Usability

Keyboard accessibility is one of the most important aspects of web accessibility. There are a whole host of reasons why certain users will find mouse usage difficult or impossible. Some users may have no use or limited use of their hands or arms and rely on the keyboard or alternative input devices to navigate websites. Blind people using screen reading software almost exclusively rely on keyboard navigation.

Recently, in my role of auditing websites for accessibility, I have come across a number of websites that make keyboard navigation impossible, because critical sign-posting allowing users to see where they are on the page are missing.

When keyboard users navigate websites, they jump from link to link using the tab key. They can see where they are on the page because the link with the focus has a dotted border around it. These borders should be visible by default, like they are on the BBC website but on a number of websites I have visited, they have been removed. Maybe the web designer considered them ‘ugly’ and removed them (this can be done by setting the physical appearance of the ‘outline-style’ property to ‘none’) because they spoilt his or her design of the page, not realising the huge impact this has on users with disabilities.

Dotted borders on the BBC website appear
around links that have the current keyboard focus.

The simplest way to ensure that a visual indicator is present is to do nothing and let the dotted borders appear by default. However, these dotted borders are not always easy to see, especially if background colours are being used. To make them obvious, CSS techniques can be used to display a different background colour when the link receives the focus. This is a great technique and can be seen in action on the Easy Slideshare website.

Links with the current keyboard focus can be made
more obvious by adding a different background colour. 

A clear and distinct visual indicator is essential for sighted users that rely on keyboard navigation. Without them, websites become impossible to use as users are not able to see where they are on a page.

Not one to follow the hype or emerging trend, I was still intrigued by why anyone would queue from 5.30am to buy something, namely the new iPhone which launched last week in the UK. On catching up with my brother-in-law last weekend, an avid iPhone user (and essentially all things Apple), I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. He proudly pulled out his phone and handed it to me, initially I was amazed he would trust his new prised possession in my hands, what if I ‘broke’ something by pressing the wrong button? It would seem that it’s not possible.

I initially went and tried out what is usually the first thing I use a mobile for, sending a text, upon realising how simple that was, I wanted to know how useful some of the applications really are - this is where it got exciting, I could fill a page on the 30 minutes spent ‘playing’ on the phone, the most useful apps for me are anything to do with travel, getting from A to B with minimum fuss - the routes can be displayed in different formats, map, satellite, text with built in compass, and the ease of use is paramount, as someone who uses the internet frequently to plan my journey, I was amazed that it was so much better on the iPhone. Not one normally for games, I spent a good ten minutes ‘driving’ (the phone acts as the steering wheel and it moves extremely well) as for playing the synthsiser, who knew I was so musical?! We even shot a short video, did a quick edit and uploaded it to You Tube within minutes.

Basically I was hugely impressed with the iPhone, it’s slick, sleek style which fits comfortably in the hand, the large clear screen, sound quality, sheer speed and the most useful applications that simply provide a cleaned up version of the internet! A great customer experience and for the first time I can see where the cost of an item like this actually holds it’s value. The iPhone is not only pretty and fun, but useful too.

I recently downloaded a free trial of Axure. After hearing so many good things about it from colleagues I decided I must try it. After entering my email address as requested I unticked the e-marketing box out of pure habit just as I was scanning the text. After unticking it my eyes reached the last few words ‘about one email a month’. This was enough to make me stop and reconsider. While part of me would like to know about updates and news what I didn’t want was to be inundated with emails and my natural instinct in all these situations is to opt out. But once a month or thereabouts I can cope with. So I reticked the box. Including that little piece of extra information has meant that Axure has the means for ongoing communication with me. Clever work.

I signed up to Waterstone’s card a couple of months ago (I was caught off guard at the counter when asked if I wanted to sign up.) I said ‘Yes’, instantly regretting it as I knew I would never use it. If you use the card when you buy books, you get points; on top of that, you get subscribed to their newsletter when you sign up - all pretty standard stuff. After a couple of months of receiving these emails, I decided that I wasn’t particularly interested in receiving them anymore. And this is when this ordinary experience started to go astray. After clicking on the link to unsubscribe, I was presented with a page that allows you to ‘manage everything to do with your email subscriptions’ – their words. However, in truth, this page only lets you sign up to receive more emails or change the email address to which you receive the mail – not exactly enabling you to manage everything to do with your email subscriptions.
After spending a couple of minutes looking for the unsubscribe option, I gave up, instead opting to mark the newsletter as junk mail and let the spam checker take care of it for me. I have since come across another mailing list which gave me food for thought. It employs a different tact - it gives the user a choice whether they want to unsubscribe or try the emails for another couple of emails – the number determined by the user. Empowering the user in this way is more likely to keep customers happy and in doing so, retain them. In addition to the Waterstone’s loyalty card that I do not use, their emails are now going straight in to my junk mail - which effectively closes the door on any future correspondence from them. And although this experience hasn’t put me off Waterstone’s completely, I believe that as important as it is to get the user experience right when opting in, it is equally important to get it right when you are opting out, otherwise you risk annoying customers and shutting them out for good.

