Help and Program Flow
From CS160 User Interfaces Sp09
Lecture on Apr 22, 2009
Readings
- The Need for Web Design Standards. UseIt.com Jakob Nielsen.
- Writing for the Web Usablity.gov U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
- Designing Apple Help Interface Design & Document Design Kevin Knabe.
Rohan Dhaimade - Apr 21, 2009 01:12:55 pm
Need for web Design Standards is an interesting appear and makes many valid points. Most people do not stay on any one site a long time and having consistency and standards across web pages would also be beneficial. Though I question how much of the web you can standardize in terms of navigation. The help button can of course be placed in certain locations but if you somehow announced "Only left bar navigation" I doubt anyone would follow it. It restricts the ability of designers to produce new designs that might improve workflow. I think Facebook tries that pretty often to get better clickrates and etc, but if they had to follow some set of web standards it would be much harder.
The Usability.gov site provided some interesting information, though it provides some fairly obvious information. Keep it concise and organized. Though it seems that usability.gov site relates to site full of information, which is things like Wikipedia. Where you are just gathering information, sites like gmail where you interact more can't really follow the same standards.
Anybody else notice that the "20 years of research" of help system that Apple developed has been replaced by a very simple spotlight help search. Instead of all this framing question stuff, you just have a little search box that appears under a help and a link to the main help page. I think that was a much better design choice rather than asking the user to try to frame his question in a certain type. Just be able to search the question using keywords such like we do over the internet and help might be better. Of course you need to mantain navigation and all the good help designs earlier.
Alan Young - Apr 21, 2009 01:57:57 pm
"The Need for Web Design Standards" is an article that basically says that there are many design elements that are standardized in most web sites today and that it is important for designers to follow design standards because they help users be more satisfied with the website experience.
Usability.gov's "Writing for the Web Design" is an article that presents questions and examples of how to best present content to the user. For example, the designer should consider if there is any sequential ordering, if there is any way to break text into chunks, and if there can be any useful headings. In addition, tables and visuals also greatly enhance the presentation.
"Designing Apple Help" went into the research and design decisions that went into how Apple Help was designed for Mac OS 8.5. The design goals were to: make help discoverable(easy to get to), make help easy to author, provide a central point of access to all available help, take advantage of the Internet, Define tasks broadly, and write minimally, and automate tasks when possible. A lot of usability studies were performed and showed that there was a high rate of task completion. While the article is dated, I assume that the iterative design approach probably was used in designing the help feature for the current Mac OS.
Carolc - Apr 21, 2009 05:10:36 pm
The Need for Web Design Standards was a quick, necessary read. It basically stated that we need more design standards for users to navigate websites without confusion. This addresses one of the main concerns I have with our current project work for my other user interface design class. We arrived at the logo and breadcrumb positioning quite intuitively, but the choice of a left navigation area seemed to me to be rather arbitrary. I am not 100% confident that users will find it easy to navigate. If they don't, it won't be hard to understand why they won't use our website.
Writing for the Web offered some practical guidelines for presenting content on the web. These include chunking, leaving out non-useful information, using fewer words, and making use of white space and bullets. I found the bit about bullets improving the Sun website the most to be the most enlightening. This may inform how I redesign my website. The advice to break information down into lots of headings, and ordering the headings by natural sequence or importance was also very straightforward and logical.
Designing Apple Help was an interesting interpretation of the lessons learned in designing Apple help. I found the direct drawing of a red circle (coachmark) around the object in question to be refreshingly clear. They also addressed a problem that often frustrates users - the reliance on the user to remember steps and move around between help windows and the active screen. They addressed this by allowing users to stay in the active application. This was an experience I had encountered with the website I'm developing for the other class; heuristic evaluations had revealed that users were concerned their changes would not be saved when they clicked on Help.
The experience of iterating the development of help highlighted the utility of user testing. Users did not notice the help question mark icon at the righthand side, so designers moved it to the left on the path of "exploratory learning" as a Help menu item.
Anatol Tsang - Apr 21, 2009 05:44:37 pm
I agree with the reading on web design standards. I think that the design of too many things today (both on the web and elsewhere) focus on the flashy display of those things and less on the usability or the usefulness of that program/website/etc. to the user. It may be frustrating to realize that making your website easier to use may require you to copy elements from others' websites (it kind of stifles the spirit of creativity and individualism).
I realized the need for concise and usable web writing when I googled online for Flex examples. I soon discovered that many websites had badly written help files and documentation. Having better-written websites would increase the efficiency of many things (programming, cooking, dealing with computers, etc.) that are guided by internet websites.
Help files are another place that can be greatly improved. Perhaps programmers spend so much time on getting programs to work that they forget about catering to the needs of their users. The reading points out many interesting topics, such as not including help for obvious functions, the fact that many users don't necessarily want to learn but want to get the task done, and the fact that users ask two main types of questions ("What is this?" and "How do I do this?").
