Lloyd Sokvitne, Manager of Systems Support and Development for the State Library of Tasmania, talks about how to give your web site users what they really need.
Many people develop web sites thinking their users will navigate them in the same logical, methodical way in which they are created. That’s not the case.
'They tend to go by intuition and visual clues, which are much more hard to predict and understand than if they were just reading the content on the page logically', says Sokvitne. This is one of the key misunderstandings between developers and users that result in 'over-engineering': providing more functionality than your user wants or needs.
For example, there was once a function on the Service Tasmania web site that allowed users to navigate to a topic area, and then perform a search for information limited to that topic. Users often mistook this for a comprehensive site search. 'We added a level of sophistication that wasn’t in fact in accordance with what people were doing', Sokvitne explains. So they scaled it back. They made the comprehensive search the default, because that was what the users expected. For users who knew to look for it, they also provided the topic-specific search.
How can you avoid over-engineering? 'One of the key indicators is complexity. A good web site is essentially and almost always simple', says Sokvitne. It follows that your budget should reflect this simplicity. If you are over-budget on a web site, or working with an unusually large budget, it may be supporting unnecessary functionality. Web sites should be cheap and easy to change as you learn more about your client’s needs, and you should be monitoring those needs regularly with usability testing.
Usability testing is typically performed as an afterthought, when the web site is fully functional. Instead, it should start during the design phase and continue right through the project lifecycle. User feedback should be incorporated every step of the way, whether the project is for a new site or a redevelopment. Several approaches to any web site change should be subjected to usability testing. As Sokvitne points out, 'It’s an evaluative tool, as well'.
Usability testing should also be used to benchmark the success rate of existing functionality. Any changes should maintain or improve that benchmark. Otherwise, you are going backwards. This also helps to manage the 'inheritance factor', which refers to the impact of changes on long-time users who are familiar with the site’s design.
Analysing web site usage statistics is no substitute for usability testing. 'You see the outcome of the choices they made, but you don’t know if those choices were made through desperation or whether they were purposeful. Knowing your users is only partially achieved by watching your statistics', Sokvitne warns.
Sokvitne also says web sites present a unique challenge for government. Service Tasmania provides approximately 600 applications. 'To provide a navigational capacity to find very quickly what you’re looking for of those six hundred is an interesting challenge and I think a lot of governments around the country are now trying to find a way to deal with that', he says. The solution requires creativity and experimentation, 'You end up needing to solve things that no one out there has solved'.
There is danger in generalising the web experience. Know who your user is. Know how they think. Give them options and ask them questions. As Sokvitne sums it up, 'Everything really comes back to, one way or another, the end user and identifying and working with that user to find out what they actually do on the web'.
By interview with Lloyd Sokvitne. iFocus sincerely thanks Mr Sokvitne and the State Library of Tasmania for their contribution.