Prioritizing Web Usability: A review and key points

Someone dropped this on my desk back in the summer (just to borrow) so I figured I might as well give it a read. It isn’t something I would have gotten myself – I’ve never been a fan of Nielsen. Well, not for quite a few years anyway. I’ve been reading the book on occasional lunch hours for months and I’ve finally gotten through it all.

Brief Review

This is a very well researched book based on actual usability studies. It is good to know that this is not just someone’s opinion (well, mostly) but actual experience with actual users. The book covers a broad range of topics, including some things that people may not consider to be usability problems: namely writing and disclosure of key information.

There are also lots of screenshots and examples of the problems in actions. This helps to reinforce the issue and show you how it might happen in the real world and to illustrate that yes, a lot of sites actually do make these mistakes.

Some strangeness

As I’ve mentioned previously, there are a couple of really strange things in this book. The first is a long section on keyword advertising as the best way to promote a site. Um, okay, any experience to back that up? This seems to be all theory with little practical evidence and very out of sync with what marketing people are talking about these days. The overlapping section on using keyword pricing to estimate usability improvements is interesting but also quite theoretical. Basically, if you improve your usability you improve conversions which means that you can afford to put in a higher bid for your keywords (because you’re getting a better ROI). Um, okaay….

There is also a section here that suggests that you can control where your site ranks in the SE’s (p. 40). Number One Guideline for Search Engine Optimisation: Aim for the top spot in the listings for all the important keywords your users are likely to search for. Yeah right. And we’ll all set up shop on Mars while we’re at it. Okay, so there’s nothing wrong with aiming for the top spot but actually getting it and keeping it is pretty much impossible unless you’re, I don’t know, Google maybe.

Key Points

These some points of interest that I flagged while going through this book. These are sort of random tidbits – sometimes big, sometimes small.

Search Dominance

• The whole idea of “information foraging” is key to usability: users are spending time tracking down new resources. Search is the gateway for this, so search needs to be usable, but so does your site. Make foraging easier through good navigation and writing.
• Further to that point, if people use search to land on your site looking for some specific information, they are unlikely to care who you are, stay on your site, or come back again. “There is very little value in giving answers to users who don’t know or care who provides the service.” How do you counter this on a website? How do you convert those one-time search visitors into re-visitors? It would probably be good to develop some personas and scenarios around this and think through how a typical visit would occur and what would make that person stay. See, for example, the Action Items at the bottom of each news article on NewsTarget.com (they should be more visually integrated with the content though)
• Why search is so important: because web browsers have poor support for bookmarks/favourites so people don’t sue them to build a list of favourites. I think this is partially true, but also part of a larger problem of people not knowing how to use software. I think there could be more opportunities for online bookmark type sites to take advantage of this beyond what is currently available with social bookmarking sites. Usability and accessibility would be key. (p. 37)
• Four Ways to Grab Value from search engine visitors: create pages that offer clear answers to common problems, add “see also” links to related content and services, go beyond pure information and provide analysis and insight with a unique perspective, publish a newsletter with additional tips to set up a relationship with users

User Interface

• On pg. 69 Nielsen has a rather interesting box about how the maximize button on a program implies that windows should take up the whole screen. Nielsen says that this should just expand them to the most usabile size, which may not be full screen. This is because people are supposed to work with overlapping windows. Okay, nice theory. Who wants to do that in practice though? He goes on to say that “maximized windows will gradually vanish as people get bigger monitors.”

  This, combined with other things he’s written on the topic, and the number of times he brings this up in the book, lead me to believe that big monitors are a bit of a pet issue with Nielsen. I think this is sort of misguided. Obviously he himself works with a very large monitor, which leads him to believe that eventually everyone will. Maybe, maybe not. I’m not convinced that everyone really wants a huge monitor. In fact, I think we’ll see more small displays as well as larger ones, and a corresponding need to design interfaces that adapt to both small and large.

• “Creating pixel-perfect layouts is futile. Define what the default should be but allow people to override your preset. Maintaining control means relinquishing some of it.” Unfortunately, people still haven’t grasped this, and are still creating fixed width, non-adaptive layouts. I’d like to do more experimentation with alternate stylesheets and more scalable layouts.