Shoeb Omar - Apr 21, 2009 05:35:12 pm
"The need for web design" article was really interesting and it's a shame that the confusing category of elements includes pretty much everything that is important. It was surprising to me that login wasn't a little more standardized as there's only so many ways of doing it but perhaps the different placements and so forth screw with that. I also wonder if things have changed since the article was written in 2004. five years is along time when talking about the web. I agree with the author that standardization is extremely important, especially in user retention
"Writing for the web" was somewhat obvious but made a lot of valid and important points on things people need to keep in mind. The important distinction is that writing for paper and writing for the web are two entirely different ball games because the web is more dynamic than paper. Also they referred to a number of informal web standards that help users navigate and sift through data quickly--it's important to keep this in mind because users do not like wasting time on one page for hours on end
"Designing Apple help" was less interesting to me as it wasn't really all that relevant to what I think is important to keep in mind today. Perhaps help systems were more useful back in the day but I think now, anytime I need help using a program I don't open their help software but I look at Google. However, despite this they did identify interesting things - such as providing help while maintaining task focus, and doing tasks for the users, instead of just tryin got teach them. I thought this part was interesting because perhaps at some point users relied on the help to do their tasks rather than ever figuring out how to do them on their own?
Saung Li - Apr 21, 2009 06:50:22 pm
The need for web design conventions is important because the more a website complies with design conventions and give users what they want, the more satisfaction and efficiency they will have with completing their tasks. It seems like search bars, sign-in processes, and main navigation schemes are used so often that they should have been standardized by now, but they are listed under the "confusing" section. These are vital parts of the site so they should be made simple for users to use. I like how they mentioned that that many other websites are visited before yours, so you should design the site to be like others since users already know how to use them. However, too much standardization can make flipping through websites boring; they should somehow combine creativity with the "design."
The second article is pretty effective in getting the point across by giving examples as you read. Using spacing, bullets, tables, bold headlines, and very short paragraphs allows us to read through the page very quickly, so websites should utilize these methods for more usability. Most of this stuff seems trivial, but sometimes designers can forget about them so it is important to ground these techniques.
The last article gives a real-world example of how usability tests can improve interfaces a lot. The test-subjects get confused on some point, so the designers changed that part of the interface to improve it. Having a help function that appears on the screen without interrupting the task would be more helpful than having just a documentation of information. I hate using help guides where you just read through them like a book and do the task because they are very boring. An interactive one that guides the user step by step and provide feedback would be more effective. A nice change was when they made the help screen window small and placed it in front of the application so that the user could read it while doing the task. It surprised me that it takes so much research to develop an effective help function. A good design is actually enabling the user to access a help feature easily and walking him through without interrupting the task. Having a little question mark icon on the top right may save space and look better, but users may not look for it after scanning through the other menu options. Grouping the help feature with the other menus solves that problem and replacing the icon with text keeps the menus consistent.
Mark Dhillon - Apr 21, 2009 08:15:58 pm
I liked this for an opening statement: much of the Web is like an anthill built by ants on LSD. Not because I like the image of ants building an ant hill on LSD, but because I can think of many sites that have incredible design and layouts, and ones that are just confusing and frustrating to use. The author's list of reasons supporting standardizing web design so that users
- know what features to expect,
- know how these features will look in the interface,
- know where to find these features on the site and on the
- know how to operate each feature to achieve their goal,
- don't have to ponder the meaning of unknown design elements,
- don't miss important features because they overlook a non-standard design element, and
- don't get nasty surprises when something doesn't work as expected.
reminds me a lot about the tech support that I have to give my mom every time she has to send an email. She has two or three different accounts on different sites, and some favor icons over text. For example, there is no "Attachments" button, but rather a paper clip icon. So she calls me, very flustered with her inability to accomplish a simple task, and so then I have to think of all the possible ways an email service could display the "Attachments" button. With standards in place, people are less intimidated because they are familiar with the object before they even interact with it.
Ian Hildreth - Apr 21, 2009 09:35:04 pm
The first article makes a very good point; that Jakob's Law needs to be taken into account when designing a webpage. That users in general spend more time looking at other websites, so when they come to yours, they expect to see something that they have been viewing before. As he points out, a person only spends on average a minute and 49 seconds, so you have very little time to convey the meaning and usability of your website.
The second article has some good guidelines and advice to ensure that your website follows some sort of standard. However, it was very simple at the same time, and some of the information seemed a little to naive to be useful, such as to ensure the headlines have useful information, or that brevity is key.
Apple's guide to its design process for its famous OS is very detail and thorough. I always enjoy reading about actual implementation of the processes that we learn in this class. As always, the examples in this article, like all the photos of different help layouts made for an easier read. This article definitely reminded me of all the frustrating experiences I have had on a computer trying to use a program's help menu, and how important it is to put extensive research into it while designing it.
Ling Chen - Apr 21, 2009 11:56:29 pm
I agree that websites should comply with some kind of design standards. It would be better for both the designers and the users. Whenever I am on a confusing looking webpage, I don't even bother staying because it's just so hard to look for the whatever it is that I am looking for. On the other hand, I like it when things are exactly where they are supposed to be. I was a little surprised that the placement of "Help" is also a source of confusion. I guess most of the sites I've been too have been pretty consistent with where they are placing the "Help" section. I wish though, the confusing elements would have been more of the less important elements of a website. Just like the article said, having a standard will increase users' sense of mastery over the website, increase their ability to get things done, and increase their overall satisfaction with the experience. I also like the Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience: users spend most of their time on other websites.
