certain tasks.

Text alternatives are equivalents for non-text content. Examples include:

·         Short equivalents for images, including icons, buttons, and graphics

·         Description of data represented on charts, diagrams, and illustrations

·         Brief descriptions of non-text content such as audio and video files

·         Labels for form controls, input, and other user interface components

Text alternatives convey the purpose of an image or function to provide an equivalent user experience.

Captions and other alternatives for multimedia are used by people who cannot hear audio or see video. Examples of alternatives for audio and video include:

·         Text transcripts and captions of audio content, such as recordings of people speaking

·         Audio descriptions, which are narrations to describe important visual details in a video

·         Sign language interpretation of audio content, including relevant auditory experiences

Well-written text transcripts containing the correct sequence of any auditory or visual information provide a basic level of accessibility and facilitate the production of captions and audio descriptions.

Content can be presented in different ways for users with specific disabilities. In order for users to be able to change the presentation of content, it is necessary that:

·         headings, lists, tables, and other structures in the content are marked-up properly

·         Sequences of information or instructions are independent of any presentation

·         Browsers and assistive technologies provide settings to customize the presentation

 

Meeting this requirement allows content to be correctly read aloud, enlarged, or adapted to meet the needs and preferences of the user.

 

 

 

Week 5 - Interface Design, Information Design and the Enterprise Interface

1. Interface Design

End users to most websites are generally not as spoiled as book readers. The notion of context is usually a major oversight in web information architecture with most users usually seeing about 5% or less of an entire website at a time. In designing web interfaces, we should consider the fact that site users will need a sense of context of their place within an organization of information. We usually jump into a site or hyperlink without having any clue as to where it might lead us.

Clear Navigation Aids: Clear cut navigation aids like icons, graphic identity schemes, page titles and headings, and graphic- or text-based overview and summary screens should be a part of the interface to help users find information very quickly and easily return to the main or home page whenever need be.

No Dead End Pages: Having dead-end pages is a major interface design flaw. Since users usually follow links directly to subsection pages buried deep in the hierarchy of web sites, there should always be a homepage link and other links to other main sections within the site.

Direct Access: Giving the users direct quick access with a click or two to the information they’re seeking will be of utmost value to your site’s design. Your site’s hierarchy should be designed such that real content is just a few clicks or keystrokes away from the main menu pages of the site.

Simplicity and Consistency: Keeping the site’s layout simple and consistent can greatly improve visibility of content, hence keep visitors in the site for longer periods. Refrain from over-designing the home page to have weird looks that can easily make users wonder if they’re in the right place or not. A legible and transparent blend of text, hypertext, images and logos that depicts a consistent pattern of modular units that all share the same basic layout grids, graphic themes, editorial conventions, and organization hierarchies should be greatly considered in your design. A consistent approach to the layout of titles, subtitles, page footers, and navigation links to your homepage or related pages will reinforce the user’s sense of context within the site.

Design Integrity and Stability: Designing for integrity and stability should be highly considered. Using high editorial, grammatical and design standards instills confidence into the end users about the information they’re consuming. Keep in mind the functional stability of your website from two ends: getting things right the first time as you design the site, and then keeping things functioning smoothly over time. You will need to constantly assure the functionality of all links to other pages within and without your site all through your design since information on the web is very volatile and links to external sources of information can always stop working without any warnings.

Feedback and Dialogue: Direct links for feedback and dialogue with the webmaster for comments, inquiries and even suggestions should be included within the interface.

Bandwidth and Interaction: Knowing who’s accessing your site and from what location is an added plus to your design, especially in the allocation of network bandwidth and interaction. Long delays (10 secs or more) on websites typically frustrates end users. Potentially slow dynamic content components on your site such as RSS, text from content management systems and other data feeds can slow the loading of web pages. Analyzing your web server logs or using tools like Google Analytics to understand your website’s interactions can greatly help in its performance.

Interface Design Conventions: Conventions now exist for the design of interfaces with most websites converging on a relatively consistent layout of header, footer, local navigation, and content elements that together make a useful, familiar starting point for the interface design. However, always keep in mind that the web page content always comes ahead of the interface and not the other way round.

• Header Area: Since the web page headers convey your organization or site’s identity, they are probably the most important elements in making a collection of web pages feel like a “Live” site rather than a random array and assembly of text, files and hypertext. Use existing provable convention to design your site header because this might make the difference in whether or not a user will click another button on this site when they hit the landing page.
• Left or Right Columns: Left and Right columns should also be designed with existing convention similar to other successful sites and studies which have proven that specific information usually resides on either the right or left column of the page.
• Breadcrumb Trails: The infusion of breadcrumb trails might not be a bad idea to aid users in keeping track of their location within your site.

 

2. Information Design

Web documents are still evolving in the presentation and standardization of content, at a faster rate than traditional information structured in printed books. There exists conventions for editorial and text organization which can greatly help IAs create very clear, comprehensive, and consistent information designs. The Chicago Manual of Style, as well as other guides like the Franklin Covey Style Guide for Business and Technical Communication and the Gregg Reference Manual are very useful guides to aid in the structuring and organization of content within web sites.

Freestanding Pages: Despite the marked similarities between website design and those of printed materials in books, websites contain more freestanding pages because a single web page may be the only part of a site that some users will see. Given these inherent difficulties in website design, the best design strategy will definitely be to apply a few fundamental document design principles consistently in every web page you create, which are the same as the basic elements of every informative document - who, what, when and where.

• Who’s the author? This information is usually overlooked, but knowing who’s speaking guides the reader of the information to easily figure out whether or not it's an individual or an institution and what type of person or organization the writer is aligned with.
• What is the end user consuming? Clearly present the page title and major headings both for user and search engine consumption.
• When was the information originally presented to the public, or when was it last updated? These are all important elements in your presentation.
• Telling users your origin and corporate affiliations is also very important, even though nowadays in the world wide web, the “where” is usually very difficult to isolate as information spans across thousands of other web sites.
• The home page URL at the end of each web page might prove to be very helpful since tons of materials are printed out of web pages, but tracing back the origins usually proves tricky.

3.  The Enterprise Interface

Nowadays, the website might be the face of the Organization or Enterprise to the entire world. No doubt today most large corporations have well-established corporate identity programs that now include comprehensive web design and interface standards. The user interface, information architecture of an enterprise’s website sells that organization to the outside world. Unlike smaller companies and public sites, as well as certain colleges and university sites which might be poorly organized, the enterprise website should adhere to consistent and widely implemented web publishing standards.

A consistent, comprehensive long term approach to the enterprise interface is the best way to maximize the return for the enormous investments that companies make in web publishing and web applications.

Incorporating the user into your your site and user interface design might prove a very worthy investment. Chaotic designs without the end user in mind sends out a message of a “laissez faire” attitude within the enterprise which might have the adverse effect of shunning users, hence potential customers away from the site. Employing a consistent, comprehensive interface and design standard throughout the organization’s web presence ensures that users are most productive, efficient, and overwhelmingly more satisfied.

Coherence, Symbolism and Positioning are the three primary aims for enterprise web interface programs.

• Coherence: Coherency in the clear presentation of the enterprise and its structure and functioning, as well as services and products to clients goes a long way in transposing to the public the efficacy and proficiency in delivery of such enterprises.
• Symbolism: An organization’s web presence tells all about the social cohesion, common purpose and culture, given the fact that telecommuting and on-line offices have become a part of our daily routines today.
• Positioning: Defining your identity and stressing your position on the web to stand out as unique might be a very determinant entity during your design. When a user visits your site, will they return? Such questions should be answered when you present your user interface to the public/end users.