CHI 96 Workshop: HCI and the Web, Position Papers

Cyndy Gal

U S WEST Marketing Resources Group, Inc.
cgal@uswest.com

"Anybody can write HTML."

The ease of creating web sites has created a rapid growth on the Internet, particularly the World Wide Web (WWW). However, a lot of the information on the WWW is "junk", or not of interest to many people (except for the site designers). As the WWW continues to rapidly grow, people will need to weed through much more information in a world where "content is king". My analogy is the home-made vacation video tape. There may be some interesting elements in the video, but most people will not want to sit through watching someone's entire vacation, unless the video is well produced.

Many sites are developed without consideration of the user and their needs. With this new wealth of information, programs like search engines (e.g., "Yahoo"-type programs) will become the status quo as long as they are user friendly and retrieve the set of information that the user seeks. Those programs/sites that are weak will not survive.

Once the user finds a specific site, they find that the design of the site may be totally different from that of other sites that they have seen - fonts, colors, navigation, even the speed of downloading the site. All of these factors have implications on the acceptance of the site by the user; herein is where the Human Factors professional or User Interface Designer will make the site usable, acceptable, and informative.

My Experience

I am a human factors/user interface designer and work for U S WEST Marketing Resources Group in the Denver Colorado area. I am designing the user interface for the U S WEST(r) Yellow Pages on the Internet, an on-line business telephone directory. Prior to Internet projects, I have worked on designing the user interface for the world's first "live" interactive television product, U S WEST CityKey, an interactive travel guide on a television in hotel rooms. Unfortunately, CityKey is no longer alive due to business reasons, but it was very easy to use and was very favorably accepted by its users, who were hotel guests. I've also spent many years designing and usability testing the air traffic controller's user interface for the United States' replacement Air Traffic Control system.

U S WEST(r) Yellow Pages on the Internet

In the development of the U S WEST(r) Yellow Pages on the Internet, we are going through the usual steps for software development (requirements analysis, rapid prototyping and interactive design, usability testing, on-line feedback from users, roll-out strategies, etc.). I doubt if many web sites go through such a rigorous process in their development.

We spent months learning what capabilities the users want in the product, as well as how they want to use the product. We had prior knowledge of how people use the print Yellow Pages, but we knew that they would have greatly expanded capabilities once the print Yellow Pages is on-line - such as expanded search capabilities and more depth of content than what is currently in the print Yellow Pages. For our requirements analysis, we held multiple focus group sessions, as well as performing consumption or task analyses.

Once we completed our requirements analysis, we were able to develop the technical requirements, from which we could design and develop the U S WEST(r) Yellow Pages on the Internet web site. I then began designing the user interface by prototyping all of the pages of the site. These pages were later handed off to programmers to make the site interactive with the huge database of yellow pages data (business phone/address listings).

Once the site was interactive, we held formal usability testing sessions with many typical users from our target community. From the usability testing, we discovered areas in the user interface that needed improvement due to confusion, lack of clarity, etc. by the users. We were able to rapidly incorporate changes (in some case, even during the usability testing) and got overwhelming acceptance by users. The U S WEST(r) Yellow Pages on the Internet was released to the world on February 13, 1996 with the Boulder, Colorado directory on-line; all of the remaining 300 U S WEST directories fro the 14 state region will be online soon.

WWW Design Implications

What I find interesting in the Web design environment are the limitations, such as browsers, HTML, etc. and how they affect design. I am very interested in User Interface Style Guide research and development, as well as design standardization. This will become more important as we move forward into the more interactive multimedia environments on the WWW (e.g., Java, Shockwave, etc.). Much of what we, as user interface designers, know about good human factors design is applicable to the WWW, today and in the future.

I would like to see more user interface designers (e.g., the HCI community) involved in web site development, similar to their involvement in most major (and many minor) software development organizations. In today's competitive world, only the best (usable) software will survive.

CHI 96 Workshop: HCI and the Web, Position Papers