Usability In The Rainforest

On the web, usability refers to the ability of users to find and use stuff on a website. (How's that for a circular definition?) According to Mel Pedley on Accessites.com, there are five core components of usability:

1. Learnability: On a first visit, can users find what they're looking for?
   
2. Effectivity: Can users do stuff quickly?
   
3. Memorability: If it's been a while since a user was on the site, can s/he still use the site?
   
4. Reliability: How error-prone are users while using the site?
   
5. Enjoyability: Do users like using the site (or, at least, do they not hate it with the burning passion of a thousand suns)?
   

Let's explore these concepts with a site we're all familiar with: Amazon.com. Sarah has been living in a rural area with ridiculously slow dial-up for the past several years, and has just discovered that you can buy products online. She needs to order a new DVD burner so she can mail her mom some home movies. She types "buy stuff online" into Google.

She sees that Amazon is the first result, and decides to click on it. (Hey, bonus points for findability!) She is then dumped onto Amazon's main page.

Okay, not a problem. Amazon's apparently a big site, which makes sense since her search query was very general. She looks around for "DVD Burners", or "Computer Components", or anything that looks like it could be what she's after. There's "Computers & Office" in the sidebar, and voila! There's "Computer Components" right there.

Lots of computer components to choose from. She remembers now why she asked her nephew for help the last time she needed to buy computer parts. Where are the DVD burners?

She scrolls down and – oh, there they are! Her nephew told her once that optical drives are the same as CD/DVD drives, so she clicks there.

She's still looking in the upper-left corner when the next page loads, so she immediately sees the link for "DVD Burners" in the navigation and clicks on it, too. No use in seeing all that other stuff she's not after.

Now that Sarah has found the DVD burners, let's evaluate how Amazon has been doing so far.

• Sarah could find what she was after with relative ease, so they get a point for learnability. (On the other hand, if she had been looking for something more obscure, she probably would have had a harder time of it.)
• She didn't have to waste a lot of time to get to where she was going, but she had the benefit of already knowing that "optical drives" and "DVD burners" were synonymous. Therefore, Amazon's effectivity was mediocre.
• This is a first-time visit, so we're not analyzing memorability.
• Sarah could easily have missed the link she needed to click on a few different times, because it was not necessarily put in a place that made the most sense. Reliability may or may not be an issue.
• So far, Sarah doesn't have a problem with using the site, so its initial enjoyability is not an issue.

What could Amazon do better? This is a hard question. One's first inclination might be to say that they should make it easier to find what people are looking for. The problem with that in this case is that because Amazon carries so many products, if they tried to make it easy to find everything, that would make their site too complex and cluttered to find anything. Burying some things three or four levels deep may be the best way to organize the information. Sometimes you have to make compromises to create the best site possible.

Accessibility Is The Path To Awesomeness

Accessibility in the context of a Web site is the degree to which that Web site is usable by people with disabilities. Web pages often have access issues for the following groups of people:

• Visually impaired people using screen readers
• Hearing impaired people using browsers with no sound
• Physically impaired people
• Color blind people (About.com, "Definition: accessibility")
  

That's one definition of accessibility in an online context. A simpler definition might be: A web site that everyone can use. That's a touch simplistic and idealistic, but it gets closer to what accessibility truly is.

There are a lot of resources out there devoted to helping web designers make their sites more accessible. The University of Minnesota, for example, has a long list of resources and tools related to accessibility. It's pretty overwhelming. About.com also has several articles about accessibility.

There's a simpler method, though, and while it's not 100% foolproof, it will get you fairly close to an accessible website. It is this: Use common sense and well-formed HTML code.

"But," you protest, "what about access keys, and alt text, and all those other things they talk about?" Remember what I said about well-formed HTML code. Images are required to have alt attributes in order for a page to validate. (Pages will still validate with blank alt attributes, though. That's where using common sense comes in: does the page still make sense without the image and without any alt text?)

Access keys (alt+[key]) are slightly different, as they are not required in valid HTML code. It also doesn't always make sense to use them. Using too many on a page can be overwhelming for a user. You also have to be careful not to use keystroke combinations that are already used for browser menus or other similar functions.

