When the Least of Us Are Ignored

I was made a convert to the cause of accessibility a few years back when I attended an STC conference with a progression that dealt with handicaps. At each table was a different handicapped person. One was blind, another deaf, another with only limited use of his legs, and so forth. It sounds like a freak show, but it was shockingly enlightening. I never forgot the lessons I learned at that session, and if you ever get a chance to be taught those lessons yourself, I suggest you take it.

One big lesson I learned was that accommodating the handicapped is not necessarily a big or expensive proposition, but simply being conscious of them. Widen aisles a little. Don't use slick flooring everywhere. Give optional paths that are not demeaning. In my view, this applies to all of us in human factors.

Then I walked on the Sakai project, and was jolted again. The one person on the whole big, extended team who was thinking about accessibility for the visually handicapped was almost literally crying out in the wilderness of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sakai's interface was a long way from being handicapped-friendly. Tests proved that screen readers couldn't use it. It's been improved, but it's still not exactly ready for screen-reader prime time. Portals are often difficult for screen readers to use. Flash, text in graphics, and scripts can be real headaches, too.

I've since been struck several times by how little attention is paid to accessibility online by any website owner. Even e-commerce sites are often impenetrable for the blind, and unnecessarily so. (This may change. The National Federation for the Blind is suing Target Corp. to make its online suit accessible, under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Very preliminary so far.)

But I also found out something else interesting -- concern about the handicapped is generally in direct proportion to how much contact a designer or marketing manager has with the handicapped. If someone in their workplace, church, or family is blind, deaf, or has physical problems, they're usually far more interested in making the blind welcome online. If they've never run across the handicapped except in movies, then they're often not just blind themselves, but dismissive.

Eye-Tracking of Multiple Images

A user experience expert will often want to know where users’ eyes are going on a page. The early equipment for “eye tracking” or “eye gazing” was cumbersome and unpleasant for users, but I’m seeing a lot of work being done nowadays with lighter and more easily available gear. This is an example of one research report on eye-tracking I ran across recently: http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/91/eyegaze.html

Eye tracking maps are often known in the user experience trade as “heat maps”, because most of the time they’re shown as websites with superimposed patches of color that go from light blue to blazing red, depending on how long a user has stared at each spot. Current research is revealing interesting things about how people look at sites. Text almost always shows an F-shaped pattern of scan. We’ve known for a long time that visitors don’t read text online, but scan instead. This is old news. But the research reported by Usability News looked into patterns of search on pages with lots of images, and there the gaze patterns break up rapidly into individualistic styles, especially when searching for something in particular. Otherwise, when browsing visitors show much the same orderly left-right, up-and-down zigzag pattern we’d expect to see. During visual search of multiple images, the eye hops rapidly about in unpredictable patterns as the brain works in overdrive to spot patterns, just as it might in an unfamiliar room with too much furniture.

The research didn’t investigate further, but from my own experience I’d say that the hippity-hoppity effect can be neutralized with proper use of boxing, labels, heads, and other clues that let the visitor quickly narrow down choices.

Web Analytics

One of the things I wish my colleagues knew more about was Web analytics. We've ceded this important facet of usability to the marketing folks, and we need to get a piece of it back.

Web analytics is the ability to get constant data on where users have been in your website, what they looked at, where they came from, what they bought, how long they lingered, and so forth. Much of this stuff used to be in log files, but they proved to be too feeble for prediction. Current analytics packages have much more functionality than log files ever did. For example, in WebTrends I can see what proportion of users went in one of several directions from the main page, and where they went after that, and after that. I can see what keywords they used in searches, both on the site and in search engine queries to find the site.

Web analytics has become the province of marketing departments everywhere, but often they don't know how to use the data for usability or IA purposes. We do, but most of us never look at the data, or don't know what to do with it when we do. When you can see clickpaths through your site, you can begin to optimize your navigational structure. You can gradually make the site better. If you're using a WA package now, I'd suggest you start mining it for every bit of gold you can find.