Day of the round table

spent an interesting afternoon at the annual E-Consultancy User Experience roundtable. When you bring together the leading customer-focused businesses and the UK’s most successful consultancies, you are guaranteed a vigorous and stimulating discussion.

The latest fashion for dynamic websites, which refresh within the page, was hotly debated. The introduction of so-called AJAX websites is causing usability and accessibility best practice to diverge. There are a lot of usability best practice guidelines encapsulated in the WCAG accessibility guidelines but AJAX websites can provide a better user experience for many while introducing problems for users of assistive devices.

Where AJAX is used for the heart of the website, it can result in an inaccessible user experience. Serenata Flowers was held up as an example of an accessible website that uses AJAX to enhance the user experience, but which also functions fully without the animation.

Discussion around the table revealed that AJAX sites cost four times as much to develop. Regarding how much should be spent on user centred design, two rules of thumb were proposed: 10% of a project budget, or half the design budget.

One question was whether there is such a thing as a ‘textbook’ defining best practice web design. E-Consultancy’s own research found that there were as many as 11 different ways that online shops ask people to enter the validation code on the back of their credit card. Clients wanted to know if anyone had defined the ‘right answers’ to such process design challenges.

Some people seemed to want something for nothing: they were asking the usability agencies to put their research into the public domain, on a centralised website. But that is problematic because there is rarely a universal right answer to design questions. Best practice depends on the client, its goals and its user base. Publishing results from tests with other sites could lead to misleading conclusions when the conclusions are misapplied elsewhere.

Some clients also failed to appreciate the expense involved in acquiring research results, which would make it bad business to give them away. Foviance hires psychology and human factors graduates, and we need to be able to charge for our services so that we can continue the good work we do. Certification in the industry might help the industry to appreciate the skillset of usability professionals.