CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Panels
Web Interfaces Live: What's Hot, What's Not?
Panelists:
Mary Czerwinski,
Microsoft Interactive Media, marycz@microsoft.com
S. Joy Mountford,
Interval Research Corporation, mountford@interval.com
Jakob Nielsen,
Sun Microsystems,
jakob@eng.sun.com
Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini,
Healtheon, tog@healtheon.com
Web Jockey:
Keith Instone,
Bowling Green State University, instone@cs.bgsu.edu
Abstract
You are up against a million other Web sites: how do you get users to come
to your site? This panel will visit live sites on the WWW and debate what
works and doesn't work in Web user interfaces.
Keywords
WWW, Web, Internet, Design, Evaluation, Reviewing.
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
Mary Czerwinski: Web Success: Critical Components
When evaluating a Web site, our group in the Interactive Media Division
needs to closely track the usefulness, engagement level and usability of
the interaction from the user's perspective. Much of our research to date
has shown us that, unless these three factors are accounted for in the
design of our Web content, the likelihood that a user is satisfied or wants
to return to that site is lower. The manner in which we track these three
important features of Web interaction is multi-faceted. We are currently
developing a behavioral coding scheme which can pinpoint the engagement and
usability levels of Web content during laboratory test sessions. Along with
these behavioral measures, we have spent much time in qualitative scale
development efforts and literature reviews, pinpointing succinct, highly
predictive bipolar questions which will guide us toward the development of
successful Web content. Finally, we have worked closely with market
research in order to track real behaviors with customers in the field in an
attempt to further validate our measures. The ultimate goal of all of these
activities is to be able to develop a corpus of design knowledge that can
be shared with our teams at the earliest stages of content development.
Biography
Mary Czerwinski, Ph.D., currently works as a Usability Manager for
Microsoft's Interactive Media Division, and is an affiliate assistant
professor of Psychology at the University of Washington. The majority of
the usability team in the Interactive Media Division focuses their efforts
on assisting design teams toward producing enhanced, computer-mediated
interaction on the Web through empirical research. Mary was formally
trained as a cognitive psychologist, and has held positions at Bellcore,
Lockheed, Compaq Computer and Rice University.
S. Joy Mountford: Beyond "More Of The Same"
The current early stages of Web interface designs seem not to have evolved
the overall quality of interaction design at all. The emphasis on
replicating the types of features in the desktop interface again seems to
have positioned it in a less than evolutionary position. It would be nice
to move beyond scrolling text highlighted with some coloured graphical
buttons. Navigational control seems still to be difficult, especially the
recovering of "How I got to where I am?" The basic interface questions
still remain "Where am I?" "How can I go somewhere else?" "How can I go
Back?"
It feels as if the same growing pains as with productivity software are
prevalent again; more is better. The more video and hypertext the better.
The quality of audio is rather poor and the use of alternate metaphors
limited. How will Home Pages evolve and do we still need them? However, I
do like the use of Shockwave plug ins to occasionally brighten my day with
surprise features! We need more exploration of alternative schemes and
navigational approaches, and to watch which ones maintain the greatest
numbers of hits over time. It is important for the CHI community to be part
of understanding why people become repeat uses of some sites and not of
others.
Biography
S. Joy Mountford joined Interval Research Corporation two years ago to
manage a media design project and previously had been the manager of the
Human Interface Group at Apple Computer for nearly eight years. Before
joining Apple, Joy worked at MCC, America's 5th generation computer
consortium and prior to that she designed advanced user interfaces for
military avionics systems at Honeywell. She has given a series of invited
lectures and presentations worldwide using interactive multi-media
demonstrations.
Jakob Nielsen: Avoiding A Web Usability Meltdown
The Web is in dire danger of suffering a usability meltdown as more and
more sites are added without proper navigational structure. In the early
days on the Web (one or two years ago), the novelty effect was sufficient
to dazzle users with the very idea of being able to pull content off
servers several continents away. Soon users will tire of mindless surfing
and will demand value-added services from the Web that they cannot get from
paper or traditional ways of doing business.
Current Web design has tended toward bandwidth-consuming multimedia effects
in the assumption that the Web needs to approximate television if it is to
engage a broader population of users. Even though attractive designs are
definitely a necessity for the discretionary usage situation that dominates
the Web, I think that the Web ultimately must be seen as a utilitarian
medium that will allow users to move beyond the couch potato interaction
approach of passive media consumption. Hypertext linking and reach-out of
server-based functionality can and must empower users to make things happen
and to become immersed on a semantic level and not just drowned in sensory
impressions.
At the time of CHI97, the Web will probably consist of around two million
sites, and most of them will have been designed without any usability
testing or serious attention to the design. For smaller sites this may be
acceptable since they will only be of interest to a few, specialized users.
The main problem is the many large sites that obviously lavish considerable
budgets on "cool design" only to suck big time when confronted with a few
simple criteria: do users know where they are, do users know what they can
do, do users get anything useful out of visiting the site?
Biography
Jakob Nielsen is a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer working on
advanced Web technologies at SunSoft, Sun's software planet. He is the
author of the best-selling books Multimedia and
Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond and Usability
Engineering and writes the monthly Alertbox column on Web
usability at
http://www.useit.com/alertbox
Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini: The Practical Side Of The Web
This year will see the transition of the World Wide Web from a giant
infomercial into a tool for commerce as companies begin sinking serious
money into developing Web-based services. For this new service sector to
reach its full potential will require sweeping changes in today's Web
designs.
Web pages have, to date, presented users with a significantly different
interface from the traditional GUI, sporting wildly varying buttons,
clickable images, and other imaginative objects. Navigating these spaces
has often been nothing short of adventure.
Users of services may be significantly different demographically from
today's Web surfers. Many will be disinclined to click on everything to see
what works. Many will have little or no previous experience with the Web,
but will come well equipped with traditional GUI application skills.
Services on the Web may be best implemented, not as a series of pages, but
as a more traditional hierarchy. The responsibility to keep the user aware
and informed of his or her surroundings becomes greater, as the user is no
longer a single click of the back button away from escape. Consistency
within the services needs to be strong, with common graphic elements and
common navigation objects throughout.
Biography
Bruce Tognazzini is designing Web-based services at Healtheon, a new Jim
"Netscape" Clark start-up. "Tog" is the author of two books, Tog on
Interface and Tog on Software Design, both from Addison-Wesley.
Keith Instone: Web Jockey
The panelists will debate Web designs pulled in real time from the Internet
by the Web jockey. If you read this before the panel has taken place,
please give Keith your suggestions for Web sites or pages that you would
like to see critiqued.
Biography
Keith Instone is the Research Associate for the Computer Science Department
at Bowling Green State University (Ohio, USA). His research interests focus
on the intersection of HCI and the World Wide Web. He maintains SIGCHI's forum on HCI and the
Web (http://www.acm.org/sigchi/webhci/) and the HCI Virtual Library, a meta-index
of HCI information on the Web (http://web.cs.bgsu.edu/hcivl/). Keith acted
as the webmaster for the CHI conference in 1995 and 1996.
CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Panels
