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British Computer Society
Business Information Systems Specialist Group
10th April 2002
Web Enabling
a Business
Vanessa [email protected]
page 1 of 10
Web enabling a business
What I’m going to cover
How you can successfully move a business onto the web
The business element
The human element
The technology element
With particular focus on getting past the buzzwords of “user-friendly”, and
“walk up and use”
Looking at current web usability problems
Why usability is a critical success factor in the whole process
How you really can make a website usable
My background and experiences
Why focus on ease of use?
Why focus on ease of use?
Important to the IT industry because complexity can limit growth!
Technology growth
Moore’s law will continue to hold
Performance will continue to double every 18 months
Software development
No breakthroughs on the horizon
Essentially a manual process
Complexity
A major inhibitor to acceptance and use of technology
A major constraint on industry growth
Important to business because simplifying IT leads to greater business benefits
Increased revenue
Increased competitive advantage
Improved customer satisfaction
Improved brand image
Increased user productivity
Reduced costs
Reduced development time and costs
Reduced support costs
Reduced user error
Reduced training time and costs
Common website usability problems
Common website usability problems
A study from Zona Research found that;
• 62% of online shoppers gave up at least once while looking for the item they wanted
• 20% of online shoppers gave up more than three times during a two-month period
• 42% turned to traditional channels to make their purchase
• Zona Research found that $58 million per month in e-commerce sales are lost due to Web page
loading failures. (Source: Zona Research, "The Need for Speed" report).
Another study by the New York research group Creative Good tested 10 of the leading web sites and
found that;
• 39% of the customers who tested the sites for the study could not figure out how to buy
• More than 50% of search attempts failed to find something relevant.
A recent study found that a third of online banking customers closed their accounts within a year. 50%
said it was because the site was too difficult to navigate. (cited in (13) Jefferey, G. Build A Site, Not A
Labyrinth)
Jared Spool's study of 15 large commercial sites users could only find information 42% of the time even
though they were taken to the correct home page before they were given the test tasks
Why do such fundamental usability problems exist?
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The web interface evolution
Understanding how web interfaces have evolved
Website presence
Domain registration, home pages, hypertext linking, e-mail, information
sharing, display of standard company marketing literature
Web technology
Advertising and marketing, large graphics, spinning animations, java and
JavaScript controls, best web site competitions, content shovel- ware, page
designer software. High graphic design presence, little to no usability.
Promotional business model
Web commerce
Forms and credit card transactions. Task and interaction design,
communities and groups, web business models such as Advertising,
Subscription and Commerce. Site structure more focused, less marketing
information, more product specific. Content and User relationships
Back office integration
Integration to back end systems providing necessary fulfilment processes,
stock control & delivery
Intranets & Extranets
Business to employees and Business to Business. Information classification.
Affiliate relationships, business models such as Keyword rental, Content
sponsorship
Standardizing on the
web client
Workflows, application delivery, communication channels, information
sharing
TV, devices & gadgets
Dedicated networked interfaces e.g. generic - TV, Phone, Handheld and
application driven - jukebox, picture frame
Problems with maintenance
Usability problems introduced by website maintenance
•New content that is easy to create and publish, leads to a volatile and changeable site prone to errors
•Sub sites are created that mirror the organizational structure rather than reflecting the purpose of the site or any
user tasks that the site should be supporting
•Redesigning the site and restructuring the information on the site is very expensive
•Content creators do not always understand any underlying information architecture that may exist, consequently
inappropriate relationships are added on an ad hoc basis
•Content creators do not classify content consistently, leading to inadequate support for searching, crossreferencing and indexing.
•Content creators do not create information with consistent structures or follow writing style guidelines, leading to
different levels of information quality on the site.
•Visual designers do not follow design guidelines leading to inconsistent visual styles within the interface
•Review processes are ad hoc which leads to inconsistencies in content quality.
•Ownership of existing content is hard to manage; consequently content maintenance can be time consuming or
nonexistent.
•No one owns the job of reviewing the site as a whole to ensure that the purpose and goals of the site are not
getting lost
•No one measures the success of user task flows to make sure that the site is usable. In fact many Web
development teams do not involve users at any stage of the project or have anyone on the team who understands
how to create usable interfaces.
Problems with authoring
Quality problems introduced by HTML/WML/XML authoring
•The writer becomes the designer
•Writer decides on content relationships
•Writer decides on content structure
•Writer decides on meta-data and classification
•Writer needs knowledge of language and tool
•Writer needs knowledge on how to publish
•No automatic process will exist for
•Defining ownership
•Reviewing content
•Controlling and recording file edits or changes
•Controlling archiving and deletion
Poor quality content translates to website usability problems
The need for content management
The need for content management
A website is an important external face of a company or organization. Therefore the quality of that interface and
the way that users perceive it should be of paramount importance to those responsible for the management and
development of the systems to be created
To ensure information quality, an organization needs to provide the necessary level of
controls to make certain that:
•Pages of information do not turn up unexpectedly without the necessary validation being in
place
•The quality of the information being presented is of the required style, uses required
terminology, is written at the right level and is correct and complete
•New content that is added will enhance the user experience and help users achieve their tasks
•The layout and the visual design of pages is consistent and of the required quality
•Information is classified correctly and fits into an overall information architecture
•The system reflects and enhances the company brand, supports the business goals and fulfils the
user goals and expectations of its targeted audience
Creating a usable website has very little to do with technology, and has everything to do
with designing a solution that people can use
It is possible adapt good practise from: Software development & Publishing
Two interfaces to consider
Usually the success of the underlying back end system affects the
success of the external customer facing website
Therefore business success may depend on achieving two key usability goals
•To create an easy to use website that delivers up to date content of a high quality. Such a system is
often referred to as a Content-driven website
•To create an easy to use website publishing environment where content can easily be created, published,
managed and maintained. Such a system is often referred to as a Content management system.