How people actually use the web

• When discussing horizontal scrolling (p.93) he brings up an interesting point: “users score lower than designers on spatial reasoning and visualization tests.” I’m not sure exactly what this means but it could have interesting implications. Are there things we expect our users to be able to do that they actually will have problems with because of poor spatial reasoning?
• “… to effectively process information, people cannot pay attention to everything on the screen.” – this was brought up in a section pointing out that users sometimes don’t notice that a scrollbar is available. There are several examples in the book of sites that have more information further down but, because of the way the page is designed, it isn’t obvious that there is more to see. So users may assume that there is nothing there.In general though, this is an interesting point. I have had several experiences on sites recently that include extra related information in a sidebar. Since I have been conditioned to think that sidebars wouldn’t include that information, I ignore it. Only after I went back in search of extra links did I notice that the sidebar had just the content I was looking for.

Technological Changes

• When discussing cross-platform incompatibility (p. 94), the authors say that the problem will decline because “most of the growth in web use will come in countries where Apple has little or no presence.” There is no reference on this (or anywhere else in the book, for that matter). They seem to be unaware of a little operating system called GNU+Linux.
• In my other post on the topic I mentioned the authors’ thoughts on mobile (p. 96). They think you need to build completely separate sites. I wonder if they have actually used a mobile browser. Not that I have, but I know that Opera mobile/mini and other mobile browsers do adjust sites to make them viewable on mobile devices (with varying degrees of success). They actually imply that on a mobile device the browser will just attempt to fit the regular display into the mobile screen space. There is no mention of mobile stylesheets in this section. Do they even know what they’re talking about here? I wonder. They say that they actually did tests so who knows.
• “Unless you’re designing for high-end users, assume that a significant percentage of your audience is using old machines with poor monitors” (p. 225). Good point. I think the importance of this probably varies depending on your audience. It is kind of ironic that they say here that “People in offices work on laptops with small displays and on surprisingly old computers”. Weren’t they yammering on about big monitors a few hundred pages back? Right.

Writing and Content

• A small box on “about us” features note that these sections are usually woefully incomplete. I agree. Small and big companies alike seem to be very reluctant to tell you who they are. Are you going to trust a company that won’t tell you who is in charge or where their office is? I wouldn’t. A List Apart has a great article on writing better about us pages.
• They don’t like tiny text either. This used to be one of my pet hates on the web but fortunately it has gotten a lot better (well, I thought so until I came across this article
• On page 265 the authors note that a surprisingly large percentage of users have problems with low literacy. In the US, they quote a rate of 43% with an eighth-grade reading level or below (yowza). They don’t have a reference for this either but it is still a very interesting point and a serious problem to consider. They also note (and this is common knowledge), that most web users prefer clear, simple language. I think I might need to consider my own writing in this light.

Traditional Usability Advice

• The “three click rule” actually causes problems for some users. This is a rule that proposes that all information should be no more than 3 clicks from the home page. I remember reading this back in the old days (pre-2000) when websites were generally a lot smaller. The authors note that this has never been one of their usability guidelines. They actually found that “users’ ability to find products on an e-commerce site increased by 600 percent after the design was changed so that products were four clicks from the homepage instead of three.” Great. I have always thought that that rule contributed to millions of overly-cluttered home pages and zealous use of drop-down menus.

  Later on in the box they note that “what makes users give up is the total amount of trouble you put them through”. That’s a great usability guideline right there. They go on to say that “having to think more about each click and having a greater risk of clicking the wrong link creates trouble in itself.”

Summary

I think this book would be great for anyone who is interested in usability and wants to know more about the specifics. For people who need a more basic overview of why usability is important and some basic ideas to consider I recommend reading Steve Krug’s Designing Web Usability first.

If you’ve got a lot of experience with web design you might find a lot Prioritizing Web Usability to be too obvious. Most of the interesting points I picked out came from the inset boxes and not the main content.

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