The WAVE report for the main page of Wikipedia reveals the access keys that are in use there. By my count, there are 14 different access keys, which make varying degrees of sense. Alt-F might make sense if the search field were labeled "Find articles", but it is not. Alt-U for "Upload file" does make sense, but Alt-K for "Related changes"? Another problem with using Alt-F to get to the search field is that that combination is used in nearly every Windows program to access the File menu. Firefox gets around this by adding Shift to the access key combination (Alt-Shift-F), but Safari overrides the default (Alt-F always brings up the search field).

Wikipedia does do something right, though. If you disable styles on the page, the navigation drops down to the bottom of the page. This makes it easier for people with text-only browsers or screen readers to get to the content.

Another important aspect is the color scheme. If you're planning on designing a Christmas website with red text on a green background, remember that about 5-7% of people suffer from red-green color blindness, or protanopia/deuteranopia, which would make it extremely difficult or even impossible for them to even see that there's text there. Tritanopia is another type of color blindness that affects a person's ability to see blue. One of my friends in college suffered from monochromacy and could only see shades of gray. When choosing colors, you might try using a graphics editor to convert them to grayscale and see if there is enough contrast there even without any "real" coloration.

Finally, organizing content in a way that makes sense is probably the most important step towards accessibility. Remember, you're not designing just for someone with a disability. You're designing for everyone.

Beauty In Type

@font-face {
font-family: "FontinSansRegular";
src: url('fonts/fontinsans.eot');
src: local('?'), url('fonts/fontinsans.woff') format('woff'), url('fonts/fontinsans.ttf') format('truetype'), url('fonts/fontinsans.svg#webfontn8vXGJ0x') format('svg');
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal;
}

Do you know what this is?

It's the future.

Okay, maybe it's not quite that dramatic. However, it does represent a huge step forward in web design. It's a web font declaration in CSS.

Let's go back to the dark ages, when Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator ruled the Internet. In those days, text online was rendered in whatever fonts you had on your system. Running Windows 95? You got Arial and Times New Roman. Running a Macintosh? Default fonts were Chicago and New York.

Then came CSS, Internet Explorer 3, and the core fonts for the Web project.

The core fonts project aimed to provide a set of fonts that would be widely downloaded and used, which was supposed to ensure that websites looked the same across platforms. The downside to this was that the fonts had to be present on the user's system, not just on the web server. Granted, due to Windows' near-complete domination of the computer market, the vast majority of people probably did have the fonts installed. With the new (partial) CSS implementation in IE 3, you could specify typefaces. Yes, that's a choir of angels you hear singing "Hallelujah".

It still wasn't perfect, not by a long shot. You were still limited to whatever fonts your users had on their systems. You could be reasonably sure, however, that the fonts included in the core package were going to be present for the vast majority of your users. I mean, I could design a page using Footlight MT Light, but it might fall back to Times New Roman on your system.

With the introduction of the @font-face declaration in CSS 2, you could finally reference fonts that weren't stored on the user's computer! In the example above, I'm telling the browser to grab the Fontin Sans file, which is stored in the subfolder fonts. On my server. Not your computer. As long as you're using a browser that's at least as new as Internet Explorer 4, you'll see Fontin Sans on this webpage.

"Wait!" you say. "It displayed your fancy-schmancy new font after a minute, but when it first loaded, [it was in Times New Roman/I couldn't see any of the text]! What gives?"

Yeah, that's the problem with using @font-face. Pingdom says that fontinsans.ttf is one of the last things to load, and it takes a comparatively long time to load on top of that. Until it loads, the page is in limbo. Different browsers handle this limbo time in different ways. Firefox and Opera temporarily fall back to the next font in the font stack. Safari completely hides the text (though not the underline on hyperlinks, interestingly enough; if you load that page in Safari, you can see random lines going across the screen). Internet Explorer, for me at least, takes so long to load the entire page that it renders in Fontin Sans when it finally displays.

When the page is finished loading, though, the typeface is so beautiful that it makes Michelangelo weep.

(Again, maybe not quite that dramatic.)

Want to learn more?

• Web Typography
• 50 Useful Design Tools for Beautiful Web Typography
• Web Open Font Format
• Arial or Helvetica?
  

I Have A Canvas And A JavaScript Paintbrush

One of the biggest problems of the Internet today is an over-reliance on proprietary plugins. Mac users will be especially familiar with the feelings of abject rage as a Flash game bogs down their system, takes over a chunk of memory, and causes the fans in their laptop to whir consistently, due to the lack of hardware acceleration in the Mac version of Flash Player (which was only recently remedied). There's Flash, Silverlight, Java, and whatever proprietary single-use plugin TV networks' websites make you install to watch their shows.

