There are many different types of vision disorders that can affect a user’s ability to view web pages and way too many to cover off here. However, to give you an idea, I have simulated how the Foviance website homepage might look to someone with cataracts, macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. These are four of the most common types of vision disorders. Cataracts is the leading cause of blindness worldwide and in the UK, 2 million people are visually impaired with macular degeneration (40%), glaucoma (13%) and diabetic retinopathy (8%) being the three most common causes.

If the text size on your website is not big, flexible or clear enough, your visitors may encounter difficulties using it. You will hopefully understand from the following images and descriptions why it’s so important that web pages contain text of a decent size and is strongly contrasted against the background colour.

Cataracts can form at any age, but it mostly develops as people get older. It is one of the most common types of vision disorders and according to recent studies, more than half of Americans will have developed cataracts by the time they reach 80. A cataract is a clouding of the eye lens, resulting in blurred and faded vision. Its affect can be a bit like looking at everything through frosted glass and it makes it difficult to read small or poorly contrasted text.

Macular degeneration is the most common cause of vision loss for people over the age of 60. This condition causes a gradual blurring and loss of the central vision. This affects the person’s central area of sight, making it difficult to see objects that are looked at directly. Text on websites can appear fuzzy and small text is particularly difficult to read.

Glaucoma can affect people of any age, although it mostly affects people over the age of 40. Glaucoma is caused by an increase in pressure inside the eye, which damages the optic nerve. The end result is often the opposite of macular degeneration with the loss of peripheral vision and a blurring of the central vision. Having glaucoma can be a bit like looking at everything through a straw and makes reading difficult because text seems faded as well as blurry.

Diabetic retinopathy affects the network of blood vessels lying within the retina causing them to bleed and form scar tissue. The scarring pulls and distorts the retina, causing dark patches in the field of vision. Text appears blurred or distorted in these regions, making web content difficult to read.

So, how do you think your website would look to someone with vision impairment? Do you think your content can be read without significant difficulty? To be sure, you should always include users with vision impairments in the design and development process of your websites, and seek to gather their opinions and feedback on the quality of the designs.

I remember the first time I attended an eMetrics conference in 2005 and being overawed by the calibre of the people speaking. It was also the first time I came away from a conference with a souvenir bag full of goodies including what looked like a sextant.

The 2005 line-up included: Avinash Kaushik (Who was he then? Reminds me of a time when Bryan Adams was a supporting act at a Police concert and no one listened. I tell you what, everyone listened to Avinash that day and from then on), Matthew Tod, Neil Mason (Foviance’s own and speaking again this year), Mike Grehan, Dave Chaffey, Jim Sterne himself amongst others. Best practice case studies for that year included Carphone Warehouse, Lastminute.com. Lovefilm, Royal Mail and Direct Wines.

Some of the titles of the sessions included: Getting beyond the basics, Catering to the masses online, Measuring your misery, Getting buy-in from the top down, and finishing up with – You thought this was going to be easy?

It struck me, even with the continuing mainstreaming of social media, how little has changed in many respects. Companies are still caught between paranoia and paralysis. I can measure everything, so I must. I do measure everything, but why? What I do measure, what is it telling me? What do I do with the stuff I am not measuring?

We are daily reminded that everything can be measured, so why is it still so difficult? People haven’t significantly changed between 2005 and 2010. We still buy and we still complain, and we will continue to do so. Social media and smartphones have simply made doing this a little bit easier, a bit more accessible and very much more public.

As a customer I can engage with a company in store, via email, web site, fixed phone, mobile phone, social media, chat, word of mouth… There’s no doubt that we have far more channels than we’ve ever had to communicate or engage with a company.

So where does it all seem to come unstuck?

Surely companies define their objectives, define what success or failure looks like, define what metrics they will use to understand this… the metrics are simply a tool to gauge progress or lack of. It seems to me that the problem with metrics has little to do with metrics and more to do with understanding what you’re trying to actually achieve. The fact that we can supposedly measure everything, isn’t a cause for paranoia, it simply gives us a richer toolkit of metrics to choose from.

A quick glance at the session headings for eMetrics London 2010 shows me that the conversation has moved on, with social media featuring prominently. And if nothing else, I’ll look forward to getting a new souvenir bag, as my one from 2005 finally fell apart shortly after seeing Jim again at the Travelling Geeks event last year.

There is a trend, particularly in the web analytical arena, for some consultancies to simply create more and more metrics for businesses, rather than working on their clarity. Unfortunately, there is also a tendency for many people to suffer from ‘data blindness’ when confronted with rafts of metrics churned out by multiple tools and technologies. Advertising campaign management, web analytics, CRM, and other intelligence tools should enable businesses to interact better with their customers, but for many actually understanding all that information – particularly across wide portfolio websites – proves very frustrating.

