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A recent class on (web)usability made me understand the political issues behind web-usability. Technically there is little doubt that usability of a software product is the result of applying the usability engineering discipline to the software development process. The earlier the better. But the politial issue behind the technical is to move design authority from business to IT. Right now business controls the design process. They call in the agencies and because of their business knowledge they are considered the experts for usability too. By establishing usability engineering as a technical discipline (when will we see the engineer for usability?) IT takes over. This is not the only case of the “battle for the web-page”. The move to structured publishing (separation of content and presentation, XML based database publishing etc.) takes away the possibility for HTML and Javascript savvy business users to control the layout of their sub-sites - thereby losing an opportunity to shine in front of company internal competition. Another result of this development is that agencies will have to design layout according to the technical standards of such a publishing system.
Especially intranet projects seem to be under constant pressure to look like a windows application. Navigation items don't look like links, lot's of marks to set instead of links to follow. Frequently certain page designs where shown and talked about in the class. Some were supposedly good and some not. It occured to me that a static analysis of a page is very hard and also not really reliable. Only when you see how a user works with it the ergonomic quality can be judged. This reminds me of a very special user interface of a data entry application I once helped to develop. The interface was highly optimized for mass data entry and took every opportunity to save on key strokes. Not at all a CUA89 or CUA91 office style interface. The user had to be trained and reached their top speed only after a week or two. The stopwatch proved after that time that the interface indeed saved a lot of money. The problem selling it was that the people who decided about the acquisiton were not the final users and sometimes put off by the “ non-excel ” look. Usability engineering still reduces the user to a fixed point in time. It disregards the following facts:
Support for e.g. visually impaired users is still weak. Even usability engineers talk about using colors to make differences “clear”! Navigation requires sight the way it is designed. But accessibilty will become an issue of political correctness. How will a company prove to be an equal opportunity employer if their intranets and internets cannot be used by the handicappeds? But there is good news as well: the move to XML based publishing will allow companies to add accessibility features easily because page layouts can be generated from XML data and meta-data. The fact that kriha.org is completely written in XML makes some usability improvements easy to implement.
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| $Date: 2008/02/16 14:07:15 $ | Home | printer friendly format | view comments | Feedback |
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