"So what?" you say. "I just install the plugins when I need them. No big deal." Yeah...except each one requires a download, an installation, and a browser restart. It's a hassle. (And we won't get into cross-platform issues.)

Better than that, each plugin introduces its own set of security holes. Flash is notorious for this, but it is not alone in that regard.

Plugins used to be the only way to provide interactivity to a website. Something better is looming on the horizon, though: HTML5, and with it, <canvas>, <video>, and <audio>.

The video and audio tags are fairly self-explanatory. As long as the browser properly implements them, they provide plugin-free playback for videos and sound, respectively. Canvas is an HTML tag that essentially gives you a blank area that you draw on using JavaScript. The code required is fairly similar to creating graphics in a Java applet, for those of you who are familiar with that.

Java Applet Code:
g.setColor(new Color(0x5E, 0x2F, 0x00));
g.fillRect(0, 180, 200, 50);

JavaScript Canvas Code:
ctx.fillStyle = "#5E2F00";
ctx.fillRect(0, 180, 200, 50);

Canvas/JavaScript provides no easy way, however, to draw ovals or rounded shapes. Compare the two methods for drawing a rectangle with rounded corners:

Java Applet Code:
g.setColor(Color.white);
g.fillRoundRect(45, 35, 50, 35, 10, 10);
g.setColor(Color.black);
g.drawRoundRect(45, 35, 50, 35, 10, 10);

JavaScript Canvas Code:
ctx.fillStyle = "#FFFFFF";
ctx.strokeStyle = "#000000";
ctx.beginPath();
ctx.moveTo(45, 45);
ctx.quadraticCurveTo(45, 35, 55, 35);
ctx.lineTo(85, 35);
ctx.quadraticCurveTo(95, 35, 95, 45);
ctx.lineTo(95, 60);
ctx.quadraticCurveTo(95, 70, 85, 70);
ctx.lineTo(55, 70);
ctx.quadraticCurveTo(45, 70, 45, 60);
ctx.lineTo(45, 45);
ctx.fill();
ctx.stroke();
ctx.closePath();

Even with that convoluted code, I still saved approximately 60 lines of code generating this image in JavaScript with canvas than it took to do the same thing in a Java applet. Most of this savings probably came from the fact that JavaScript has both a fillStyle and a strokeStyle, while Java uses setColor() for everything, necessitating more color changes. Plus, the user doesn't have to install a plugin to make it work, it renders pretty much instantaneously in the browser window, and you could copy the generated image and save it if you wanted to, which would be useful if you wanted to code a drawing web app of some sort.

Want to learn more about drawing with <canvas>?

• HTML 5 canvas - the basics
• Canvas tutorial - MDC
• W3Schools HTML5 tutorial (for HTML5 in general, not canvas specifically)
  

The Standards Are There, So Use Them

Imagine a scenario.

Kate has just been hired by Widgets Ltd., a start-up company that is being run in a garage outside Madison, Wisconsin, to create a website for their products. She has no web design experience outside of Comp Sci 101, back in the bad old days of freshman year. "No problem," she thinks to herself. "I've got an old copy of Microsoft FrontPage here. I'll just draw some tables and drop the content in. Easiest money I ever made."

Of course, we, as web developers ourselves, can imagine the hideous code that will result from this misguided approach:

<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<title>Welcome to Widgets, Ltd.!</title>
</head>

<body bgcolor="#00FFFF" link="#00FFFF" vlink="#00FFFF">
<table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse" bordercolor="#111111" width="100%" id="AutoNumber1" height="59">

So much for separating organizational and display functions. Kate's work failed to adhere to (or even consider, for that matter) web standards. Without boring you with the details, the above code snippet contains four errors when run through the W3C HTML Validator — and we haven't even made it to any of the actual content yet.

What are web standards, you may be asking? They are a set of guidelines codified by the World Wide Web Consortium (and Ecma International, which standardizes ECMAScript/JavaScript). They define the elements, the syntax, the attributes, the doctypes, everything. Browser developers then take these standards and program their browsers to properly render web pages based on these standards. Opera generally leads the pack as far as standards compliance, with Firefox and Safari following and Internet Explorer trailing in a distant fourth.

