Need for maintaining website usability

Rukshan Alexander

The term “user friendly” is most important one after user interface increased significantly when the personal computer revolution started. It is obvious that to make maximum use of the computer system or product we have to make the systems usable.

From past to present different fields have contributed in making the computer products usable and to the accepted definition of the term usability such as - User Centred Design (UCD), Human - Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer Human Interaction (CHI), User, Human Machine Interface (HMI), etc.

One of the first usability definition was established by ISO for software quality in 1991.

According to ISO9241 usability can be defined as “the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments” where :

* Effectiveness refers to the both the completion and precision a consumer/user can succeed in a desired task/action.

* Efficiency refers to the precision and net use of resources and the extent to which an action is completed.

* Satisfaction refers to a user being content and comfortable with the use of the work system.

Usability in the web

In our modern world, Internet plays a significant role in the everyday life of people. The World Wide Web has been tremendously successful. Both the number of users and the amount of material available on it have grown at an astonishing rate. The Web allows the audience to access private, public, academic, business, and government websites.

Vast amounts of data are available on web pages, but they can be presented in a variety of ways which will determine the web pages’ tasks, users and environment.

However, a large amount of data is not reachable to all users, due to usability and accessibility problems in web sites. It is determined that the key to online success and increased market share is to make its e-commerce site as usable as possible as the web usability is a major factor in the quality and success of a web site.

Web usability and accessibility problem led to the launch of web site construction standards and guidelines.

Usability guidelines for the web

Web usability guidelines play an important role in ensuring web site omit all common usability problems particularly whilst designing and evaluating web sites. To satisfy users by presenting a usable web design of English web pages, a wide variety of web usability guidelines have been designed by different researchers and authors.

Each one of them focuses on how to satisfy users by presenting a usable web site design and also these guidelines address a wide range of web page design issues starting from the browser’s title to the detail of web page features.

Web usability guidelines are numerous and distributed among different sources: recommendation papers, design standards, style guides that are specific to a particular environment, design guides and algorithms for ergonomic design.

Additionally, contradictions exist between guidelines, which might be because of their different ages, the changes in the technology or because they might be appropriate only for specific group of users.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0 accessible at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/) plays an important role in web site usability guidelines because it yields to apply broadly to more advanced technologies; is easier to use and understand; and is more precisely testable with automated testing and human evaluation.

Furthermore while usability implies accessibility (at least when an unconstrained user population is considered), the contrary is not necessarily true. For example, a missing link to the home page may be a fault affecting usability, while it does not affect accessibility. It is possible to categorise web usability guidelines within the following:

1. Consistency of presentation and controls.

2. Adequate feedback.

3. Contextual navigation.

4. Efficient navigation.

5. Clear and meaningful labels.

6. Robustness.

7. Flexibility.

8. Functionality.

9. Others.

Title guidelines

The web page title is an important element in the web design as the title is the first item that appears in the web browser window, it is considered as the main references to the web pages, and it can be used in the bookmark list and the history list.

Web site users are always expected to scan rather than read, consequently web titles should have limited length and be descriptive of the page’s content. In order to successfully select the web page title experts offer some guidelines developers should follow as follows:

* Web page titles should not be more than 64 characters.

* Window titles should contain no more than eight words.

* Web page titles should not contain words such as “.com, online, homepage and etc.”.

* Window titles should not start with words like “The” or “Welcome to” .

Text effects (bold, italic, underlined) guidelines

Users can traverse web pages in several ways depending on their reading habits.

The user’s eye movement can be classified either into a normal reading style starting from left to right and back again or as clockwise pattern.

In both cases the users scan the web page from top to bottom searching for the desired data by concentrating on the emphasized text, which can be indicated by bold, italic, underlining, changed font size, face, colour or alignment.

Each of these aspects has its own guidelines to improve its usage. For what regards bold text:

* It can be easily noticed and read from the screens.

* Too much bold text lacks contrast and loses efficiency.

The experts’ recommendations for italic face usage can be summarized as follows:

* Avoid setting large blocks of text in italic.

* Avoid using italic text altogether.

* Italic text is hard to read in paragraph format.

Underlined text has special meaning in web documents because it represents hypertext links in most web browsers and there is a wide agreement on the fact that it should be avoided.

To be continued