Writing for the Web provided very practical help for web designers. I liked how the webpage content itself has been broken down into sections as suggested in the article. It also had helpful headings that draws the readers' attentions. There is even a table-of-content-like list of links at the beginning of the page. The paragraph and sentences are short and straight to the point. In addition, there's also a lot of bulleted lists, tables, and examples given. The webpage itself is a perfect example of what the content is trying to tell the readers: make your content easy to use for your readers. As a web designer, one should always write with the readers in mind, making things as easy as possible.
"Designing Apple Help" gives a really nice example of how people actually do use all these design theories and usability studies when designing a product. It shows us that things we learn are actually important in the real world. It's important for us to do research early and ask all kinds of questions that can help with the design.
Jeffrey Patzer - Apr 22, 2009 12:39:28 am
This was definitely a useful article. I have often asked myself the question what is the most effective web layout when I'm browsing many different sites. After reading the past few articles I think I have drawn a few conclusions. Due to the diversity of the web, it is near impossible control and mandate standards. The nature of the web is that it can have content created by many people. People would most likely wish to express themselves in many different ways and even if standards were suggested, they would ignore them. This being said, I believe that for large sites or commonly traversed sites they will begin to adopt certain standards. User's will come to expect certain things with major sites and those sites will want to serve the user's as best as possible. This does not mean that some people will want to conform to standards though as the article suggests, since in my experience many people will go left merely because everyone else is going right.
The second article suggested a couple of things to me. It suggested that information should be organized in a poster-board like manner. Making certain information pop and draw attention. Organizing your information like you would notes also helps since when users are looking at the pages they want to access information quickly (and notes are designed to be like that).
The last article is interesting in understanding how the help menus have changed. I definitely think apple has the best help menus. They have real-time search that can find things right in your menu bar rather than having to read how to get there. PC's do not even come close to this sort of functionality. But what I found most interesting was the chart of how users focus on problems. They do not view things in a serial manner, but rather in a flow-chart decision path structure. Making decisions, doubling back, and reassessing at all times. This is probably the most helpful piece of information in designing a help menu and even a website. When navigating a site you are looking for information and how that information is laid out should resemble this branched thought process, not a serial path.
Kevin Huey - Apr 21, 2009 10:40:55 pm
Yes, keeping designs uniform across webpages would help reduce overall confusion when trying to navigate between different sites. It helps users in that way. But you also need to have some distinct variation among these sites, or your website will basically be carbon-copies of other, dissimilar sites in terms of general reason for site usage. One is a search engine and another is a language translator. They both have a text-based input box. Should these two sites have similar designs? Ok, this might be a bad example (especially since the sites are used for two different purposes), but I think you get the point.
Writing for the Web is kind of like a recommendation for using the style of research papers or reports on websites as well. Outline and segment options clearly. Use a clean design and make sure no confusion can arise. Refrain from boring readers with too much text at once. Really, it's all about organizational skills. Organize well, and the website will give off a good mojo.
Designing Apple Help is a parallel to the steps we've done this whole semester on our games. Apple found problems with their Help icon through usability studies, looked for better ways to implement it, and eventually revamped its features (and discoverability, for that matter). The best feature, in my opinion, was the ability to let the Help menu automate a change the user wants, reducing chances for error from users trying to follow directions. It also caters to the lazy people in America, and makes life even easier for them. They'll be stress-free, happy, and still enthused by their Macs. Gets more people to buy Macs.
99.165.91.228 - Apr 22, 2009 12:42:38 am
I definitely agree with the first article in that there should be a standard towards designing web pages. After all, web pages are made to be used by others - therefor, making it comprehensible encourages the site to be used. In fact, that's why many of LJ's recent changes angered its user base; they made things more difficult to use. Jakob's Law is something that every web designer should keep in mind.
The first sentence on Usability.gov basically summarizes its point succinctly. "A successful Web site has the information that users need in the place they look for it, in the amount they want to deal with, in the words and pictures that make sense to them." The points they made were direct and very clear, and the page itself was a fine example of exactly what they were preaching.
The last article was a nice look at history, but to be honest, it was less interesting to me simply because it was much less relevant to me as a user. Especially with the internet today, someone is much more likely to go to Google to look up how to fix their problem, rather than trudging through the help menu in the hopes of finding something relevant, even with the search function.
Derek Liu - Apr 22, 2009 01:30:06 am
Following a standard design is indeed what websites should try to do. After reading this article, I thought about how many times I've simply left a website because the design looked nonstandard from what I'm used to. Of course websites can't be copies of each other but site messiness will definitely lead to users leaving even before they have read any of the content. While reading this article, I thought of a particular episode of The Simpsons in which Homer builds a website that would fall under the "confusing" category. You can probably find a screen shot if you Google "Homer Simpson's Website" (it's the one with the dancing Jesus).
