Usability Research You Can Use Today

We recently presented the keynote at a conference for public school web content managers.  Our topic: an overview of web usability research and how to improve school web sites by applying the findings. In preparation, we reviewed the vast amount of usability information on the web and found invaluable, practical information.  We thought we’d pass along the fruits of our efforts. So, in this issue of the E-Writing Bulletin, we’re pointing you to five of the top usability resources. We’ve highlighted some findings that we believe are particularly applicable to content providers. You’ll discover that knowing the results of usability testing will reduce your development work, help settle endless web “negotiations,” and justify the time and resources you need to develop user-friendly web content.  

 

Five Top Usability Resources

 

1.  Useit.com is “guru” Jakob Nielsen's website.  Since 1995, Nielsen has published the bi-weekly Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability.  Never one to mince words, Nielsen has written tracts such as “Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading” and “Flash: 99% Bad.” 

• Mission Impossible To Find.  From Alertbox: "About Us" -- Presenting Information About an Organization on Its Website.  Study participants searched websites for background information ranging from company history to management biographies and contact details. Their success rate was 70%, leaving much room for usability improvements in About Us design.  Research conclusion: sites should clarify a company’s purpose on the home page, present a tagline, and provide “meatier” About Us content. 
  
  
• Color Me Visited.  From Alertbox:  “Change The Color of Visited Links.”  Advice: “Using different colors for visited and unvisited links makes your site easier to navigate and thus increases user satisfaction.” Seventy-four percent of websites do so already, making this a strong convention. 

2.  The Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) at Wichita State University provides user interface design, usability testing, and human-computer interaction research.  SURL publishes its research findings in Usability News! To make things easy, SURL also offers an A-Z Research Index and a Usability News Digest.

• Link Early And Often.  From Usability News: “Where Should You Put the Links? Comparing Embedded and Framed/Non-Framed Links.”   Research conclusion: users preferred redundant links, embedded within a paragraph and repeated in a column to the left.
  
  
• More Whitespace Isn’t Better.  From Usability News: “Finding Information on the Web: Does the Amount of Whitespace Really Matter?”  Research conclusion:  users were equally successful in finding information on pages with little, medium, or a lot of white space, but they were significantly more satisfied with pages that had a medium amount of white space.  

3.  User Interface Engineering (UIE) is Jared M. Spool’s consulting firm, specializing in web site and product usability. UIE publishes UIEtips: articles, commentaries, and interviews on usability, web design, and information architecture. Check out UIEtips, including The Truth About Download Time and The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch.

• Three Clicks And You’re Not Out.  From UIEtips: “Testing the Three-Click Rule.”   Research conclusion: after measuring both success and satisfaction, testers found the three-click rule to be a myth.
  
  
• It’s Not About Time.  From UIEtips:  “The Truth About Download Time.”  Research conclusion: “…when people accomplish what they set out to do on a site, they perceive that site to be fast” even when it’s not!

4.  The Usability.gov site was developed to help U.S. Department of Health and Human Services web managers.  But this usability site is not for dot govs only.  Check out the ultra-usable Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines.  Each guideline contains a statement of the overarching principle (for example, “Use Clear Category Labels”), an explanation of the research/supporting information, citations, a score indicating the "Strength of Evidence" that supports the guideline, a score indicating the "Relative Importance" of the guideline to the success of a Web site, and graphic examples of the guideline in practice.

• An Icon Isn’t Worth 1000 Words.  From Usability.gov: “Use Text For Links.”  Research summary: Text links are easier to recognize than graphic ones, as well as more effective at suggesting the link’s destination.  Graphic links confuse users who have to mouse-over to tell whether the graphic is a link or mere decoration.
  

5.  Human Factors International (HFI) is a user-centered design company whose mission is to improve the interactions people have with computers. HFI publishes UI Design Newsletter which reviews developments in user interface research. 

• You Gotta Believe.  For example, HFI’s Web Credibility review revealed that experts and consumers judge a site’s credibility differently: experts “…focus on brand, company reputation, information sources, and internal fact-checking … In contrast, consumers use characteristics such as look-and-feel and information design to evaluate credibility.”
  

Interested In Conducting Your Own Usability Research? 

• For answers to the basic questions (“What is usability? How, when, and where can you improve it? Why should you care?”) read Jakob Nielsen’s “Usability 101: Introduction to Usability.”
  
  
• For a couple of useful definitions of usability, go to Whatis.com or Usability.gov. 
  
  
• For a detailed list of usability research methods, go to UsabilityNet. 
  

Do you have a favorite usability resource we haven’t listed?  If you like to recommend a usability site or study, or have conducted usability research on your site or a client’s site, let us know and we’ll add it to our Resources page. 

To wrap it all up, keeping up to date with usability research is worth doing.  The information is plentiful and the findings are easy to understand. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle recognized the value of usability early on.  He said: “The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.”  

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