This is why we and our customers place such value in effective visual dashboarding – known to some as data visualisation. But does everyone really understand what a dashboard is supposed to do? If we ask new clients whether they already use dashboards, many will say they do. But when we actually see these tools for ourselves, they often turn out to be Excel workbooks or similar spreadsheet style presentations riddled with tabs for all manner of different metrics. Sure, internal web analysts may spend many well intentioned days compiling these books to send around the business, but they rarely receive widespread adoption simply because most people don’t understand metrics in this dense form. This style of ‘dashboard’, if it can even be called such, is not targeted and really just represents dumped reporting. It’s an inadequate ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that confuses most people and lacks any practical meaning.

At Foviance we know how important it is to understand business requirements before attempting to produce proper dashboards that help individuals understand key performance indicators (KPIs). In most cases, a dashboard wouldn’t attempt to present more than around ten KPIs, but would be sufficiently flexible to present different information for different people across a business with different information needs. We also try to help people understand the difference between metrics and KPIs – a metric is a simple measure that can be quantitavely assessed, but a KPI is an indicator that actually means something to individual people across a business when it goes up or down, and importantly it is something that can then be acted upon.

So an effective KPI framework or strategy helps people understand and challenge KPIs. These frameworks can be distilled down to a short list of things those people really need to measure that means something to them and which they are able to display and share in an immediately understandable way. How does last month’s figure relate to a previous year? How about month on month? Is that fluctuation typical or unusual? Is that good or bad?

We hone our dashboarding techniques through the use of ‘sparklines’ – inline charts that clearly show how the trends and variations of particular metrics. The technique and term was created by Edward Tufte, a noted American statistician and expert in information design. We have listened to Stephen Few, another respected expert in the field of effective visual communication who examined dashboard design and visualisation to see why some methods fail and others succeed.

We try to think of business dashboards like airplane cockpits – there is a huge amount of granular data we could present, but the most important thing is to clearly and immediately highlight critical indicators and common KPIs. A business that discovers it had 100,000 page impressions over the past week actually knows nothing unless it has also been alerted to the fact it had 10,000 or 1,000,000 the previous week. Good dashboards alert anomalies and dramatic trend tacks. The right people can then dive into annual averages assess significance and highlight possible actions. Initially though, the dashboard should clearly display from afar or at glance any issue of possible immediate concern – just like in a cockpit.

We’re continuing to develop ‘dashboarding’ as service at Foviance, and we’re making particular strides in this field right now. Talk to us about tactical dashboards, strategic dashboards, and how they can help different audiences across your own business with short and long term planning, as well as the unexpected.

This article was written as part of the crossing the channels of experience March newsletter

Even if your business is not currently serving content specifically to this huge population of mobile data addicts, as estimated in analyst IDC’s recent Worldwide Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast report, it’s very likely you’ll want to before its number doubles by the end of 2013. So it’s important to understand the strengths and weakness of each of these approaches to content delivery, and where your own focus should be.

The mobile internet market is maturing rapidly and IDC isn’t alone in its bullish predictions. Forrester Research claims high-speed handsets with next-generation ‘3.5g’ integrated technology will be available within three years and that by 2014 one user in three in the Western European market will own an internet-centric phone, such as today’s iPhone or Android-equipped handsets.

So what do we usually mean by the mobile internet? Well it’s this blend of websites accessible through mobile web browsers, together with emerging bespoke mobile apps.

Accessing websites on mobile devices can be very effective or very frustrating. Too few businesses are prepared to put in the resources necessary to develop sites specifically optimised from the ground up for mobile browsers and instead just assume their primary website will render sufficiently for use. As a result, visitors often receive a very mixed experience, with problems ranging from complete incompatibility to broken plug-ins, random layouts and inaccessible content of varying degrees.

On other hand, mobile browser capabilities are evolving all the time as the developers of Safari, Symbian, Opera Mobile, IE Mobile, Android, Firefox for Mobile and numerous rivals, ramp up their enhancements to differentiate amid fierce competition. User experience will only improve with this competition driving unique features as well as cross-compatibility.

Mobile apps are of course the latest thing for mobile platforms, with adoption largely driven by Apple’s iPhone and AppStore, as well as emerging platforms including Android. Apps are trendy, popular, and offer seamless task-based access to the internet. One touch on an icon presents users with relevant functionality and content with no obvious browser interaction. Apps are intuitive and likeable, they can be rapidly developed and offer new business opportunities and fresh revenue streams. Users who would never pay for premium content on a website will use micropayments to buy apps on their mobile platform, and even upgrade for further services.

On the downside apps currently remain largely OS specific walled-garden experiences, and won’t always benefit from being perceived as such novel concepts.