The second article is essentially how to layout texts for your website. A lot of what was mentioned seemed pretty obvious to me and probably falls under website convention now. I found this to be an interesting link to the first website because this article gives some conventions on how to do texts, transitioning for the first article which was mostly about the layout of navbars, search bars, and other components.
The last article was mostly on how to design a help menu but I agree with 12:42:38's comment about how it is less useful because personally I never go to any sort of help menus with Google nowadays.
Yin-Zen "Johnny" Hwang - Apr 22, 2009 01:49:13 am
especially hated are the evolution of many websites that lose sight of their singular purpose: they quickly become bloated and unavigatable. i wish this is what people have when they have a huge team of designers:
1. HEAD DESIGNER who is responsible for EVERY SINGLE DESIGN. doesn't have to code, but every design should match what he/she wants. 2. everyone else can only suggest ideas and implement the HEAD DESIGNER's idea. not implement their own ideas. because that will make everything ad-hoc and a jumbly mess.
i don't like the usability.gov website. it gives suggestions without backing them up with sound evidence.
and user-centered online help is pretty much dead. people who need help usually won't understand the help file anyway.
Cuong Ngo - Apr 22, 2009 02:23:41 am
Of the three articles, I liked "The Need for Web Design Standards" the most. I couldn't agree with the author that websites should comply with design conventions. Standardized design elements help visitors quickly find what they're looking for and finish what they need to do. For instance, I can easily check my shopping cart by looking at the top right corner of the screen. In contrast, I've been to a few websites where I couldn't figure out how to sign in or even register. Nielsen's study found that "users left websites after 1 minute and 49 seconds on average" because "the website didn't fulfill their needs." It didn't take me that long actually. Design standards bring about a lot of benefits to users. They don't have to waste time trying to understand the meaning of unknown design elements or get stuck when something doesn't work as they expected. Instead, they know "what features to expect and how to operate each feature to achieve their goal." "Writing for the Web" and "Designing Apple Help" are great resources for web designers. The big idea is that information should be presented in logical order and what's important should be highlighted.
Dwij Garg - Apr 22, 2009 02:21:44 am
1. The Need For Web Design Standards makes a good point that because of Jakob's law (users spend most of their time on other websites), designers should try and steer their websites to a more standard and universal format. This will help users with a better web experience, as when they visit your site, most will be looking for and be used to elements from the previous sites that they have visited. Because of this, I agree with the article that most websites should be standardized to a universal format.
2. Many designers do well at the graphics, interface, and visual aspects of their sites, but fail to convey the information on the website with clarity and precision. I think that the Writing for the Web-Design article gives a great outline of what to consider and pay attention to while writing for audiences that will visit your website. I especially think that the section on what the audiences need is particularly helpful. It asks the designer to take into account what the audience rather than he/she him/herself consider relevant, and also delve deeply into thinking about what the audience actually needs. With these two major points analyzed, a designer is successfully able to start on informational content on his/her website.
3. In my opinion, the Designing Apple Help article was somewhat useless. Although it had some useful information about setting design goals, those goals specified were completely specific to the mac OS in the example. Since this OS is pretty much extinct, so are the points made through its use as an example. For instance, most of the users today do not even use the in-built help functionality. Rather, most resort to the use of Google, various forums online, and customer service to resolve their problems.
Alexei Baboulevitch - Apr 22, 2009 02:38:30 am
The first article doesn't mention different cultural standards, which was discussed in an article we recently read. Because the internet is a global medium, it's especially difficult to design to one standard, since that standard would essentially have to be universal. Creating multiple sub-designs per site is possible, but messy.
CSS was invented because web designers were combining form and function, and the W3C felt that they should be kept separate. Almost every suggestion listed in the second article is directly implemented as an HTML tag, and "good" websites are supposed to be readable even without CSS. Sadly, with the arrival of Java and Flash, form and function are once again intertwined.
The third article makes the observation that even if a function is better than the competition (Apple Guide), it's not guaranteed to be the most successful. Standards and interoperability are often much more important.
Colin Downs-Razouk - Apr 22, 2009 02:16:19 am
I thought the readings were interesting. The first reading, about standardizing web designs, makes a good point. It is probably a good idea to standardize your website to act like other websites that people are using. I thought that Jakob's law was pretty interesting, and made a good point that users have very strong preconceived notions about how a website should work.
The second reading was interesting. I thought it was pretty ironic that the second reading talked about writing for the web, but the actual website that the reading was on was very poorly designed. The buttons at the top, for example, are all different shapes and styles. The first two look like crayons while the third is just a box with a circle in it. The fourth button is slightly higher than the others, and has a weird design on it. Also, in safari, if you mouse over the different buttons, it moves the text in the first paragraph. All in all, the website is very confusing. I also didn't really find their writing advice to be too helpful. I thought their "chunking" was a bit short. They had too many headers and bullets, but not enough explanation.
The third reading was useful. I actually really like the help functionality for Mac OS 10.5. It's obviously a good idea to standardize help functionality to be in html format. I personally like my help functionality to have lists. The perfect help menu (for me) is something like the auto-generated api pages for Java and stuff like that.