I recently received a DVD featuring video and photographical highlights from a friend’s wedding day. As much fun was experienced by all during the celebrations, I eagerly loaded my DVD player in the anticipation of spotting myself and my friends amongst the crowd. However, it was not to be as I was defeated at the first hurdle; I couldn’t understand how to navigate around the media. The top level menus were faint images of roses (I think!) and featured against a moving blurry background of rotating flower bouquets, in addition, the feedback for selection was non-existent and the labelling incomprehensible.

The poor usability of my friend’s wedding DVD could be forgiven as the DVD was compiled by the groom as a cost saving exercise using free software, however commercial DVD manufacturers can not use the same excuse. This experience led me to review various DVDs in my collection.

From exploring the first few, it was obvious that from a usability point of view DVD menus are generally poor - commonly a case of placing aesthetics over function. In other words, designers appear to view this medium as a creative arena where no rules apply.

In many cases, navigating menu options from simply playing the film to selecting individual chapters was frequently difficult and often frustrating. On one DVD, I drilled down within the special features section and the only way I could return to a start point was to reject the disk and reload the DVD!

As a result of these experiences, here are some suggestions for better presented and usable DVD menus:

• Keep the animations and menus within their own distinct regions on the screen. (Nothing is more frustrating than trying to assess feedback after making a selection against a rolling or busy background.)
• Ensure feedback is obvious e.g. highlight the current selection.
• Clearly label menu items; ensure the labels are intuitive. ‘Chapters’ are chapters, don’t reinvent the wheel - people just want to watch the film and the extras (not spend value leisure time working out the meaning of a label or a new way of navigating around a DVD.)
• Remember that users will be using one of the most frustrating selection devices invented by man, the remote. So don’t hide options and require the equivalent of a mouse over movement to highlight menu options.
• Always provide an escape route; there should be no dead ends when navigation down ‘levels’ within a DVD menu. For example, there should be direct mapping between the remote control’s rocker buttons and target operations, i.e. the up/down/left/right movement, should be direct and immediate.
• A user should always be able to return to a logical start point. (Nothing is more frustrating than having to eject a DVD and start the loading process all over again.)

Ask yourself this question, how many times do you want to watch the opening credits of a movie when exploring a DVD?

On the 12th March 2009 we invited Fergus Roche to join us on our company day and ran a workshop on storyboarding. Fergus heads up user experience at an agency called Enable Interactive in Bristol.

In December 2008 he presented storyboarding as part of the User Centered Design process at the UPA in Turin.

Storyboarding, with its roots in the animation and film industry, is an extremely engaging and powerful method to shape and visualise interactions. Examples of where it can be used range from the animation of a single homepage banner over user journeys to complex cross- channel experiences. The workshop was an excellent mixture of input from Fergus, hands-on experience and refinement of our skills in a number of iterations.

After the workshop Fergus continued to throw some shapes, this time on the dance floor in Shoreditch.

Apart from learning a lot everybody had a great time and agreed that storyboarding is a valuable part of the User Centered Design toolbox.

Storyboarding, spread out and attach to the windows                                Images can be creative

Andew Walker shows off his ‘handy work’                                                                                              Sven Krause and Ronan Tighe get stuck in 

 Read our interview with Fergus in our May newsletter.

This article, written by Catriona Campbell was originally published on iabuk.net and is republished here with permission.

There has been more written about the iPhone than any other technology gadget in the last ten years. How do I know this? According to PC World’s 50 greatest gadgets of all time, the others on the list don’t even come close.

The iPhone achieves a staggering 315m Google search results, where the Nintendo Wii has 239m, and the Sony Walkman 3m, it’s fair to assume that it is a gadget which creates a good deal of buzz.
However not all that buzz is generated by people enamored by the iPhone. In April Virginia Heffernan: a US Journalist at the New York Times wrote a personal account of her experience: “Why I hate my iphone” It is an article written by a well-heeled journalist, and one we should take note of. She opens with an introduction into the heady world of the iPhone enterprise and how it requires so much attention, organisation, explanation, praise, etc.

