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."
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.