ellen kanner

I had a discussion the other day in a room full of programmers and system administrators where the conversation migrated to how usable a tool should be, in this case software, if it were a complex system. The argument from some in the room was that, “hey, it’s a complex system, it will be complex to the user”, to which my response was, “Really?”

Several examples came up of how very complex systems – be it a software application, a car, the human body – appear to be fairly easy to use by the user. A driver of a car does not need to be an automotive engineer, a baker does not need to be a mechanic to fix his mixer, nor do we all need to understand how a software application is built to make it work for what we need it to do. A user needs to understand what the tool offers and what they can achieve from using it. If one doesn’t understand the possibilities of how to use Photoshop or Illustrator, for example, then they will not understand the benefit of the tool. What a user doesn’t need to understand is how to get Photoshop setup on their Mac – set up should be simple and make logical sense, in layman’s terms. If every time we had to go into the shell account of our computer to install a software application, the industry of the web and software world would not be what it is today.

As web design, development and software programming professionals, we owe it to our users to make what we build as intuitive to the user as possible. If not, we’ve lost our user, a client, and the point. The most successful and appreciated products and software applications on the market are simple in the hands of the user.

After about 12+ months of a redesign effort, the new Dartmouth Computing website has launched. A project where we inherited generic terms for navigation such as “Support” and “Resources” and honed it down to pointed subjects such as “Email” and “Video Services”, to name a few. I did the architecture, design, coding and managed the technicalities of the project through launch. I think we’ve come out with a product that many folks are happy with. And, though Google Site Search needs to correct its cache of the old site, we’ve had few to no complaints on the issue as users are finding what they need through the navigation. How fantastic.

The largest changes to the site are the design, the architecture and the way the content is presented. We went from 4000 pages to just under 700 currently, with a few more to come in as the site editors continue to build out the site.
My approach to this site was to tackle and present the navigation of the site from a users perspective – user-centered terminology as opposed to the old structure based on the org chart or generic terms. This did take some time for folks to get used to and at many a moment did we have site editors asking, “But how will users find content about my department?”

So we provided the “self-help” section of the site that’s included in the top-level navigation, as well as a location for individual departments to share their information about their division of Computing.

This project was a long time coming. We started the discussions 3 years ago and it wasn’t until within the last year or so did we get the buy in from the appropriate offices.

So here we are with user-centered architecture, clear and consistent design patterns for content and useful ancillary items, like the DartPulse alerts, that allow users to gather and view information as they need it all in one website. Overall a project well worth those endless discussions over terminology and appropriateness.