Over on my future web blog I’ve just posted on a new report from the UK, on the management of websites in Higher Education.
I’ll probably be adding more of the web management stuff there in the future and, when I can find a suitable person, giving over this blog so it can function purely as an admissions blog.
Usability news is always a good source of material and here’s a great article on common problems with linking. One of the problems with using links like ‘Click here’ or ‘Read more’ is that it does not help search engines understand your content. In the decentralised world of university website management, where faculties and institutes on separate websites are linking to each others sites, we could all do our users a favour and provide more meaningful links which contain the page’s targeted key words.
I recently blogged about the poor evaluation that Lund’s research pages got in a recent research evaluation (although the research itself was judged, in many cases, of being world class). Now I’ve got more detail about what was wrong with the pages. The biggest usability issues are:
- Missing content
- Out of date content
- Poor navigation
I found this out by sending a questionnaire (using the very groovy Questback) to the evaluators; this got a 35% response rate which was not too shabby. Here’s a table showing the problems they encountered:
I asked them if they felt the pages they looked at added to the credibility of Lund; not unsurprisingly only about half said yes.
All the data from the survey, including the evaluator’s opinions on what should be fixed immediately.
Forum magazine (the organ of DIK, a Swedish union) has a feature about one of my favourite subjects, reading on the web. The author is Tomas Dalström, the article’s in Swedish, but the main points are:
- Text is more attractive than pictures
- The most common mistake is to have text which is too short
- 92% of readers look at text first, not the pictures
When I first read this, I was surprised by the ‘text is often too short’ comment, but (unless my Swedish has gone completely haywire) he qualifies this by explaining that short text often lacks the necessary words to lock in the readers interest. One of the cool things about the article is that he links content to cash, that all texts are used in some way and have the potential to generate either a profit or, unfortunately, a loss if incorrect. Words equal money – I like that.
I think that there is a happy medium to be found, clearly you don’t want text which is so short that you struggle to get your meaning across. But I still remain to be convinced that reading longer texts on a computer screen is something we can do with any degree of success.
Raspberry Frog has a similar feature about reading, going back over Jakob Nielsen’s eye tracking work. It has some examples of good practice, in their opinion, from the non-profit sector.
And finally, speaking of the non profit sector check out User Experience for Non-Profits which has a good article on recruiting research participants.
Over the last year an external evaluation, by over 100 international evaluators, has been assessing the quality of research at Lund. The evaluation is called RQ08. The final report is out now, with several key areas highlighted as being of the highest international standard – good job.
But the evaluators also said that our web pages suck.
I blogged about this subject (with pretty much the same conclusion) a month ago, where I discussed my own review of our research pages. The main conclusion of the RQ08 report says:
“…the absence of a comprehensive English web presence robbed many of the panels of a facility that they would normally expect to exploit in an assessment such as they have just undertaken…”
So, the research evaluation itself may have been made more difficult, or even affected, by the lack of good web pages.
Here are some of their comments, the page references are to the entire report.
“On the basis of information provided on the School’s web pages, it seems like if (sic) the research activities at Campus Helsingborg would not be very extensive.”
Page 163
“I had particular difficulties navigating the departmental web-site. This is somewhat unevenly organised.”
Page 178
“The Panel has tried to obtain some information through the DCE web-site. It has helped significantly, yet it did not provide the full picture of the research organizational structure…it did not give information concerning full dimension of such (ongoing) projects and further introduced a few elements of difficulty since some projects are repeated in different areas.”
Page 402
“We believe that much of this information can be made available with no or little pain to the faculty people, by properly populating a Web information system that we think the university anyway lacks.”
Page 453
The evaluators had a strong motivation to try and find information, I seriously doubt that many of our visitors would make the same effort.
So what now? Well, as I suggested in my review of the research pages we really need to understand what tasks users of the research pages are trying to do. We also need to figure out the best metrics to measure the performance of any changes we make. Watch this space.
Please comment on this – what problems have you encountered on our research pages? What could be better?
Apologies – long post….
I received the reports from Coast Digital describing both an expert review and usability test of www.lu.se/english – the english web pages of our university. And I can breath again….
The expert review found (this is more or less directly quoted from the report’s executive summary):
And none of the critical issues scored higher than ‘low’:
A while ago I blogged about Nicholas Carr’s article ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’, I noticed that there was a piece in the Guardian (by Charles Arthur) which explores this a bit more and gives another angle on the themes I commented on in my entry ‘Professors Don’t Read’. The main point is:
- It’s very hard to read lots of text on a computer screen
Summer’s over and I’m back at my desk – there’s a lot of cool stuff coming up in the Autumn, not least the results of an expert review and usability test I’ve commissioned a consultancy to do of the english web pages. I’m looking forward to it with constructive apprehension – watch this space…
I’ve recently completed a review of the research pages of the university – principally just to find out how many we have…We’ve got at least 2500 pages which directly describe research and there’s probably another 5 000 to 10 000 describing, among other things, researchers, equipment, services etc etc. This review will be used to focus further development work.
One issue I saw immediately, in some cases, is the sheer volume of text. Many pages had at least 300 plus words – which is a problem. Why? Here’s some facts:
- Gerry McGovern, in his book Killer Web Content, says that after the first 300 words you’ve lost 40% of the readers.
or, if you want something a bit more empirical (and we are talking about research, after all)
- Based on the work of Weinreich et al. (2008) Jakob Nielsen showed that most visitors to a web page will look at only 28% of the text (on a page with 300 words, users are on it for around 30 seconds)
Ah wait, but the research pages will be read by Professors and such, who have much more patience than the rest of us time starved hunter gatherers of the web. Sorry:
- A study by the British Library (2008) showed that both undergraduates, and professors, exhibited the same tendency for shallow, ‘flicking’ behaviour in digital libraries. Yep, just like the rest of us, professors don’t read.
So too many words, and you’ve lost the reader. Which is a problem if the most exciting stuff is in your last sentence. And this is now 341 words, which means, according to Gerry, that only about 40% of you ever got this far.
“Designers underestimate the thresholds for an effective site and should give greater consideration to overall effectiveness, thereby reducing the chance of failure for a user to find the information they seek”. This is one of the conclusions of a new report from the Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement which conducted a survey of almost 3000 respondents which included non-profit organizations, web designers and the general public.
The survey also showed that:
- Easy access to complete information is key to visitor enjoyment
- Visitors want information fast
- Visitors want a broad range of topics
- Designers are overly optimistic about visitors’ ability to maintain orientation
I love this kind of report, it just adds to the growing body of work which provides us good data from large scale surveys of what users want from a website. Like stone versus scissors, facts beat opinions every time.
One of the results from this survey which I find astounding is that only 60% of designers believe that up to date information is important (compared to 80% of users). What are they thinking? That the users are just visiting a site to look at the pretty pictures?
Two great webinars from Gerry McGovern are available for download from his Customer Carewords site. One deals with Government websites, the other with intranets.
If, like me, you’re switching your brain back on after the summer break these are just the thing to provide inspiration.
Gerry’s main point is that it’s all about managing the tasks people are trying to do on your website. What is your website for? What are the people trying to do who come to it? Can they actually do the things they want to do? Because, if they can’t, they’re probably not coming back.
They are each about 40 minutes long and cover carewords, organization vs. customer centric thinking and the way to measure the success of content; all good stuff.
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