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The Basics: Audience, Goals, and Purpose Planning Your Website: Organization Planning Your Website: Effective Communication
Audience and Your Goals The first step in planning any Web site is to define your goals. Decide what your primary objective is: do you want to inform, educate, or entertain? Who will be your target audience? A site targeted at prospective students will be very different from one targeted at current students, which would be different still from a site targeted to College faculty or staff. Remember also that the web is global, so viewers from all over will have access to the information you post on your site. You should also be aware of the language that you use on your pages. Don’t use technical or discipline specific jargon if your pages are meant for a broad audience. Purpose If you are a student or faculty member constructing a personal Web page, it is highly probable that you have more than one goal in mind. For example, if you are an expert on exotic fish, you may want to incorporate information about this subject on your Web site, with pointers (links) to other sites as well. Or, if you are teaching in the Biology Department, you may want to make your course syllabus and other related information available to your students. As a college student or employee, you are not allowed to sell or advertise commercial products using college resources, but you may wish to sell viewers on ideas. Similarly, you may be active in professional or nonprofit associations and your personal Web page might be an appropriate place to advertise the information and services that are available from that organization. Organization Develop the content of your site before you being to design. Collect or create all of the graphical and textual content that you will need before you start. Outline your information into a hierarchy of pages to assist viewers in navigating through your site. A main page with a table of contents or directory of information that can be found at your site is helpful. This page can contain links to your major submenus, which then can contain links to content.
Note the first type of site, which has an easy to follow organizational scheme, as opposed to the second, which really has no clear direction.
All web files must be saved as .htm or .html file types, regardless of whether you are using an WYSIWYG web creation and management program (such as FrontPage or DreamWeaver) or hand coding all of your tags. Although filenames with spaces will work with most FrontPage or DreamWeaver, it is not recommended. The name for your main page must be either default.htm or index.html depending on which server you use to host your site. The following is list of tips to help make your Web site more effective:
The Web is constantly changing; your pages should not be static. Check them periodically to make sure that all of your information is timely. Be sure to update the dates on each page when you do this. Check your links periodically and make sure that they still work. Test your web site. Website UsabilityUsability, in the context of web design, refers to those qualities that make a visitor’s experience with a website successful. There is no single measure of success, but sites with a user-focused design typically have a clear purpose, make information easy for people to find, and provide an overall pleasant experience for viewers. Think about your own experiences surfing the Web. Have you ever visited a site where it took you 10 minutes (or longer) to find the information you needed and then had the same experience the next time you visited the site? Have you been to sites where the text of the links is next to impossible to read (such as blue text on a dark background) or the graphics took so long to load that you just gave up and went to another site instead? Sites like these have poor usability. Sites with good usability, on the other hand, are harder to recognize; when everything goes well, you may not notice it. If you have surfed the Web extensively, you may already have a pretty good idea of what makes a site successful or unsuccessful for you. However, as a web developer, it is not an easy task to assess how usable your site is to others. The developers of a site already know how the site is supposed to be used and where all the information is located, but the actual viewers will not have the benefit of that knowledge and may run into difficulties that the site designers never imagined. Usability is much more than just common sense; what makes sense to you may make no sense at all to others. The best way to assess how useful your site is is to perform some usability activities (including testing your site with representative viewers of your site). Making Your Site More UsableHow can you make your site more usable? At each step in the process of designing, implementing, and maintaining a website, you need to think about usability. If you try to think about every aspect of your design from the perspective of its viewers and potential viewers, your site will likely be more successful. Usability cannot be an afterthought. There is no magic formula for making a site more usable, but there are some common pitfalls that you can avoid and some steps you can take to improve the usability of a site. Techniques for Testing UsabilityThere are many ways to improve the usability of a website. Some can be done with only members of the design team, while others use people who are not members of the design team. The best method for testing is probably done with actual current or potential viewers of the site. The design team can sit down and do a "walk-through" of the site. During the walk-through, the team goes through each page looking for problems, such as missing links that prevent the easy completion of a task. This has the advantage of being quick and cheap, but it does not reveal interface problems, such as those related to finding specific information on the site or the use of technical jargon. Another technique is the use of a focus group. The members of a focus group may or may not be viewers of the site. These group sessions produce a lot of feedback on the site in a short period of time, but these groups are difficult to arrange and facilitate, and there often are differences between what people say in the group and what they actually do on the site. Paper and pencil tests. These activities use paper and pencil to develop the principal elements of a site such as the text used on links or the location of the main headings and the navigation areas. Words such as "Search" or "Download software" are written on Post-it® notes, which are then attached to a larger piece of paper that represents the web page. The tester can then point to the Post-it that says "Search" when the desired action on the page is to do a search. These kinds of tests have the advantage of being easy and fast, and a large number of viewers can be tested in a short period of time. They have the disadvantage of being decontextualized. One situation where it is helpful to use paper and pencil tests is when one is not sure what words to use on a page, especially for navigation links. Set up a list of possible words in one column on a page and a list of tasks in a second column and ask viewers to indicate which words in the first column they would select to get information about the task in the second column.
