Case Study - Building a Usable Site

A Website can be both attractive and easy to use. Usability and good looks aren't mutually exclusive and one doesn't necessarily have to negate the other.

When I first came into the online world, I knew nothing of technology, design, or usability. But as my site evolved, I realized that my users had particular characteristics -- if I wanted to keep them, and attract more visitors, I'd have to make my site work for this audience!

Now, over 5 years later, I have a successful site and a loyal member base that's growing all the time. How did it happen? Good question. Here's the story of my success -- and the steps I took to make my site attractive and usable to the largest possible number of users from my target audience.

From Small Beginnings...

I was never a technocrat, that's for sure. I was 35 before I even owned a computer, in the early 90's. It was second-hand, from a university professor—a venerable old 286 that had been new in 1986 and had a whopping 40 megs of memory. It did just fine running the word-processing program I'd bought it for.

Along with my day job, I bred and raised canaries, and also did some rehab work with abused or unwanted birds of various species. This became my passion. I assembled, edited and published the local canary club's bulletin, and wrote stories and articles for other clubs, and occasionally for a popular pet bird magazine.

Quite a lot of my spare time was spent teaching new bird owners how to care for their pets; in an attempt to cut down on this time, I wrote a series of basic care and information sheets, that became quite popular among the local clubs and pet stores. Every once in a while I would turn on the computer and write out another info-sheet, or note down a story I couldn't get out of my mind.

That was the complete extent of my technical know-how.

Enter: The Internet

As 1994 wended its way into 1995, every now and then someone would mention the rapidly growing phenomenon of the Internet to me. Several times I'd been told that I would love the inherent potential for communication, but I pooh-poohed the notion. Me? Why, my ancient little 'puter couldn't even run a modem properly!

Then I was given free time at an Internet Cafe as a Christmas present. At first I was positive I'd never be able to use up the entire two hours, but I came away utterly flabbergasted. Even though I'd not been able to find any sites on my favourite topic -- canaries -- I was hooked. I had no idea how, but I knew I was going to get online as soon as I could manage it. And if I couldn't find a good canary site, then I was going to learn to build one!

Getting Online

By May 1996 I had a new, almost top-of-the-line 266 Pentium II computer. It was so completely different from my old 286 that it took me almost 6 months to get comfortable enough using it to feel ready to venture online.

I found a world vastly different from the one I had experienced during my original two-hour foray. Many Websites I wanted to visit were difficult to read, or difficult to navigate, or both, especially to a 'newbie' such as myself. As my frustration levels grew, I promised myself that my site would be different, so I began to take note of common elements of the few sites I found that were both attractive and easy to use.

This time there were some canary sites to be found, but none fit my ideas of what a great small-bird Website should be. All those years spent (literally) cutting-and-pasting print content to make photo-ready copy for newsletters and club bulletins had given me enough background in page layout to see what many Website masters so obviously did not: that there's a pattern to the way the eye picks up information when scanning the field of vision.

The exact pattern used by each individual varies depending on that person's personality, culture, and even their emotional state, but population-wide averages are generally predictable, and page layouts and the colours used should be designed to aid and enhance these movements, not frustrate them (try running a search on the phrase "how eyes scan pages" at your favourite search engine for more on this).

I soon found the 'build your own free Website' sites, but rejected Geocities as having too-long, difficult-to-remember urls, and eventually settled at iVillage, where I spent as much of my time as I could over the next two years learning basic HTML and 'playing' with Web pages.