Mad Web Skills

A marketing email from Loop11, the maker of online usability testing software, did the rounds among local government IT managers, marketing teams and mailing groups last week claiming in it’s subject that “City Of Melbourne website ranks 2nd in Australia.”

Screenshot of the Loop11 website offering the usability case study.

The email, offering a usability case study on six of Australia’s capital city websites, got passed around some of the execs/managers at my day job with much interest, then passed to me for evaluation – well, actually it was more of a “TL;DR. Why aren’t we on top of this list?” (We’re not a capital city for starters. )

On reading the published report, there were a few things that immediately stood out for me. First of all, this post is not intended as a rant, merely an observation and commentary on both the marketing aspect of the report and the user testing process. Loop11 looks like a great tool, and this exercise has most likely drummed up quite a bit of interest in their product as well as the idea of user testing in general.

There is some obvious link-baiting going on in the email subject. Not to detract at all from Melbourne’s great website (of which I’m a fan), they came second out of six captial city websites, not exactly “2nd in Australia” as mentioned in the email’s subject. There’s no doubt that the sole purpose of the report was an attention-grabbing marketing exercise for Loop11′s user testing software. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, however the test itself seems rushed and inconclusive.

The six council websites were tested by 600 random world-wide internet users to complete one single task (100 testers per website) recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service which, to me, sounds like the internet equivalent of a sweat shop. The testers were paid 5 cents each for completing the task.

When conducting your own testing, you would be better to test a much smaller selection of people. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen believes that 85% of problems can be found with only 5 users (and a follow-up test with 5 more users should pick up most of the remaining problems.) You would also likely offer higher compensation (such as a free cinema ticket) to get a better buy-in from your participants.

The task the testers had to complete was “Find out what day your household waste is collected”. So in the end, the result is less “most usable website” and more “most prominent waste collection link“. In a real-world test scenario, you would obviously test more website functions across a number of council services.

As I said before, I actually really like Loop11′s software and think it can be really beneficial when performed adequately, however the price tag of $350USD per test ended up being a bit of a sore point for us. Being a developer of web applications who enjoys a challenge, it has definitely given me a bit to think about regarding perhaps developing my own in-house user testing application in the future.

Those zany boffins* at ZURB have just unleashed their latest creation: something they call Bounce. Their website claims Bounce is a “fun and easy way to share ideas on a website” and after a quick play, I’d have to agree. It allows you to instantly take a screenshot of a website, annotate it with feedback and share it with others to provide their comments, all without a single login or sign up form in sight.

Bounce is a lightweight and totally free (as in beer) version of their Notable app, created as a way of both spreading the word about their paid offering, as well as a “sandbox” of sorts, allowing them to test new interface ideas and features without potentially upsetting their paying customers with untested concepts.

I think this idea is brilliant. It’s very similar to the way that 37signals uses their free apps, Ta-Da List and Writeboard, to promote their bread-and-butter products such as Basecamp. As a bonus, for those users that are happy to just go on using just the free app, the 37signals brand is still in the back of their minds as a generous company willing to share some of their simpler tools with the wider community.

Personally, I’ll be getting getting a lot of use out of Bounce, and I’d be very interested to find out how this move pays off for ZURB in the long term.

* While I can’t personally vouch for the exact level of boffinry possessed by ZURB, I’m sure they’re quite bright.

I’ve always been a bit wary about “The Secret“, the same way I’m wary about psychics and mediums. Many people are sold on the idea based on some kind of silver-bullet or magic-wand notion that it’s going to make them feel good or change their lives forever.

While I personally believe that psychics and the supernatural like are a load of old bunk, I can understand the reasons and the value placed on them by those that who do believe, such as grieving relatives looking for closure after the passing of a loved one. What makes me angry are those that prey on the weak minded, giving false hope instead of comfort and closure with the aim of extracting more money, but that is a rant for anther day.

Unlike psychics, I have no doubt that “The Secret” can work, but not in the way that the author and her publisher would have you believe. While it may work, that doesn’t mean it will work. It’s not like some kind of magic switch, in fact, there’s nothing spiritual, mystical or phantasmagorical about it. There’s no Jedi force, glowing auras, harmonic resonance or any phoney “Law of Attraction” at work here. It basically boils down to one basic truth.

Your chance at being successful at something increases exponentially the more passionate you are about it.

I’m not talking about a casual hobby or a passing interest. I mean an all-consuming passion for the subject where you can work so hard on achieving your goals but you’re so focussed that it doesn’t feel like work. Take a look at successful people throughout history. They weren’t bestowed with phenomenal cosmic powers or share some ancient powerful secret. Their success came from their passion, their will to see it through, and the hard work that went along with it.

I’m a web guy. It’s not just what I do; it’s who I am. I’m always being approached by people with the idea for the “next big thing”, even having to sign the odd NDA or no-compete clause. You know how it always ends?