But how? What’s a good way to go about this?
The importance of analysis
The key is to base designs on real data
Importance of the analysis phase
In Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach,
Pressman shows that for
•$1 dollar spent to resolve a problem during product
design
•$10 would be spent on the same problem during
development, and multiply to
•$100 or more if the problem had to be solved after
the product's release
And the cost of maintenance
Pressman also states that
•80% of software lifecycle cost occur during the
maintenance phase and
•80% of maintenance costs are associated with
'unmet or unforeseen' user requirements
Different viewpoints often create tensions in web design
Business analysis
Business analysis
Understanding the
business
•Performing a competitive analysis
•Performing a cost/benefit analysis
•Analysing the existing brand, products and services
•Understanding methods for marketing and communication
•Understanding the requirements for business partnerships
Creating a business plan
•Defining the business goals and objectives
•Defining the business model
•Defining the value proposition
•Defining the target audience
•Defining the funding and business commitment
•Defining the new brand and brand messages
•Defining the success factors and targets
Creating the business
requirements
•Defining the business goals and priorities
•Defining the cross marketing and collaborative filtering requirements
The value of market research
Using market research to adapt to the web user
•Demographics
•Web usage
•Buying patterns
•Product design and pricing
•Trust and distrust
•Good experience and building brand loyalty
User analysis
User analysis
Defining who the users
are
•Building user profiles
•Creating cultural models
Understanding target
users
•Investigating user goals, tasks, terminology, experience and requirements
•Understanding how users classify information
•Accessing expert knowledge
•Defining user scenarios
•Understanding user priorities
Creating a usability
plan
•Defining the usability goals and objectives
•Defining the user benefits
•Defining the user profiles
•Defining the evaluation plan
•Defining the success factors and targets
Creating a conceptual
design
•Defining user scenarios
•Performing task modelling
•Performing information modelling
•Performing a design space analysis
Evaluating conceptual
design with users
•Creating, testing and refining low-fidelity prototypes
Content design considerations
Content design considerations
Classification
•Supporting search
•Providing a consistent terminology
•Providing consistent support for synonyms and common spelling mistakes
•Providing a central service where synonyms are mapped to keywords
•The ability to define the accuracy of how content is classified
•Controlling and analysing the scope of a site
•Separating out a process for information classification
•Providing a method for building automatic navigation paths and different site
structures
•Supporting the notion of alternative classification hierarchies
•Supporting a business model that includes keyword rental
View templates
•Providing consistency within the user interface for the user
•Specifying a level of content detail
•Breaking the bottleneck between designer and content provider
•Reducing the cost of delivering new content
More content design considerations
More content design considerations
Summary views
•Site contents
•Site indexes
•Specialized lists
•Combination views
Offering different
views on a site
•Targeting adverts
•Cross marketing
•Customizing information to the user
•Providing a customized service to known users
•Supporting different client environments
•Supporting different languages and cultures
Content & Workflow
Content & Workflow
Workflow
analysis
•Understanding the organisation
•Understanding the formal workflow stages
•Understanding the roles and responsibilities
•Understanding the informal information flows
Workflow design
•Defining the ideal workflow rules
•Defining the control attributes that will capture the workflow rules
•Assigning individuals to roles
•Defining the access rules
•Defining the properties that can measure the workflow processes
Content analysis
Content analysis
Defining the user perceived
objects
•Defining content types
•Defining the scope for each type
•Defining the content properties
Defining the important
relationships between objects
•Content to content
•Content to user
•Content to user type
•Content to business priority
•Content to time
•Content to task
Defining content meta-data
•Classification keywords
•Classification hierarchies
•Category names
•Searchable properties
•Workflow properties
Defining content measurement
requirements
•Content usage, site exits, content queries
System analysis
System analysis
At the highest level a system analysis identifies which
system is appropriate to support the required
functionality and user tasks that have been identified,
based on the benefits and constraints of each option
PC, Telephone, TV, PDA
Different network speeds
Different business applications / processes
How it all fits together
How it all fits together
Business analysis
User analysis
Site goals/ purpose
User goals
Content analysis
Conceptual design
Physical design
System design
Target audience
Task model
User model
Brand
Vocabulary
Values
Properties Actions/State Content types Classification
Design priorities Data model
Structure / Visibility
Behaviour
UI Elements
Table definitions
Data integration
Access mechanism
View layout
Interaction design
Messaging
Style
Template design
User-centred Design Process
Business goals and requirements
User evaluation is key
Evaluation
Attitude testing
Expert evaluation
User evaluation
Competitive evaluation
Accessibility evaluation
Site goals and purpose
Target audience
Brand values
User goals and requirements
User profiles
User goals and tasks
Conceptual design
Task and navigation modelling
Information architecture
Low-tech (paper) prototyping
Physical design
User interface guidelines
User interface specifications
Functional prototyping
Designing for accessibility
Advanced interface technologies
Any questions?