CIL 2011 - Day 3 - Usability Express

This solid and useful session was led by Bohyun Kim and Marissa Ball from Florida State University. The session was divided into two sections. In the first, Bohyun Kim examined common problems on library websites and the basic principles that can be used to correct them. These problems (most of which I can agree with emphatically from experience) were:

• Clutter & Noise - in promoting everything, nothing really gets promoted. I found it interesting that in this session the presenters stated that the conventional wisdom that people don't want to click more than 3 times to find anything, is in fact incorrect and that people don't mind clicking a lot to get to what they want as long as they don't have to think about where to click.
• Dated Look - If your site looks old, even if it's regularly updated, users will assume it's out of date.
• Too Subtle Design - With a 500 millisecond evaluation period that most users apply to websites they are visiting, your website should have the visual simplicity of a billboard.
• Unclear Terms/Library Jargon - Avoid library jargon (something we've generally tried to do), don't use vendor provided names for databases (something we haven't necessarily done well), and use a short description if necessary. After the session I was talking about the jargon problem with someone and they mentioned the case of a library having a database of the month promotion with the catchy phrase (something like) "This month tango with Mango" without mentioning that Mango is an online language learning database. It would be far better to avoid the Mango name entirely and just say "Learn a language for free"
• Redundant/Unnecessary Content - Avoid stuff people don't care about (welcome/introduction text) and any stuff that functions as a kind of small talk. Users of your website don't care about small talk.
• Bad writing - Cut the length of any text by half and then cut more. Avoid full sentences if possible and use bullet points. Short paragraphs. If someone can't glance at a page and quickly find the important text, they will get frustrated.
• Design against convention - In this case "against" means "using as a measuring stick" not "contrary to." People expect sites to be consistent and there are a lot of established website conventions which you should adhere to.
• Unintuitive Navigation - If you can't figure out what intuitive navigation is, do some usability testing

That last point led into Marissa Ball's portion of the program which focused on doing quick, cheap and easy usability testing. Here she described a variety of ways to get the biggest bang for the buck in testing individual users on your site and then building a design with user feedback that should be easy for them to understand.