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The church of usability(continued)
By Alan K'necht
Thursday , May 10 2001 12:00 AM

Jared Spool
Jared Spool goes out of his way to position himself as anything but a user-interface designer. Yet through his company, User Interface Engineering (UIE), he is a frequent keynote speaker on effective Web design, produces a monthly publication reviewing Web sites for effectiveness, and runs a series of workshops of effective Web design. Founded in 1988, UIE is an independent research, training, and consulting firm specializing in user-interface design and product usability issues. It has grown into one of the United States' leading usability research practices, conducting more than 400 usability tests each year on software and Web sites.

Spool doesn't speculate on what makes the perfect Web site, or how many graphics can dance on the face of a Browser, instead restricting his comments to things in the real world. "I can only reference what I have or my company has observed."

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So why has the Web design community given him so much attention? Perhaps it's the way he delivers his message or perhaps it's just that we need someone who snaps us back to reality. In either case, Web designers look to Spool for the answers. And yes, Spool has the answer, and it is 42.

Unlike the proverbial answer 42 in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Spool also has the question, which is "What percentage of the time are visitors successful at achieving their goals on the best-designed Web sites?" From Spool's observations, the answer is 42 percent. In Spool's simple understated approach, "All sites are failures." Which sites scored the best of all the failures? According to Spool, they are Amazon.com, eBay, Dell, and CNN.com. The worst of the worst are Disney.com, About, and any site that sells computer accessories.

Spool's commandments
Because Spool has never seen an effective Web site, he doesn't have a list of what to fix first, nor can he even list key items that make up an effective site, "I'm a historian, trying to figure out if it works, not if it will work." Yet we were able to get him to break his vow of silence and extract some morsels of information.

  • Know the goals of the site.
  • Know the goals of the users.
  • Make sure that content is achieving your goals (including graphics, advertising, and so on).
  • Make sure the developers know how the site makes money.

The most interesting fact that Spool was able to share regarded page-load speed and why we shouldn't be overly concerned with it. From one of his studies, "A group of users all ranked a series of Web sites the same (slowest to fastest)." Yet when Spool's team reviewed the videotape evidence, "there was no correlation between the actual load speeds and how the group ranked the sites." What the team discovered was "a direct correlation between perceived speed and the ability of the user to achieve their goal."

Sacred texts
Designers interested in learning from the enigmatic Spool should read Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide and UIE's comprehensive set of reports entitled Designing Information-Rich Web Sites.


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