In this week’s lecture, we’ll be talking about accessibility. Accessibility, in the context of usability, refers to how easy (or hard) a site is to use by all people, with a particular focus on people who have visual, motor, or cognitive disabilities. In the past year, there have been some major advances in this realm, especially with the introduction of roles from the WAI-ARIA (”Web Accessibility Initiative-Accessible Rich Internet Application”) working group.
This is a huge benefit for people with vision loss who use screen readers such as JAWS to use web sites. Websites can now be marked up so that common areas (such as search, navigation, main content, etc), can be clearly marked to the screen reader. That means, a user can easily jump to specific areas of the screen without having to have the entire page read to them first. For instance, if you were on a newspaper article page and were using a screen reader, you wouldn’t want to have the entire navigation, ads, and links read to you before you finally get to the content. By clearly marking up parts of the page in the code, you’ve greatly improved usability for those folks using screen readers.
75% of those surveyed did not have JavaScript enabled in their browser
CAPTCHA, Flash, ambiguous links, poor/missing alternative text, complex forms, and poor keyboard accessibility are cited as the most problematic items on the web
Headings are the primary mechanism (50.8% of respondents) for finding information within a page.
This semester, a good chunk of students had problems getting into their Google Docs account. It’s too bad, its a pretty interesting service - it’s core strength that I see is its ability to allow multiple people to work on the same document simultaneously. However, the problem was so bad this semester that this will be the last time I’ll be using it for the class.
As a result, feel free to submit the usability test plan assignment as a word doc, and email it to me at nyuusability@visicog.com.
The results from usertesting.com were pretty impressive. The tester was particularly articulate, eagerly expressing his expectations and reactions to the site. It was pretty clear, also, that this was definitely an “expert” user. I usually don’t see people editing the URL string during a usability test (how about, never?). I received the video and a written report less than an hour after I submitted my task to the service.
One of the other positives was that I was able to encourage the user as a final task to explore the site to get his impressions of the general functionality. In traditional usability tests, you usually don’t have this flexibility in time to allow such free-flow exploration– every minute is precious because of the effort involved in getting the user to begin with. This service makes access to participants so much easier that it makes participants into a commodity (in a non-objectified way, of course).
Negatives? Well, there is the obvious that you can’t follow up with any questions or direct the test based on their actions. You are also limited to 15 minutes, which could limit some types of real transaction-based scenarios. Perhaps the biggest drawback is the limited factors by which you can recruit users (age, gender, income, computer expertise, country). Considering that I personally do a lot of work around business processes, I’d like to be able to recruit users based on their professional background - for quality participants, I’d even be able to pay a premium for it. However, I’d recommend the service if you have a general-purpose site or relatively simple workflow.
After tonight’s class, I went to go check out usertesting.com. I had been discussing drop.io with Meredith on the train home, and decided it would be an interesting test-case. In particular, I wanted to see how easy it was to sign up. My feeling has been that the old signup process (from about a year ago) had a clearer message, but I was curious to see how someone whom had never seen the app before reacted to it. My scenario was to ask them to imagine they worked at a small office, and that a client asked them to create a site on drop.io to act as a collaboration space.
The signup process was very straight forward. I was able to both create my test and my account on the same page. The value proposition of getting video with audio was also compelling. They also have decent filters to select your audience (gender, age, etc) or you can just specify to use someone with a high rating. This all seemed somewhat familiar to me, as I’ve done a bit of work in the crowdsourcing space with products like Amazon Turk and crowdSpring.
Literally a minute after I posted the job, someone had claimed it as their task. Considering their fast turn-around times, I would have appreciated it if the status on my dashboard had been ajax powered (I had to refresh my page to get the status update - perhaps it does pull the results via ajax but just not as quickly as I would have liked). Thirty minutes later, I’m still waiting for my results. I’ll try to post the video later and my impressions of the quality, and where I could see this service being applicable.
Search
About
You are currently browsing the Visicog weblog archives for the month November, 2009.