1. I build out the project on spec, on time and on budget.
2. The client sits back rubbing their hands together, waiting for the money to come in.
3. The website is left to stagnate, usually closing within 2 years, rarely turning a profit.

I swear, it’s like South Park’s Underpants Gnomes every time.

Of course I have my own “big ideas”, and maybe one day I’ll work hard and make something of them, but the point I wanted to make was that you can have the best idea in the world, the best plan and even the best execution, but I guarantee you will be beaten by someone who wants it more and will work harder. I can also guarantee you will fail without the correctly channelled enthusiasm required to see your plan through to success.

That’s not magic. It’s what’s called “applying yourself”.

I’m not up on a soap-box here. I’m not entertaining any ideas of becoming a motivational speaker and I’m certainly not telling people anything they don’t already know.

I just think it’s worth reminding ourselves that you don’t need to spend your hard-earned money to have Oprah or anyone else tell you what you already know about life and living.

with Earle Castledine

Apparently I’m now a jQuery ninja. Who knew?

My Day One Workshop for Web Directions South 09 was run by Earle Castledine (with a little help from Craig Sharkey) and aimed to teach me a bit about jQuery. I’ve been looking for the right excuse to make the switch from MooTools to jQuery for a while now. The MooTools community tries hard, and while I think that it is technically a better library, jQuery just wins hands down when it comes to real-world usage, available plugins and general community support and adoption. But this is not a jQuery vs MooTools post; there are enough of them out there already.

Earle did a great job of simplifying the concepts for the javascript noobs in the room without alienating the more advanced peeps who already have an understanding of jQuery and what it can do. True, it started off a bit slow, but before too long we were using jQuery to do most of the cool stuff that jQuery works best for: traversing the DOM and turning up the Ajax-o-meter. A few choice dairy-related phrases emerged from the session too, which can only be defined as “had to be there” moments, such as “it all made sense when I saw the cheese” and “they go together like cheese and… and stuff.”

I already have a few projects that are half-finished, requiring just a bit of progressive enhancement to make them a bit more awesome, so I’ll definitely be playing with jQuery a bit more this week to bed-down a few concepts. Thanks Earle.

Accessibility shouldn't cost a lot of money if your website is built with accessibility in mind from the beginning.

I was recently asked to evaluate a product called BrowseAloud in the interest of improving a website’s accessibility. This is a browser plugin which aims to help those people who have difficulty seeing the screen, maybe through old age or those with lower literacy or dyslexia who might find it helpful to hear rather than read the words on the page. It basically functions as a screen reader, but will only operate within the browser on websites who have subscribed to the BrowseAloud service.

My first reaction was to point out that many users who require this sort of accommodation would usually already have software installed on their computer to help them. Most operating systems have Text-to-Speech and screen-reading (available in Windows since XP by pressing the Windows Key + U), screen region enlargement and visual contrast functionality built into them and most web browsers have text resizing/zoom functionality available.

In addition to these tools already available, we invest a great deal of time and effort ensuring that the websites we build meet all mandatory (and many optional) accessibility guidelines and regulations, and take a long-term view to ensure that accessibility for all is maintained.

Having said that, I can see how this sort of technology would be useful. The main problem I have with this particular product is that it is something that actively must be downloaded and installed by the user in order to be available. Many people with text access issues are particularly unlikely to be able/willing to download and install anything additional to their computers. A competitor to this product, Talklets, seems like a slightly better solution as it does not require anything special to be installed apart from the Flash Plugin (which is almost as ubiquitous as the web browser itself.)

I’m personally also not a fan of BrowseAloud’s business model. Their plugin requires no changes to be made to a website or software to be purchased or installed. Paying them an annual fee simply adds your website to a white-list of sites that their plugin will work with. There’s no reason why BrowseAloud couldn’t work with ALL websites, but they cripple the plugin until you pay them what could be an expensive annual cost. (Granted, I don’t know exactly how much it costs, but from what I’ve read from others, it’s not cheap.) I would probably prefer them to sell the un-crippled plugin to the public for a nominal fee, or at least offer that as an option. I guess it’s easier for them to target enterprise organisations such as government and educational sites, mainly because traditionally they are the types to throw lots of money at a perceived problem.

The Opera browser, available free of charge, also has in-built speech capability which can assist with reading web page content. There are also free extensions to Firefox such as FireVox which adds web-page reading to the browser. While I’m not sure how effective these tools are in the real world, I would much prefer to use an accessibility page of a website to point users to these resources that will help them with ALL websites.

In summary, there are a lot of options for accessibility these days. Accessibility should mostly be built in to the website by following W3C standards for development and accessibility. Additional tools can be used to ensure that as many people as possible can access the content of the site, but I believe these users should get themselves a solution that works on ALL sites, not just on some that have been “enabled”. Otherwise, all you’re doing is setting up a nice walled garden for them, and as soon as you need to link out to an external site or whatever, you’re leaving them stranded. “Give a man a fish…”, etcetera.