Kevin Nakahara - Apr 22, 2009 03:06:11 am
In the Need for Web Design Standards, I noticed that some of the problem areas in my group's project are parts of the aspects labeled under "confusion." For example, the sign in/account creation process has required numerous designs on our part, after our studies concluded that users got confused with signing in and creating an account. Seeing it under the confusion list made me laugh a little.
In the Writing for the Web article, I took note of how it said that information without an audience should not be put on the web. I think in today's Web 2.0 era, more and more people hope to express themselves online in creative (or non creative) ways, if they have an audience or not. I'm personally all for bloggers or artists without a listening audience to express themselves as much as they want, especially if it helps them foster creativity or blow off steam.
The design article on Apple's help was interesting because of how it showed the evolution of the help dialogue. I'd say most of the programs (even Microsoft) and applications out there today do stuff similar to what was described in the article. A very utilitarian, divided, and easy to search help seems to be the best way to go, since it helps foster efficiency (although, I had no problems with Mr. Paper Clip myself).
Matthew Can - Apr 22, 2009 03:04:10 am
The Nielsen reading made a good argument for why we need web design standards. When people browse the web, they're all over the place. It's hard for a user to form expectations for how things on a site work if each website has a different design. Did anyone notice that it was written in September 2004? That was almost 5 years ago. I'd say that there is still no design consensus for some of the things that he classified as confusing. Look at the placement of the search feature, for example. Facebook has it at the top right, Google in the middle, and Wikipedia on the left column.
I think it would have been helpful to assign "Writing for the Web" early in the semester. I noticed that I use many of these design principles when I format and edit write-ups for the class wiki. Bulleted lists are especially useful. They break up the text into manageable chunks and make good use of white space. Good use of headings significantly improves a design as well.
One thing I realized as I was reading the help article is that I hardly ever use that feature. I just turn to Google to help me solve my problem. Usually, it's not too hard to find someone else that has had the same problem I'm having. As design goal 4 says, help systems should take advantage of the internet, but not just by linking to other help documentation as the article states. Help systems should give the option to search the entire web for the solution to a problem. Something as simple as automatically searching an error code would be helpful.
Moonway Lin - Apr 22, 2009 03:46:43 am
Regarding the web standards, it is important to distinguish between business-oriented websites and personal websites, which people create in order to express themselves freely. However, even with business-oriented websites, the layouts are not as standardized as the first two articles may suggest. For example, a Google search on web templates yields many websites offering premade templates for free or at a price. This web template's design, which is styled like a (horizontal) accordion, is unique and interesting, and yet it is still easy enough to navigate. Not every single good website design has to use the logo in top left, sidebar/topbar layout that the article suggests. Sometimes, it may be better to be different, in order to leave a lasting impression.
Nalditya Kusuma - Apr 22, 2009 03:50:49 am
The "need for web design standard" reading suggests that the contents of web pages should have similar components to other big sites because people expect them behave the same way. Also that is because people on average spend 1 min 49 secs on a page that way you want to make them accessible.
The "writing for the web" suggests how you should write your web contents such as dividing data into different tables so that it is much easier to read and also use simple language so users can understand easily. Again, this is related to the first readings saying that on average people spend less than 2 minutes so you want to get across the information to the users as much as possible.
The last reading "designing apple help" is really interesting. Putting the help sign on the top right screen won't really help because usually that corner is used to show the icons of the programs that are running, and users won't recognize it there because they usually just ignore the icons there. Shifting it to the left side makes more sense coz it should be a part of the menu list so that users can find it easily.
Timofey Titov - Apr 22, 2009 03:59:45 am
Even though common interface is important it lets users form habits and expectations that can add to frustration when they are not met. The article doesn't explain what Conventions were based upon (Is there a logic to it?).
It seems like usability.gov is Task Centered design all over again. The most common reason why users go to a website is to retrieve information, although this is changing with the increase of webapps. The advice on information visualization agrees with our previous readings.
Personally, I always disliked the in-window help of Microsoft Word that resized half of the application! I think the best way is to provide tool-tips and being able to apply the "?" tool to every item. Unfortunately, current implementations lack coverage of all the possible functions.
William Cho - Apr 22, 2009 04:21:32 am
The first article seems to be geared more towards corporate websites selling their products and such. In that case, I can see how the site might be more appealing to visitors if it had a familiar, intuitive design. I understand the importance of general standardization in web design, but I feel it shouldn't be enforced strongly, but be more of a set of guidelines that web designers can refer to, since designing is generally subjective. Myself, I visit quite a few online forums, and while most of them are similar in design and usage, I remember being annoyed at having trouble finding certain user options in one or two different forums. The second website gives helpful info on how to present content, and it seems to do a good job of following its own advice. Like many of my fellow classmates, I often Google to find answers to my questions instead of reading the help menu.
Chang Su - Apr 22, 2009 05:04:12 am
I don't think it's ever a question whether web designers (and their web designs) should adhere to a standard. The web is an archive of information just like any other archives of information. If we don't expect to pick up a book to find all the letters inside printed from right to left, starting from the lower right corner, why should we not impose an equally high expectation on the web?