“I was late to get one - and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe my hopes for the iPhone curdled in the time it took for my perfectly good T-Mobile plan to expire so I could switch to balky AT&T and purchase one. But I had bided my time. And, really, my enthusiasm survived right up to the moment at the AT&T counter, post-sale, when a saleswoman transferred my address book from my battered BlackBerry to the sweetie-pie iPhone.
“Can you set up my e-mail too?” I asked. She handed me the phone and told me what to type. Pressing her good nature, I asked if she’d do that part too, since I wasn’t yet handy with the iPhone’s character-entry system - the D screen-based simulation of the qwerty keyboard.
She gave me a hard look. Truly, as if she was supposed to be on the lookout for people like me. “It’s your phone,” she replied briskly. “It’s time you started typing on it.”

It is disappointing that the Apple store experience has not been transferred into the AT&T store where she purchased the handset. The Apple store would have delivered a better “out of the box experience” - they may well have had a pre-charged up handset for her - and they would certainly have helped her transfer her data onto the iPhone, as well as showing her how to use it. Apple store staff are trained in each of the Apple products, and staff are encouraged to understand them inside out. The staff are even called “Creatives, Geniuses” or “Specialists” as opposed to sales assistants.

“I didn’t trust myself either, there were warning signs. I didn’t rush to explore the phone or load it up with apps. You can see I wasn’t thinking clearly. To answer the phone, I had to touch the screen. Years of not touching screens - so as not to smudge or scar - made me wary. But I brushed the “answer call” and up came fragments of my mother’s cheerful voice. AT&T no doubt works like a charm in other areas, but as I’d been warned, it wasn’t so hot on holding calls where I live. I let it drop her. I hunted for a keypad to call back, but it was gone.”

The next example she gives in her dalliance with the iPhone is about learning how to use the device’s keyboard. It points out an issue we have with the way we use technology - Behavioural Psychologists call it “Learned effects” - the fact is that once we have learned how to do something - it takes a great deal of time to relearn it, and for some, that is time best spent elsewhere….

“The morning after my sleepless night of charging the phone, a text message arrived from a colleague, about breakfast. It came up in a little dialogue bubble, as if we were characters in a comic book.
Now I had to reply. My throat tightened. “Running late,” I decided on. “See you in 15 min.”
What came out was this: “Runninlate. See you in 15 Mon.”
And so the iPhone made suggestions. Did I want to say Ride? Ripe? Ruin? No. I wanted to say Running. I refused to fight further with the smug phone. Off sailed my text - the work of a blithering idiot.
The failure to appreciate the iPhone was all mine. But I decided not to dwell on that. “I thought you might be back,” the AT&T saleswoman said as I walked in the door. “So?” I said. “You were right.” With some satisfaction, she took the iPhone, and I walked away with a new BlackBerry and money to spare.

Does one person’s experience make a universally popular device unusable? No, of course not, but unfortunately the iPhone does expect a different kind of human interaction, and one that takes some time to get used to or “learn”. Above all else - if a device is not intuitive, as I would argue the iPhone is not, then it needs to be taught. When the iPhone is sold in non-Apple stores you rely on the non-Apple staff to sell the product, this dilutes the brand experience.

In my recent podcast with Richard Hewitt, I asked him what new features he thought sportsbook operators could introduce to their mobile channel that would add value to their users. His belief was that location based services within a community based environment would be the next biggest innovation. Providing content that is relevant to the user based on when and where they access your product would obviously greatly enhance the experience. However, determining what that content should be is a massive challenge.

As with online sportsbooks, operators need to determine what added content such as statistics or news is relevant and appreciated by their users. This can be tricky, but creating an appropriate social media strategy is even harder. The news that social betting site Pikum has folded, will scare people away from experimenting with social media on their site (although there were other reasons behind Pikum’s demise).

I’ve no doubt that the most successful sportsbooks in the future will be those that create a community around their site, as the days of acquiring and retaining customers purely on the basis of bonuses are limited. What a community on a sportsbook should look like, is something I don’t know, but the important thing to remember is that a community does not have to mean a social network. Sportbooks will need to understand what media their users are currently consuming, to develop an understanding of what content and functionality they are currently missing that should be offered to them. By creating content that leads users back to their site regardless of whether they intend to place a bet or not, will build loyalty and inevitably increase revenues.