Understanding Web Usability

One of the great things about the Web has always been its democratic nature. Anyone can participate. But once you do, your contributions are wide open to public scrutiny. Good or bad, someone will evaluate your Web content.

People Recognize Poor Design
In the Web's early days, when people were adjusting to this new medium, most online critiques applied to a site's design. If you created a really ugly site, before long your handiwork would end being featured on a site dedicated to bad design, or even included on someone's all-time list of bad sites. Today, the collaborative features of the Web 2.0 environment such as blogs, forums, and widely used folksonomies practically guarantee that truly awful design will receive the recognition it deserves. Such criticism can be constructive; people can learn from good examples of what NOT to do.

Today, blogs and wikis extend their democratic and educational influences beyond site design to site content. This can be tough on the writer who wants to explore new ideas. But as Wikipedia, one of the best example of online collaboration, advises all contributors:

If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed by others, do not submit it.

This is excellent advice, because the collaborative search for truth online is not subject to parliamentary or academic niceties. If someone advances a weak argument, people will be quick to point out its flaws. And an unpopular opinion can produce flaming responses.

Is Web Usability a Sham?
For example, last week Ryan Stewart, who has his own blog, and also writes a ZDNet blog about Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), wrote that Usability on the web is a sham, arguing that ...

While accessibility and standards are great for the Web, the concept of usability has been overblown. Usability as we define it is basically the rules for how the Web should behave while in the confines of the Web browser. But Web applications don't have to exist inside the browser and relegating them to these antiquated notions of usability is bad for progress.

To support this argument, he used the Back button as an example of a browser usability problem that RIA developers could eliminate altogether.

I think the central idea behind his argument was that the RIA technologies -- because they offer the developer more options -- can be applied to deliver usability improvements in Web-based applications. But I'm afraid he expressed it very poorly, first by over-generalizing in his criticisms of the concept of Web usability, and second by trying to use the Back button -- one of the most intuitive and widely-understood browser conventions -- as an example of poor usability.

Naturally, his post has been generating a small firestorm of responses ranging in tone from expletive-laden outrage to carefully-argued disagreement. In their different ways, both those examples (along with other responses) argue that Stewart's post is full of opinions and assertions that are not supported by any evidence, and that (to put it bluntly) Stewart doesn't really know what he's talking about.

Marshaling the Right Skills
Unfortunately, this is a common problem in the field of Web design. An effective online application must be available, responsive, easy to navigate, and deliver value to its user. This demands a wide array of skills rarely found in a single individual. As a result many sites are designed and built by people who are aware of only a small subset of the issues they should be considering. And all too often, someone in the site development process -- a business manager, someone in marketing, a Web designer, or a site developer -- makes key design decisions without understanding the consequences. And the challenges are even greater when developing a Rich Internet Application.

Simply getting more people involved isn't the solution. Some really bad Web site designs have been the result of design by committee. Even if you follow a good checklist, like this one by Vitaly Friedman, you will overlook some important aspect -- often site performance. The problem is the sheer breadth of knowledge required to do a good job. For evidence, read the Wikipedia entry on Web Design. It's an unbalanced, poorly organized, collection of information that offers little help with the process of creating an effective site.

The only answer is to get better, more knowledgeable, people involved. Start with a good overview of the process, like Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites that Work by Tom Brinck, Darren Gergle, and Scott D. Wood. As they say in the book's introduction:

To ensure high usability on our own Web projects, we defined a development process that incorporates proven techniques from software and usability engineering, graphic design, project management, and other disciplines. The process had to be practical and lean. It had to allow us to work on multiple projects of varying sizes with fixed budgets. It had to help us keep track of the details that can kill usability and destroy profitability. This book is about that process.

Then find people who understand what the book is talking about to do the work -- and don't interfere!

Tags: Usability, Web design, Worst website, Ryan Stewart, Rich Internet Application, RIA, performance.