ellen kanner

How surprised was I to hear this from a colleague recently who heads up an IT division.

“Usability is an afterthought, if we have time.”

In fact it had my head spinning, so much that I felt a little sick.

Unfortunately many of the software products used by higher education institutions obviously lack the involvement of a use-centered design professional. It is painful to see and have to use some of the products used in higher ed, and elsewhere, that fall severely short of meeting the grade of proper process-flow, design and intuitive response.

Many times, I have come upon web tools that don’t do what’s expected. For instance, not being able to use the back button on the browser on many a college’s jobs postings site. For an example, see jobs.dartmouth.edu, do a search and try to use the browser as you normally would. And what’s sad is a majority of institutions use this for their employee recruitment process.

I could think of many systems that have the user confused about which is the next button to click, what needs to be completed to make the tool do what it needs to do. It’s kind of like the carnival midway fun-house, who knows what’s next if I take a step, perhaps the floor will move, or maybe I’ll be staring at a multitude of mirror images of myself. There’s a serious lack of concern in building these systems to make the user understand what still needs to be done before their submission is valid.

Take for instance a colleague who was in the process of submitting an application for professional certification, and thought she had completed the process by the deadline when she hit submit on the organization’s website. She received confirmation, yet came to find out through returning to the site months later that her application was not completed in time for the deadline, and that five years worth of experience she had not entered because the organization’s website had failed to send up proper flags and checkpoints for completing the application should have ben submitted days ago. She is now planning legal action because of this. Just a simple notation, an alert box, saying, “Your application is not valid until all dates of experience and information is entered” was all that’s needed.

So in web and software development, it is still the Wild West. Sure, we may have corralled content into content management systems, and everyone knows security is always on people’s minds and an important part of many a website nowadays, but the user experience and the proper use of web standards to ensure a proper experience in the browser for all users is still an afterthought.

Businesses are placing so much importance on their websites to take over where paperwork has left off that they’re treating the web as a replacement for years-old tried and true processes without putting thought into whether their system makes sense to their customers and fulfills the requirements that then paper process did. How often have you gone to your bank’s website and had a confusing, let alone frustrating experience, navigating around their clunky system? And yet somehow, when I see they’re advertising to “Apply for a loan in an instant” that I am somehow going to feel confident in their system accepting and processing my loan when the account interface looks startlingly unlikely to be able to support any transaction of it’s kind.

With all this movement away from paper processes toward the web, I predict in the not so distant future that we’ll see more complaints – and lawsuits – where an organization is at fault for not providing a proper, easily understood website with proper process flows, alerts and notifications.

So then usability and user-centered design will be at the forefront, not an afterthought, as organizations get hit where it hurts the most – in the bank account. Not until then does it seem will we have serious consideration by Information Technology professionals for the users perception and understanding of web-based systems. Until then, it’s the Wild West. Or maybe a fun-house.

Let the user beware.

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.