One can be surprised at what particular words mean to the people tested. For instance, some people when asked, "If you have trouble using the software, whom would you contact?" may ignore the link "Help & Training" and go to the "Technical information" link, which is in smaller type under a different heading and did not lead to the answer. Jared Spool, a recognized usability expert, found that viewers go to help for only two reasons: "(1) they are confused about something on the screen, or (2) they need to find specific functionality." See the article Making Online Information Usable. Similar articles can also be found at the User Interface Engineering website at http://www.uie.com. Paper prototyping. This activity can be done by oneself in the initial planning stages of a Web site's design, or can be done with another individual to observe interactions with a paper prototype of web pages. Various pieces of a web page, such as the search button, the content links, or the navigation bar links, are created with pieces of paper and pencil as shown below. This can be used by an individual to determine the best way to layout a page without first investing the time of actually creating it with software.
To observe another individual's use of a site, only the pieces that are to be tested are created. The developer (or members of the development team) moves the pieces for the tester to mimic what the computer would do. There may be a facilitator who talks to the user, giving him tasks or scenarios to carry out using the prototype while the observer takes notes on what the user does and says. The user may be asked to "think aloud" while performing the tasks or scenarios. This type of testing has the advantage of being fast and easy to do because no HTML code is written, and the findings can be very helpful in determining what problems viewers will have. Viewers may be more willing to offer comments because they feel that changes can be made more easily when the pages are less developed. It is also easier to abandon a design that doesn't work if you haven't put a lot of time in developing it. However, this activity requires that someone watch the user's performance, which may be affected by nervousness or discomfort at being observed. You need to decide what tasks you want to test using the prototype. These tasks will usually be based on the primary use of the site. Just design the elements needed to complete the particular task you are concerned with on each screen. It is important to not spend time redoing the screens to make them neater. Don't use a ruler. As long as the words are legible they do not need to be neat. When you think you have all of the screens set up, do a couple of run-throughs of the tasks. You may need to make changes before bringing in your participants. This type of activity can be used to help you decide on how to set up navigation to an important area on your site. For instance, as a facilitator, you may ask the testers to find the phone number of the Chair in your academic department. Iterative design. It is important to realize that usability activities help you find problems with your current design. For example, when you change the design of the prototype to eliminate problems you may be introducing new problems so it is a good idea to repeat the usability activity, redesign, usability activity, redesign, usability activity, etc., until the major problems disappear. Paper prototyping speeds up this interactive design process so you don't have to do HTML code until the design is much more developed. Optimum number of testers. Only three to five people are needed for testing each design iteration if you are doing prototypes. According to Jakob Nielsen, a well known usability expert, you will learn the most with the first participant. A third of the errors identified by the second participant will already have been identified by the first participant. Two thirds of the errors seen by the third participant will have already been identified, and by the fifth user 80% of the errors will have been seen. Accessibility considerations. Remember that people with various disabilities will be accessing your web pages. See suggestions on how to make your Web pages ADA compliant for more information. If possible, try to find a participant who uses a text reader to test your site early in the design process when you have some pages available online, and see what problems they have. Tools for Automating Usability TestingAs usability has become more critical on websites, new services and tools are being developed. For example, UsableNet.com (http://www.usablenet.com/), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/webmet/sat/websat-process.html), and NetTracker Corp. (http://www.sane.com/products/NetTracker/) offer tools for analyzing web pages for usability problems. A review of these products Usability Tools: A Useful Start (http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/08/stratrevu/) appeared in Web Techniques, August 2000. While these tools are useful, they are a complement to, not a substitute for, usability tests performed by direct observation. Resources with More Information on UsabilityThere are many resources available to help you improve the usability of your websites. Some useful resources on the Web include the following:
There are a number of helpful books that include information on this topic:
In addition, Jakob Nielsen has an extensive annotated list of books on usability (http://www.useit.com/books/). Copyright Laws and PlagiarismPerhaps it should not be necessary to have to say this, but you should observe copyright laws and avoid plagiarism! The admonition is not only for students, but also to faculty who wish to make materials of others available to their students. Make sure that, whatever you include, its display is both legal and ethical. Ask yourself, would you be comfortable in a court of law explaining your use of another's work? Some useful resources on regarding copyright can be found on the Trinity Library page from the following link: http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/library/help/copyright.htm. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