So if you want to develop your mobile platform today, where should you focus? The answer is to have an open mind, look at the benefits of both approaches and decide precisely how they fit your individual business requirement. Apps are cheap, rapidly developed and easily marketed tools, but they are not browser substitutes for broad businesses without a single focused service to promote, and they require effort on behalf of the user to find and install. Creating or converting websites costs a great deal and takes time and expertise, but they offer more flexibility and are a more familiar and intuitive concept for most web users.

It may be that the majority of businesses take a dual approach at this stage, capturing the zeitgeist of the app while continuing to develop a mobile website strategy. But while the browsers-based will be around for some time to come, the app market will certainly saturate at some point. Apps cannot be ignored today at the risk of missing out on their marketing coup but business should not abandon their focus, or indeed their budget, for a standards-based optimised mobile website. The future, inevitably, will present integrated approaches that build on today’s web services approach and take the best elements of both existing content models.

Back to January newsletter

Here’s something on accessibility:
Recent research from Webaim, claims that the mobile web is a highly utitilised resource by screen reader users, with more than 50% of blind people using screen readers on their mobile phones.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks on the conference circuit. WebTrends held their Engage conference in London and last week I was in Washington DC for the Emetrics Marking Optimization Summit . It was good to see WebTrends out and about in the market, showing off some of their latest stuff. They’ve been working hard on their messaging by the looks of it and getting a distinctive market positioning going. The core brand themes they talked about were “Power”, “Elegance” and “Openness”. By “Elegance” they were referring to the usability of the solution for the end user and it was interesting for someone who works at a user experience consultancy that they have built an in-house user experience team on ensuring that they have the right focus on making the data as accessible and digestible as possible. Information visualisation is definitely on the agenda at the moment. By “Openness” they are talking about the ability to get data in and out of the application via APIs. As someone who thinks that web data should be “liberated” and not locked into reporting tools, this is an approach I approve of.

Emetrics was the usual three days of input, stimulation and networking. Jim Sterne kicked off proceedings by challenging us to focus on turning web intelligence into business value and there were some great examples of how’s that being done in some of the presentations I went to. One of them was from Joe Megibow, VP, Global Analytics and Optimisation at Expedia. Megibow took us through some of the initiatives and changes that had been happening in analytics at Expedia over the past 6 months following a global re-organisation of the business. Some of the work they are doing to tackle marketing attribution problems was interesting, but what was more interesting to me were some of his thoughts about how to get analytics and optimisation initiatives higher up the food chain at organisations. Some of his advice included the need “to construct meaningful narratives”, i.e. the need to add insight and interpretation rather than just hand over the numbers. That resonated with me as I’m always asking my analysts to “tell a story” rather than just present a bunch of charts. Other useful bits of advice from Megibow were to “do less but accomplish more” and to “start small and communicate”. It’s clear to me that he’s focused on delivering business value and he said in response to a question that at the moment he wouldn’t grow his team because the business wouldn’t be able to necessarily get more things done from the insights they generated. Therefore the return on investment from the additional hires would be zero. At the end of the day, the return on investment from analytics is dependent on an organisation’s ability to execute on the findings.

A continuing impression I got from the conference was that measurement of some of the newer digital channels is still hard to do. When it comes to the measurement of mobile, audio, video, social media and so on, people are figuring out as they go along. So it was good to see some of the various approaches that companies were taking to the measurement of these various channels. What struck me also was that there are an increasing number of possible tools that can be used, particular in the social media monitoring and measurement space. But whatever, the technology the key thing is to have a process and that came through loud and clear in a couple of the sessions that I went to on social media measurement. A bit like the dotcom days 10 years ago, it’s tempting for companies to jump on the latest bandwagon without being clear about what their objectives are and what they want to get out of it. So planning is key and the measurement approach follows from that.

Sterne wrapped up the conference with a quick digest of the things that he had learned from the previous US conference back in May in San Jose. He went through the highlights of the “Analysis Symposium” that lead to his report on “101 things that you should know about analysis” . He summarised it as follows: “When doing analysis you should make it:

• About people
• Actionable
• Not about you
• Prioritised
• Intriguing
• Pre-determined
• Compelling (rather than precise)
• Palatable
• Relevant (to the individual)
• A treasure hunt

And finally you should make it happen. I don’t think you can say fairer that that.

The downside to this, however, can be reduced accessibility. Blind people use screen readers to navigate a web page either by tabbing through the links one-by-one, or (if their screen reader provides the facility) by viewing a list of links either in the order that they appear on the page or alphabetically. Whichever method is used, if there are multiple ‘read more’ links on a page all linking to different web pages, it is impossible to know which one leads where. To work it out they will need to stop, backtrack, read the surrounding text, all of which can be a time-consuming and frustrating process.

