Ensuring a website can be accessed by those with disabilities has been widely discussed and many public sector organisations are following the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) guidelines on accessibility when developing their web-based services. However, how does accessibility impact usability? Is there any need to distinguish between the two? What about the wider experience of interacting online? ....

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I recently asked a question on LinkedIn asking

“What do you consider to be essentials criteria for a web redesign and how do you test these criteria for effectiveness in producing a successful site?”

I was interested to see how the wider professional community saw the subject of successful web design, what where the points that needed to be addressed and even what did people consider to be ‘design’.

I know when I use design in reference to a project I mean the information, the structure and the function of the site, but others think code, or images or possibly something else.

The answers I got where all extremely well thought out, eloquent and I couldn’t argue with any of the points put forward, mainly because the respondents where answering from the point of view some focused on code or user testing or graphics, some even looked site visits as their metric and all fit the bill, but none focused on the structure of the content, the architecture.

One answer caught my eye from AZHAR SAEED in Toronto,

ESTHETICS is the key.
UPDATED INFO most important.
SEAMLESS is the skill.

Well kinda, structure is the key, findabilty the ease with which the visitor can locate the site and its contents, the aesthetics of a site is in reality secondary, if you can't find the content then it amtters little how it looks...

It’s the simplicity of the answer that caught my eye; he managed to answer a deceptively complicated question in 3 lines! Wonderful!  The simplicity of structure the answer is itself uses indicates a key point of all web design, If only all answers was as simple.

In short I guess there is no one right answer to a successful web site (re) design, there are however many many wrong ones.

 

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I was invited to speak at Sage Publishing this week. My talk was pretty much the same one as the UKSG one I did last year but I threw in a couple of slides about web2 and the 'scarcity vs scale' topic I've written about recently on Electronic Museum.

One thing struck me very, very forcibly during the talk which I'd like to share here.

It's this: I am not normal.

My wife and friends of course know this. But it's not my dodgy tuna omelettes (don't ask), inability to do one thing at once or love of crumpets that I'm interested in here. It's the love, fascination and exposure to technology which define much of my life, both day job and personal time.

The reason that this came to light is that I was presenting at Sage to a biggish, youngish, coolish, intelligent London audience. In short, it's a supposed key internet demographic. These people are 20-40 somethings, very switched on, and interested and engaged in what I had to say.

You know the interesting thing? These guys for the most part didn't know what web2 was. All but one hadn't used Google Docs. The notion of the Semantic Web was a million miles away. They heard about an “API” for the first time during my talk.

I often say to people that I'm not 'deep tech'. By that, I mean that I consider myself to be a bit of a generalist. I 'dip': I roughly know what XML, OAI, RDF, GRIDDL, AJAX, SQL, .Net, etc - do. I don't, however have the brain (or inclination) to be a deep tech like many of those around me. It’s not the way I work. But I do for the most part consider myself to be connected to “real people” and able to voice the concerns and needs of the technology-requiring masses.

What I realised at the Sage talk is that I’m out of touch. I haven’t spent enough time recently talking and walking with those who actually matter: the mass market – the users - represented by the attendees at my talk. It got me thinking about how us geeks actually miss huge opportunities by not understanding how people *really* work and think. We don’t ask. We don’t test. We don’t mingle enough.

There was also a fascinating moment when I talked about tech systems often being incompatible with each other, hard to use, far from user-centric. Spontaneously, the room sniggered and nodded heads. It’s not a wholly original perspective, but I realised again how technology is a blocker and not an enabler for so many people. Whereas I wallow in this stuff, most people probably open up Word or IE with a sense of dread rather than a sense of opportunity. Of course I get frustrated too – bad user interfaces annoy anyone – but I’m in a different place from those who see these tools as just getting in the way.

One of my slides shows how I believe Facebook has pushed the Hype Curve and (luckily) this was backed up by a quick “hands up” confirmation – yes, pretty much everyone in the room had a Facebook account. This teaches us something very important, too. It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly, but it’s something about usability, user need, the “real” social web. It’ll have to be another blog post once I’ve thought it through, but needless to say Facebook has been very, very important in this equation. I’d always assumed that Google Docs were “mainstream”, for example, but compared to Facebook, they’re still geekville, by a long, long way.

I’ve blogged endlessly about how tech fails people. I’ve struggled with why and how systems in organisations are usually procured by people who haven’t asked for user input. I can see how these things happen – it’s the organic growth of requirement and technology – but I’m also determined that we geeks have a huge responsibility in educating, listening, being modest, open. We have SO much work to do - and I don't believe the vast majority of it is technical. It's "soft stuff" - asking friends, family, users, colleagues about what they use, why they use it and how it could be better.

So I’d like to thank Sage for having me and for providing some normal people to bring me back down to earth and remind me what it's all about .

Ok this is a bit of personal grip of mine but, a very simply put a key way for you to make the content of your site easier to use and improve its trust rating, add a date.

The web is full of content, not all of it useful, accurate or up to date, the user needs to be able to trust what you put up there but that’s hard to do if they don’t know how long its been there.

A simple 'published date', 'date last updated' or date last accredited, tells the user that you, the content owner are still aware of this article that its still loved and remembered and its still relevant. 

Too much content it orphaned and left online to mislead users, disinformation for the masses, add a date field and keep checking your content, let the user know your there.

 / gripe 

J