Now, designing with web standards does not mean making your website look exactly the same across all browsers. Someone looking at it in Firefox on Windows XP is going to get a slightly different look than someone looking at it in Safari on Snow Leopard. Is that wrong? Is that bad? Not at all. Very few people will even notice without you pointing it out to them. They're different, not wrong — if you coded the site correctly, that is.

So, in summary, my argument for designing to web standards is this. Internet Explorer 6 (and prior versions) didn't care about abiding by web standards, and complications stemming from that caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Why would you want your website to even have a possibility of inspiring a response like that? Design to the standards. It will cause many fewer problems.

*The problems described herein are not unique to Microsoft products by any means. However, every time I bash Microsoft, Canonical and Red Hat send me a tenth of a penny. I look forward to being able to afford a gumball.

Architecture, Latches, and Taxes

Information architecture is the confluence of context, content, and users. What does that mean? It means you design your website around your content, while keeping in mind usability, the perspective from which your audience is coming, and any relevant "stuff" (for lack of a better term) from your business.

Richard Saul Wurman first coined the term information architect in the mid-1970s. He explains his choice of words as the following:

Unfortunately, design, which used to be a perfectly good word, means to make something look better for most people....The designer is called in to make a magazine article look better, or an illustrator is asked to make a picture look arresting, or a photographer is asked to take an interesting view of an author or a subject. Nowhere are any of these designers used in the fundamental sense of creating meaning or understanding.

That's why I've chosen to call myself an Information Architect....I mean architect as in the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles to make something work--the thoughtful making of either artifact, or idea, or policy that informs because it is clear. I use the word information in its truest sense. Most of the word information contains the word inform, so I call things information only if they inform me, not if they are just collections of data, of stuff (qtd. in Wyllys, 2000).

So an information architect's job is pretty much all-encompassing: figure out what you're displaying, and present it in the best manner possible. Organizing the information is a big part of that. Wurman lays out the five LATCH methods of organizing:

• Location
• Alphabet
• Time
• Category
• Hierarchy
  

An example of information arranged by category and hierarchy is Jess Bachman's Death and Taxes poster, which divides the federal budget by department and uses a proportionally-sized icon to indicate the relative size of that department's chunk of the budget. (As a side note, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the Office of Governmental Ethics' icon is visible only with a microscope.)

Web designers should be concerned with information architecture. Website content is divided into multiple pages, of course. How do you organize them? This is where the context comes in. Is this a large e-commerce site? Organize by product type. Is this a site dedicated to the history of Elbonian widgets? Organize by year. What are your users going to be looking for? Figure out how to get them to what they need, as effortlessly as possible. You are an architect. Construct your virtual building.

Web Writers: "You Have A Short Attention Span"

My conclusion is this. Write short, grammatical sentences and have other people edit them.

I probably should have broken that into more sentences. Let's review what isn't acceptable in web writing:

• Semicolons
• Long paragraphs
• Long headers
  
• Complex sentences
• Sentences that aren't stuffed with keywords
• Formal writing style
• Exclamation points
• Excessive bold and italics
• "To be"
  

Some of this is common sense, carried over from print writing. Others were developed to work within the constraints of screen real estate. (Remember 640x480? Those were the days.) Killing semicolons, however, is advice I find odd. How else would you punctuate a list that has items requiring commas? "Mr. John Doe, Esq., Dr. Ibee Grumpy, MD, and Mrs. Jane Smith" is not as readable as "Mr. John Doe, Esq.; Dr. Ibee Grumpy, MD; and Mrs. Jane Smith".

Whoops, I exceeded the sixty-word-per-paragraph guideline. Take a deep breath.

How many words should there be in a paragraph? Let's take a look. Ask a Manager's most recent post will serve as an example. Excluding the introductory "A reader writes" paragraph, she averages 77 words per paragraph. Even a web writer's blog occasionally exceeds 60 words per paragraph. The paragraphs that don't are often one sentence long or sound choppy. I think paragraph length will follow from your writing style and your topic.

The next web writing tip is a short paragraph. Don't make grammatical mistakes. Proofread your text. Have someone else proofread your text.

Yes, make your content engaging. Yes, remember that websites aren't in order like a book. Yes, make your stuff easy to read and navigate.

The most important point to remember? Good web writing is good writing.