If screen reader users are to read web pages quickly and efficiently they need to know from the link text alone where the link leads. This means giving the link a clear and meaningful description. However, with headlines sometimes being fairly lengthy, this could impact the usability for everyone else.

To get the right balance of usability and accessibility (something I strongly believe in) there is a solution. You can repeat the heading text after the ‘read more’ link but hide it off the screen using CSS positioning techniques. This way the scanability isn’t affected for sighted users and screen reader users have a clear and useful description of the links destination – everyone wins!

The image below show how links on our blog overview page are presented in a screen reader links list. Each link clearly describes the article users can read more about because our ‘read more’ link is followed by the article heading, e.g. ‘Read more about: Chance finds with online shopping’, instead of just ‘Read more’. The links list to the right shows how links are presented when no context is given, which isn’t very helpful.

Click on image below for a larger view.

                     Accessible links on Foviance website              Inaccessible links on other website

Tealeaf’s aim is to enable businesses with busy online channels to see and understand their customers’ actual online experiences, analyse their motivations and gain greater insight in to why those customers do what they do while engaging with the site. We’ve been aware of Tealeaf’s talents for some time, and were keen to embark on any project that allowed us to add mutual value to customer experience management and measurement.

Essentially Tealeaf has developed technology that is able to accurately capture genuine details of customer session and interactions. Not only does it capture keystrokes, it also creates a searchable database of specific activities and events occurring during those sessions, which can then be replayed later in order to analyse precisely what those visitors were or were not able to do.

Of course the underlying component of key logging has been possible for some time now,  but not the level of ease by which businesses can now find the ‘needles in haystacks’ of customer experience – the exact moments when potential customers are turned on to or off of an online business. Tealeaf now lets those firms drill into an accessible database and uncover root causes of any issues at very granular levels of user experience.

From our perspective Tealeaf is yet another valuable tool in our toolbox, capable of playing a pivotal role in identifying and understanding issues surrounding customer experience. With Tealeaf we can observe interactions from a high level –what’s working and what isn’t – then replay ‘journeys’, drilling down to understanding specific user problems and integrating those insights with other data. If for example, we see a problem arising through our web analytics but don’t see why error pages are being thrown up, we can dive into Tealeaf, search into a session, find out when that page was served and look at how the user triggered it. Another example would see a company running a survey and wanting to know more about why a respondent gave a low score in one area of their online experience – using Tealeaf, we can delve into their site experience and see what made them feel that way.

Tealeaf promotes its technology as an effort to understand why customers take the actions they do, uncover missed sales opportunities, reveal the real impact of critical issues, and provide precise details of customer interactions. It achieves this by gathering the quantitative data and the qualitative experience information necessary to understand customers’ true experience and its impact on businesses. This ethos is obviously proving to be a fantastic fit with our own mission: to offer the broadest possible range of user experience consulting, accessibility and research services.

Back to September newsletter

In short, no, it’s not but this question regularly comes up. I recently discussed this issue with our User Experience consulants and got some consistent responses:

“Keep it as one field per line. People will be able to use the forms more easily by having one flow rather than having to read across and down. I would have thought there would be a higher instance of people missing fields with two or more rows.”

“Not only will having two drop-downs on one line look more cluttered/complicated etc, but it will be less efficient as users will have to go left to right as well as down the form.”

“A long vertical list is better as it maintains focus and reduces error rate. No official stats, but just my observations from previous testing.”

This confirmed my recommendation: Keep one field (e.g. text fields, dropdown menus) per line and think of reducing the fields on the page instead. If the form is really too long and all the fields are necessary (and most of the time they are not) the form should be split in two and have a Step 1 and Step 2.

From an accessibility point of view two dropdown menus next to each other do not violate the DDA guidelines, however, it will make the form more difficult to read.

I hope this proves useful the next time you review the layout of an online form.

Accessibility compliance is all about meeting the requirements of the WCAG – that’s the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which are internationally considered the de facto standards for web accessibility.
Meeting the requirements of these guidelines is a key aspect of web accessibility, but it doesn’t always mean that people with disabilities will be able to use your website successfully.

The goal is to make websites work for everyone. Good standards are important, but what really matters is the user experience.

Here’s an example: If a website uses images for navigation and there’s no alternative text (alt text), the site is clearly not accessible and fails accessibility compliance. If the same website uses frustratingly verbose alt text for the images (such as ‘This image is a green oblong containing white text. If you click on it, it will take you to the Contact Us page for this Company website’ ) instead of just ‘Contact Us’, then you could say that the website is technically accessible because there is alt text; however, the alt text is so bad that the usability of the site is awful for anyone who relies on alt text.

Websites should be quick, easy and enjoyable for everyone to use, so it is important that things don’t just stop at the guidelines. To create great web experiences for users with disabilities you need to involve them in your projects, to help identify and eliminate key areas of confusion and difficulty.