The question, then, is what that standard is, which is also a much harder question. The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services gave some suggestions that read like (uh huh, you guessed it) something from the government. Furthermore, it's hardly about web design, just... web writing. In that case, I fail to see how writing for the web is any different from writing for say, a newspaper. The "six keys to organizing logically within a page of content" apply equally well to your favorite subscription.
As for the design of Apple Help, the method described is indeed a scientific and meticulous one. But as programs today are getting increasingly complex, the questions of "how do I...?" can no longer be efficiently anticipated by programmers before or even after releasing the program. More and more software are therefore turning towards a "user-generated content" approach (the so-called Web 2.0). Users post questions on a centralised platform, answer questions from others, and rate the answers given by others. Assuming a critical mass of users, this achieves a much more thorough and personalized result than the traditional help documents.
Eric Hernandez - Apr 22, 2009 05:40:03 am
"The Need for Web Design Standards" gave some useful information. On our project team, we have tried rather hard to base our initial interfaces on existing designs, then add or modify as needed. I wish this article would elaborate more on what particular web components were used and how they were used however.
"Writing for the Web" gave useful but somewhat known information on how to keep users around, as well as to maximize their ability to find what they need in text. The use of tables and headings was probably the most important of the discussions. This paper seems like it can be summarized nicely by saying "assume your users have A.D.D." People, including myself, hate having to dig through a website for information, and will probably not even use such a difficult website if even a slightly better alternative exists.
For the Apple Help, I thought one of the best features was the "Do it for me" option that appeared in certain help screens. The only problem of course is that finding the appropriate help pages may be harder than actually performing the task itself. Writing minimally, excluding very basic tasks that the vast majority of users can perform is also a good idea that isn't done enough. It would be nice if a user could define themselves as advanced or intermediate level users, filtering out useless beginner search results. The one problem I saw however, was that the search results that are returned seem to more or less require that the user "guess" what terminology to use. If some of the techniques in current web search engines were used (I'm sure they are now or in other OSs) to attempt to interpret the meaning of the search query, the quality of help would dramatically improve. It's unfortunate that the insight given by this article is something we all sort of know already, since any decent OS in existence now uses these techniques. Still, it's good to see how these ideas came into existence.
Chao Michael Zhang - Apr 22, 2009 05:35:07 am
In "The Need for Web Design Standards", Jakob Nielson states that many websites do not fit into the bigger picture. However, he does not actually say what the "bigger picture" is, and why websites should have to fit into it. It's interesting that his findings showed that users spend about a minute to two minutes on any given website, suggesting that design IS definitely one of the biggest factors towards whether you will succeed in retaining users who come across your website. However, I'm not so sure that the solution is for the website to resemble every other website. I've seen a good number of websites where the user interface is novel and unique enough to draw me in for longer than I would have otherwise stayed. Likewise, many websites with standard user interface design don't succeed in drawing more than a glance from me.
I found the second article "Writing for the Web", much more useful, since it gives practical advice on how to make information design easier for users. This is simply how to organize information on a website, rather than a standard for how the user navigates the website and interacts with it. I think websites should spend more time on making their information easier to gather and understand, rather than focus on making navigation conform to standards.
David Burban - Apr 22, 2009 06:10:26 am
The first article refers to something called "breadcrumbs". What is it talking about in the web design context? Problem with creating standard web pages is that the web will be monotonous; I wouldn't want to visit websites that are essentially carbon copies of one another. The second article from usability.gov essentially gives heuristics for how to design web sites properly; by using tables, short descriptions, using lists, etc. its pretty obvious that unneeded content should not be included on the site as filler, as it will just bore users and cause them to leave. The other articles were pretty mundane, essentially encouraging us to copy designs that we think are successful and convey their information well to the users.
Alexander Cho - Apr 22, 2009 04:55:02 am
The articles brought up very agreeable points. The first article The Need for Web Design Standards explains how most of the most viewed website follow a simple pattern that we are all familiar with, like a search bar on the homepage, a logo on the top left, a shopping cart on the top right, etc. There is also a standard for logging in and out and setting up accounts. Also there are usually little links on the bottom, like help and information. Whenever a site deviates from this norms there is much confusion, and usually I just skip the website thinking that it was made by some amateur or targeted towards users unlike myself. I noticed this common pattern in web sites as I taught Senior citizens to use the computer and the internet. This helped make teaching much easier, but whenever a website that didnt follow these standards showed up, headaches ensued. I definitely see the value of having a standard for web design, but I wonder when people should break out of the norm for the sake of improvement, because we wouldnt want to limit ourselves to the strict standards we have today when we can improve. Perhaps a gradual change would be in order. The next article talking about good design also makes sense. Who really wants to read chunks of information not well organized and in full sentences. People commonly go to websites to find a short snippet of very specific information. Like the way I organized this comment, it is long and there are no new lines and by now only a few people read this far. The patterns presented were all agreeable. The final article about the help system was a nice snippet of information about the effectively of guided help features. Perhaps we will take this into consideration for our game tutorial design.
