Web Sites That Work: Designing with Your Eyes Open

(2 Days)

Jared M. Spool and Christine Perfetti

Our two-day course, Web Sites that Work: Designing with Your Eyes Open, is the only research-driven, in-depth training course created to teach web designers exactly what it takes to build usable web sites. Based on User Interface Engineering’s research from the last six years, you’ll learn the latest in how users navigate and interact with information-rich web sites.

We don’t want you to blindly believe everything we say. We’d rather show you how to spot the evidence yourself and draw your own conclusions—that’s designing with your eyes open.

You’ll usability test several web sites (including your own, if you wish) to explore our findings for yourself. We’ll show you some things to look for, and you’ll conduct short usability tests in small teams. It’s great if you’ve done usability testing before, but it’s fine if you haven’t.

When you leave the course, you’ll be armed with essential skills in designing and conducting usability tests, and you’ll know what to look for when you test your own site.

Course Outline

Introduction

We’ll start the day with hands-on exploration of live web sites. You’ll gain first-hand experience with the basics of how to test web sites for usability and Usability problems of some popular web sites (possibly even your own).

Usability of Web Sites

When creating a web site, you need to know what kind of site you are creating, who your audience is, and why users are coming to your site.

Find out:

• How your business model affects your design
• What we learned from our usability tests of 91 users in 3 days
• The tasks we used in our usability research (and how to create your own tasks)

The Scent of Information

Some sites work better than others for finding information. You’ll discover:

• How human “informavores” behave as they hunt their prey
• How links give off “scent” that guides users to their goal
• Examples of links that misled users

The Quality of Links

Links play a vital role in the user’s success at finding information. You’ll see why:

• “Content” links do better than “category” links at helping users succeed
• Longer links work better--to a point
• Harder-to-read text has a strong positive correlation with successful use
• Reading and skimming are different activities that may require different designs

Link Organization

The arrangement of links on a page affects how quickly users can find information. We’ll show you why:

• Users have more success getting to information when content links were grouped
• Redundant links improve users’ rates of success
• Simple design elements, such as bullets and brackets, can help

Honing Your Facilitation Skills

We’ll give you the “quick and dirty” on facilitating a usability test. By the end of the day, you’ll have facilitated several mini-usability tests and experienced:

• The three roles of the test facilitator
• Briefing and debriefing users
• When to help users (and when not to)

Page Layout

The way you present content influences its ease of use. You’ll probe the underlying reasons why:

• Providing more “levels of information” on a single web page helps users find what they’re looking for
• Requiring less drill-down within a site may lead to more success than having lots of smaller pages linked together
• Scrolling isn’t necessarily evil
• Users did worse on sites that had more white space

Graphics

Some designers place more emphasis on graphics than they’re actually worth. You’ll explore:

• Why graphics don’t really help or hurt on sites where users are looking for information
• How image links are harder to design than text-only links (and they don’t work any better)
• The role graphics play in branding, and how to determine whether this is important for your site

Designing for Marketing

Web sites can make weak marketing tools if designed improperly. Balancing marketing goals with user goals takes knowledge. You’ll learn:

• Why some sites work to strengthen branding and other sites actually weaken brands
• How sites have successfully increased sales through their existing channels
• Why ‘seducible moments’ are your most effective sales tool

Site Organization

An experienced user isn’t necessarily going to be more successful than an inexperienced user. You’ll explore why:

• Shell sites can hide information
• Users get confused when your site mimics the structure of your business

On-Site Search Engines

Your site may actually be better off without an on-site search engine! You’ll see why:

• Users were LESS likely to find information when they used an on-site search engine
• Users had a hard time specifying a search correctly (spelling, syntax, partial matches)
• Search engine results may not lead to the answer, but there are things that designers can do about it

Users’ Experience Over Time

A user’s knowledge doesn’t automatically make web sites more usable. You’ll discover that:

• Users show evidence of learning to navigate sites, but learning
  may be temporary
• “Internet savvy” users learn all sorts of tricks for working
  with web sites--but most of these don’t help

Who Should Attend

This course is ideal for designers and developers of Internet and intranet web sites, including content developers, web authors, marketing professionals, and managers.