Week 6 Reading

Chapter 10 talks about the common courtesy of usability. The author refers to the reservoir of good will. If users are treated badly at a website, they'll probably leave and not only not want to use your site in the future, but they'll probably think less of your organization. The reservoir is idiosyncratic, meaning some people are patient, some aren't, some are trusting, some aren't. You can't always count on a large reserve. It is also situational depending on a users time frame. You can refill the reservoir by doing things that improve usability, but sometimes one single mistake can empty it and you're done for.

Things that diminish goodwill include: hiding information that we want, asking us for information they don't need, lying, taking too much time away from us, or if your site looks ameteur. Things that increase goodwill include: making things you know we want to see obvious, telling us what we want to know, know what questions we are likely to have and answer them, be comforting, make it easy to recover from errors, and be apologetic.

Chapter eleven talks about accessibility. Designers and developers are responsible for doing something about this since they are the ones who build the sites. Designers and developers fear more work and a compromised design. Accessibility can seem like one more thing to fit in and it will force them to design sites that are less appealing. If something is confusing on your site, it's probably going to confuse those who have accessibility issues. The way to fix this is to test often and continually smooth out parts that confuse everyone. The way to learn how to make anything is to watch people use it. It's also a good idea to add appropriate text to every image, make forms work with screen readers, create a "skip to main content" link at the beginning of each page, and make all content accesible by keyboard.

Intro to usability:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html

Intro to web accessibility:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.php

Usability is good management:
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2003/nt_2003_04_07_usability.htm