Rosenfeld and Krug: The usabilty A-Team visits Atlanta
Louis Rosenfeld (the Polar Bear book) and Steve “Don’t Make Think” Krug
visited Atlanta last week for a two-day IA/usabilty workshop. Workshop participants came from Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Red Hat, a large and boisterous crew of local favorite Delta com, and as far away as Germany.
The latest edition of Rosenfeld’s (with co-author Peter Morville) book adds the subheading Designing Large-Scale Web Sites, and Lou concentrated on the challenges of big sprawling sites in his presentation.
Such large-scale sites can benefit from a more gradual and continuous approach over “boiling the ocean,” Lou said, and he provided roadmaps on how to move key areas of large sites over time to better architected and more usable experiences.
We should consider ourselves “information therapists,” he said.
Large sites are often plagued by silo mentalities and politically compartmentalized content. Rosenfeld offered some techniques for cutting across those bureaucratic boundaries…
If you have a site map, use it as a test bed for navigation terms and architecture. Experiment with moving it away from representing the company org chart toward more user centered topical approach.
Site-wide A-Z indexes are often unwieldy and expensive to maintain. Consider offering users smaller specialized indexes that relate to certain topics or content areas.
Using guides — those small groups of related links embedded in or near main content — to address important, common user needs can give users easier access to cross-silo content that may be important to them or their tasks.
Rosenfeld conduced a metadata exercise using a (completely Southern appropriate) Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pie, which illustrated some of the challenges — is it creme, cream, or kreme? — of tagging.
On day two, Steve Krug began by sharing his collection of usability nightmare pictures from the real world — relating his own painful experience with a dark Starbucks bathroom, a motion-sensing light, and an inappropriately placed cabinet. A folded towel duct-taped to the cabinet indicated extensive user testing of the same scenario by others.
Krug emphasized user testing of web designs early and often, and not to get caught up in making testing a big production (although it can be if you want to spring for a Tobii eye tracking machine). Even small scale, informal testing is useful.
For example, he suggested “cubicle” testing forms. Mock up the online form you’re designing, complete with fields and instructions, and then visit a fellow cube occupant and observe him or her completing the form manually.
Krug reminded us that focus groups are about opinions, and user testing is about actions. He conducted several live site evaluations with URLs submitted by (somewhat anxious) conference participants. Volunteers from the audience were used for live user tests on stage, demonstrating they could simultaneously use a web site and fend off commentary and jabs (or friendly hisses if they ventured onto a non-Delta airline site) from the audience.
Thanks to the guys for visiting Atlanta and sharing. Please come back (on Delta) and have a Little Debbie and Coke with us, our treat, anytime.