Rethinking Usability for Web 2.0 and Beyond
by William I. Wolff, Katherin Fitzpatrick, and Rene Youssef
1. I am fortunate to have had many wonderful teachers during my way-too-many years of
education. But no teacher has so subtlety and thoroughly transformed how I understand the
Internet—and, by extension, how I understand my place in the world—than John Slatin. This
transformation happened during his graduate seminar, Multimedia, Accessibility, and the Virtual
Body. The purpose of the course, it seems to me now (and despite what might have been on the
syllabus), was to suggest that designing a Web page was a rhetorical act fraught with real-world
implications. It was certainly not only about making the page look like what a designer had
sketched on a scrap of paper. This idea blew me away. John’s Access First Design approach
located the user—all users, regardless of (dis)ability—at the center of the design process. The
designer was merely the mechanism for ensuring that everyone who wanted to be able to
access and consume the information on a Web site should be able to. John’s approach was
essentially an answer to the questions, “What if we looked at this issue from this new
perspective? How would it change things?” Inherent in those deceptively simple questions are
a curiosity to learn more, a desire to never maintain the status quo, and an eagerness to
engage the world in new ways. I have tried to use those questions to inform all the courses I
teach, the research I continue to pursue, and the challenges I face in my life. John closes his
seminal article, “The Art of ALT,” with the sentence, “As rhetoricians of the Web and teachers of
writing in webbed environments we can now participate in reshaping practice.” This article is an
extension of the practice of writing that he reshaped by his teaching, example, and approach to
life. —Bill Wolff
Introduction
2. In a groundbreaking 1983 presentation that initiated a user-centered focus on designing
computing systems, Gould and Lewis suggested four main principles for designers. First,
designers should know who their users will be. This could be achieved by careful study of users
“cognitive, behavioral, anthropomorphic, and attitudinal characteristics” (50). Second, designers
should work with a group of suspected users at the early stages of the design of the computing
system. Third, in the early stages of the design process, those users should interact with
prototypes and their performance should be evaluated. Fourth, when users have problems
using a computer system, designers must fix them. Thus began the field of usability, which is
dedicated to the idea that if a computer system or application is going to be successful it must
be easy to use, efficient in terms of the amount of time it takes to use, and aesthetically pleasing
to use. To achieve success in these areas, designers create usability studies. In these studies
potential users are put through a series of goal-oriented tasks and their successes are
measured along pre-determined scales. Often voice-aloud protocols are employed by asking
the test subject pre-set and task-emergent questions and/or asking the subject to talk through
the decisions they make when trying to reach their goal (Barnum & Dragga). Usability test
methodologies have been applied to all manner of technologies with which humans interact; in
this paper we will be focusing on usability studies designed to assess the usability of Web sites.
3. Nielson has argued for the considerable focus on the usability of Web sites because they
reverse the traditional producer-consumer relationship. When someone buys a product in the
store they pay for the product first and then experience its (often lack of) usability later (think
about the difficulty of programming a VCR or understanding the vast assortment of buttons on a
TV remote control). With Web sites, however, “users experience the usability of a site before
they have committed to using it and before they have spent any money on potential
purposes” (10). Since 1994, Nielsen and his partners have “identified literally thousands of
usability problems and developed as many guidelines for avoiding them” (xvi). These problems
have been located in three main areas: page design (how individual pages are laid out), content
design (how the content is written and presented), and site design (how the entire Web site is
organized) (Krug; Nielsen, Designing Web Usability; Barnum & Dragga). Along with advocates
for Web Standards (Zeldman), usability advocates also argue for designing Web sites that are
accessible for people with disabilities (Slatin & Rush; Clark) and many suggest that sites should
also comply with readability standards (“About Readability — Tx Readability from The
Accessibility Institute”).
