Craig.Carlen[Online].com

Something I truly enjoy about the Internet - and specifically the World Wide Web - is that it’s constantly in flux.  It’s always changing - never quite the same as the last time you saw it.  But sometimes when things change they are really remaining the same - they just look different, or feel different.  Something that my studies at Michigan State focused on quite a bit was usability and sustainability.  Looking at how usable a website or web application is and how sustainable will it be.  This is accomplished with a variety of methodologies like play testing, focus group analysis, competitive analysis and so on.  Usability testing can be rather tedious - but its fruits can be very valuable.  Just ask Google.

Well usability guru Jakob Nielsen recently completed his yearly look at web habits and his conclusions mirror those of what Google has often found.

“Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so,” said Dr Nielsen. “People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience,” he said.

“I do not think sites appreciate that yet,” he added. “They still feel that their site is interesting and special and people will be happy about what they are throwing at them.”

This correlates directly with Google’s philosophy of keep it simple stupid (aka the KISS method). The Google home page has 16 links on it. And since I can remember, it’s been that way. It’s a search engine first and foremost and when you type their URL into your browser’s address bar that’s what you expect to find when you get to the Google home page.  Now other sites are taking notice – Microsoft’s revamped search engine Live.com is utilitarian compared to their former flagship search engine MSN. Yeah I know, MSN is a portal – but web users have shown repeatedly that when they want to search they will gravitate to a search engine – not a portal (are you listening Yahoo??). So Microsoft – not being a stupid competitor – too a chapter right off of Google’s front page and created Live.com. It’s simple, it’s usable and my initial guess is, it’s sustainable.

One of my biggest issues with any webpage is usability. I simply cannot believe that a company – any company – would put a live page on the WWW that isn’t usable. And with so many cross-platform tools available today it’s really not that difficult to create a webpage that is usable. The first place any web developer should go is W3C and learn those standards front and back, upside down and right side up, slantways, sideways, and everyway except the wrong way. (Have I mentioned I’m a sucker for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?) For me it’s unconscionable that any aspect of a webpage is unusable. The local ABC affiliate lost me as a viewer after never contacting me about my concerns that their on-line videos do not play correctly for anyone using a browser other than Internet Explorer. I made a choice based on what they presented me – I chose to not frequent their site.  Now they are deploying a new site soon - and from what I hear they will have a flash-based video player rather than utilize Windows Media servers.  Sorry WZZM, too late - your site’s difficult to navigate, your videos don’t play in my Firefox web browser and your page is full of ads I don’t want to see - not usable and not sustainable.

The internet is a fickle thing – it is becoming very user-centric and if companies with significant resources dedicated to a WWW presence aren’t careful their investment could go sour very quickly.

In what I see as one of the biggest bits of irony in a long time - WZZM promotes on their site the download of Firefox with Google’s Toolbar pre-installed.  Never mind you won’t be able to view any of their videos until they roll out their new site.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Internet, Poor Design, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.