UNIVERSAL USABILITY IN PRACTICE

Introduction Recommendations Guidelines Websites  Conclusions  Resources
Conclusions

      

        Usability has multiple components of which learnability, and efficiency are two most fundamental usability attributes. [9] Usability research has focused on different component in different time of the history. Now it is time to combine the previous efforts and design the interface to be both easily learnable and highly efficient. It is time to accommodate both novice and expert users in one interface.

Designing accessible web sites for each user stage is a complex and highly creative process that blends intuition, experience, and careful consideration of numerous technical issues. [1] As long as the Internet keeps doubling every year, there will always be half of the users who have less than a year's experience. [10] So, helping novices in web site design should be a main task to be dealt with. As a web designer, the most important thing to keep in mind is that never assume that your own personal characteristics are common to your users. [4] Involving novice users into design process and evaluation of the web site might be a key to success. Extensive testing and iterative refinements are necessary parts of web design and as well as every development project. Design principles and guidelines are emerging from practical experience and empirical studies. Practitioners should collect experience and develop better guidelines and set standards so that web site developers can achieve accessibility of their web sites more easily.

      

Tzu-Ting Chen
Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742 USA
jacktar@cs.umd.edu
April 2001
Previous | Top | Next