Web-Site Usability Engineering, Part 2
Building a Quality Web Site
By Paul Helinski
In the first installment of this article, I discussed the concept of usability with regard to quality, and addressed its various components; see "Web-Site Usability Engineering, Part 1," Web Techniques, April 1997. This time, I'll demonstrate how to test for usability and avoid common pitfalls.
Jared Spool, founder of User Interface Engineering and a frequent lecturer on usability engineering, is fond of pointing out that: "...the cost of making a change or fixing a mistake rises tenfold on the day you write the first line of code. Starting on that day, any bug you fix is most likely to produce another one." For Web-site production, that tenfold increase takes place even earlier, when you map the navigation, so it's important not to skip the introductory steps I'll outline here.
Concept Prototyping
The first usability test usually occurs within your own organization. This "concept prototyping" involves three groups: the Web team, company employees who are less than Internet savvy, and customers (or in the case of an intranet, a well-distributed set of employees).
The first step, after the decision to create a Web site, is to have the department heads brainstorm a list of resources for inclusion in the project and print each one on a separate index card. The human-resources department, for example, would have cards like "job listings" and "benefits packages," while the sales department might submit "product descriptions" and "ordering information."