Siddharth Shah - Apr 22, 2009 08:46:55 am
My favorite line from the Web standards article is "Unfortunately, much of the Web is like an anthill built by ants on LSD." I think it's great any time we have to read from this website because even though it's focusing on UI, the pages are so damn UGLY. I also didn't really like the author's plug for his other article. I feel like the "Why Design Standards Help Users" section has already been solidly covered by this class, and a lot of the stuff they said in the other sections was either obvious or unimportant; I didn't really appreciate this reading at all, except for the fact that it was short.
My favorite line from the Web-Design article is "A one sentence paragraph may be fine," which is great because it exemplifies the heading that it is trying to explain, namely "Keep paragraphs short." Overall, this was a relatively quick read, and it was easy to grasp the gist of the article because they DID "Put in many headings" and follow many of the other design principles they advocate in the article.
My favorite line from the Apple Help article is "Discoverability was identified as the number one usability problem with the help system, because for many users, it was the only problem they ever encountered." This article was pretty straightforward. I really like the "do it for me" buttons that have (rightfully) become more prominent in modern help systems. I kind of dislike web-based help systems that are plain and boring; I don't mind the more sophisticated ones.
Anjana Dasu - Apr 22, 2009 09:37:24 am
The first article encourages standards compliance and implies that the best way is to make your website like other websites so that users know what to expect and how to fluidly navigate your site. The second article encourages website makers to be concise in their writing, providing many (visible) headings and logical charts and making proper use of space. This article made me think about how much I really appreciate the wiki for this class because whenever you go to a page you can just click on the table of contents to navigate where you want and you can just skim the headers to get a good feel for anything. The final article detailed the advantages of Mac OS's help menu, which as many people said before is a bit outdated considering now people just google what they need.
Sum Sum Wong - Apr 22, 2009 10:09:31 am
The author of "The Need for Web Design Standards" said that many websites do share certain "standard" characteristics in order to let users be able to get familiar with the interface in a short time. The author believed that website designers should follow the "standard" in their designing process. I do agree that some shared characteristics could make a website a bit more user-friendly but nowadays there are a lot of well-designed websites that do not follow those characteristics. Compare to the first article, I found the second reading more useful as it stated a lot of important rules to make the website neat and readable. Althought some of the rules are already known by many people, it is still very helpful to list them all out since we can make sure we would not violate any of them by accident. The last article is also quite interesting since it lead me into something that I did not notice before. The "write minimally" part is most impressive for me since as a user, I hate the unnecessarily long help messages as they might make me lost the interest to read, but as an interface designer, it is very easy to write down a long and boring help message incidentally.
Andrew Chen - Apr 22, 2009 09:48:21 am
I think the most important concepts I got from Writing for the Web and The Need for Web Design Standards are the ideas that "users spend most of their time on other websites," and "users are not here to read, they are here to find information." These concepts are quite new to me; they seem to lead to the conclusion that the best website would have a minimalist, standard-complying layout with little but highly-structured text. Although the point is convincing, I am wondering whether conforming to standard would limit the ability of websites to grab and keep the attention of users or to stand out in the users' minds. With a standard-complying layout, it would seem that the only creative space left to the designer is graphic and content design.
In the Apple Help reading, at first I thought Apple Guide would be a nice improvement to the current type of help most commonly seen, which comes in window form. I was surprised that Apple reverted to the centralized window form, although it does make sense considering the issue with expert users wanting fast access to information. However, I wonder if it's possible to incorporate the "coachmark" and steps concept with the window view of help, since the window view now blocks a larger part of the screen when the user it trying to follow its instructions. The coachmark also increases the dynamic relationship between the help window and the actual application.
Denise Ngai - Apr 22, 2009 10:36:54 am
I enjoyed reading "The Need for Web Design Standards." As an avid internet surfer and a web designer, myself, I found this article helpful and truthful.
For example, the following:
Standards ensure that users
* know what features to expect, * know how these features will look in the interface, * know where to find these features on the site and on the page, * know how to operate each feature to achieve their goal, * don't have to ponder the meaning of unknown design elements, * don't miss important features because they overlook a non-standard design element, and * don't get nasty surprises when something doesn't work as expected.
The above standards are very important and should definitely be considered when designing for the web. There have been numerous occasions when I visited a website that looked pretty, but I had no clue what to do on the page itself. I had no idea where the menu was or basically what the functionality of certain "pretty" things was on the site.
A web designer must not only think about the look and feel of the design, but s/he must also consider whether the design is functional and whether users will be able to figure out how to find features and operate them on their own with a good amount of ease.
I found the following interesting:
Standard: 37% of design elements were done the same way by at least four-fifths of the sites. Standard design elements included:
* A logo in the upper left corner of the page * A search box on the homepage * An absence of splash pages * Breadcrumbs listed horizontally (when they were used)
From my personal experience, I thought web design standards would yield a higher percentage because it seems like a lot of sites follow a basic design layout. However, from this article, it shows otherwise. I have noticed the absence of splash pages being dominant over those sites with splash pages though. I do recall a period of time years ago when splash pages were popular, but web designers seem to be getting rid of that idea nowadays.
