usability in a multidisciplinary team
TRANSCRIPT
Usability in a Multidisciplinary Team
Lisa HerrodMelbourne Web Standards Group
November 2006
Usability in a multidisciplinary team
Usability at every stage for every role
Usability
Why, What &…
The Kebab Method
In the past
Software and desktop apps
Nielsen’s 10 heuristics
Different considerations
Less complex requirements
Usability practitioners had less technical knowledge
The web changed all that
2 Dimensional Multidimensional
Site complexity increased
Improving the User Experience became more complex
The whole site impacts on
the user experience
Interoperability Compatibility Accessibility Functionality
Standards Speed
Visual Design
These considerations were new
in 1998
But they shouldn’t be new now
how did we cope?
graceful degradation
(hope it breaks well)
how did we cope?
Bugs & hacks
“best viewed with”
(a top down approach)
current best practice
Progressive Enhancement
A bottom up approach
Progressive Enhancement
Start with essential components and build up
Progressive Enhancement
Behavioural layer
Presentational layer
Semantic Structure & Accessibility
Content
so the web is maturing
user focused development
user centered design
Compare with the past…
the web has matured
Web standards
Web usability
Industry groups
(left right and center)
usability and web standards
How are they related?
WCAG 1
UCD = best practice
usability and web standards
Good examples of UCD incorporate web standards
accessible ==usable
clear link labels
matching page title
matching headers
usability
accessibility
web standards
usability is mainstream
More people
Identify with this role
Are involved in usability
Are Interested in usability
30 people used this tag
employmentUI Developer
Online Producer
Senior Flash guru
Web Developer
Web Designer
Team leader – Javascript
The Experience Architect
User research methods: contextual inquiry, paper prototyping, card sorting, personas and other
ethnographic techniques
Best practice information architecture principles
Working with product teams to ensure that user research findings are tracked and acted on
…the experience architect
Design and analysis of
experiments or surveys
International user research or remote user studies
Accessibility and universal design
Analysis of web server log dataKnowledge of Web design / HTML
Eye-tracking
Web Usability is Design,
not QA
the client
Sanity check post build
Testing iteratively
Political motivation
the design agency
The client
requested testing
The agency
supports a user centered approach
2.0
Web apps are richer and more complex
Usability practitioners need to grow with it
the perpetual beta
Confirmation we’re heading the right way?