Adit Dalvi - Apr 22, 2009 10:35:50 am
I thought the need for web design standards was a pretty good article to read, especially due to the large number of websites that people visit on a day-to-day basis. I think it’s important to have some sort of standard for websites to make all of them easily navigable for users, especially since most of websites link to others and users follow these links often as well. It would definitely serve to improve efficiency by a lot. Also, using previous websites to help you design your own is not only a good idea because it helps maintain standards, but also gives you a good starting point to develop your own website (at least that’s what I thought when designing my own). Of course, too much standardization will take away from the creativity expressed in website design, so it should be balanced up to a certain limit.
Szu-Chun Mao - Apr 22, 2009 10:36:07 am
As a web designer myself, I found the reading of The Need for Web Design Standards quite helpful. Most of the standardized design elements mentioned in the articles are very common and I agreed that these little things make the website much easier for the users to use. Users get a sense of what to features expect on the website and know what the mostly likely place those features would be. So they feel comfortable using the website without taking to much time to get use to. The reading about intranet standards is particular helpful to me because I have no experience designing an intranet site. The different between an intranet and Internet is that the intranet has a single authority in charge which allowing web developer to focus on internal target users. Usability.gov provides some good tips in writing for the web-design. I like how it tells you to “chunk” the text and making text more manageable. It’s nice to know a little bit of history about the Apple’s design in the Designing Apple Help too.
Bernardo de Seabra - Apr 22, 2009 10:59:23 am
In the article "The Need for Web Design Standards" the authors state that there exist design standards for website but more standards needs to be created in order to make users be more comfortable and familiar navigating websites. Also, I wonder how outdated the site is since it was written in 2004. There has been a huge shift toward more local application look and feel for websites. The article "Writing for the Web" focus on the content presentation for websites. The interesting portion of the article is the fact that it underlines the different style needed when writing web content. It cannot follow the traditional essay writing style. Also, since users often visit websites to look for information it's important that we make that information accessible as easy as possible so the user can find it quickly. The last article, titled "Designing Apple Help" provided us with information on how to design a help menu. I feel that it would be more useful to have a more generic document on designing help menus that wouldn't focus on the macintosh. Nonetheless, there were a few important points mentioned such as incorporating or making use of the internet and the text being searchable.
Sean Ahrens - Apr 22, 2009 11:02:34 am
I found these articles interesting. I think their point that the web needs greater standardization to be easier to use is an interesting one. An interesting complexity here though is that many webmasters DON'T want their sites to be "standardized". Many webmasters want their sites to be unique to really give them the freedom and control to immerse their users in a specific experience. Take individual movie promotion websites for one, like "enterthematrix.com". This site specifically seeks to appear very much like it is not a website at all, but instead another facet of the movie.
I liked the "Writing for the Web" article very much. It basically says, don't write an essay on the web. Write like you are giving clear instructions. Use bullets, indentations, etc. to highlight the information of importance, and to give users a clear view of what you want to tell them.
The "Designing Apple Help" article was also a good read. After finding problems with their help icon, they set out on the task to improve it, and did an excellent job in the process. In fact, I am a huge fan of the curret iteration of this improvement. In individual programs, for example, the help menu has a built-in search field. This search field searches through the menu options available within the program, and highlights the appropriate one. This is seriously a huge help -- gets you to the action you want, and teaches you how to do it in the future.
Aaron Hong - Apr 22, 2009 11:53:07 am
This is not a bad reading. The only thing though, is that when I do these readings, and since these readings are on the web, I see if they apply their own design principles they talk about. The government website does that very well, they used bullet points, kept sentences short (sometimes too short in my opinion), used tables, and lots and lots of headings. That website read pretty quickly and pretty clearly. I actually had a bit more trouble reading Jakob Nielsen's site. Although it was mostly straight forward, when it came to his usage of the percentages, it was a bit confusing, especially how there were the same 3 items in one section with percentages describing one thing and the same 3 items with percentages describing a different thing. A graph here would probably have helped, especially since the second one did total up to 100%. Other than that, I do agree with him that we should design websites like other websites, and not make people learn some esoteric design.
As for the Apple help, there was some good insights there. The minimalistic approach, avoiding spoon feeding (I know I don't like to be spoon feed, since I hardly ever follow every step of the help), and phrasing things as questions. This was the Apple help for Mac OS 8, I wonder what they have learned and how much it has changed since then.
Prahalika Reddy - Apr 22, 2009 04:15:46 pm
These readings were interesting. I agree with the first article, "The Need for Web Design Standards", there need to be standards that all websites follow. However, it's not likely that people ever will follow all the rules if they were set. It also stifles creativity for people who are trying to personalize their own sites.
I'm not sure if I agree with the second article for websites. Many websites are for entertainment than for information, and trying to order the information in a particular order may not be applicable to many websites. For the ones whose purpose it is to inform, it would be nice if they followed the standards of presenting information, but again, I don't think people will follow it because everyone has different ideas of what they think is the best way.
I found this article quite interesting. The design concepts explained weren't specific to that particular article nor for that time period.
