Case Study - Building a Usable Site

User Research -- Who Are They?

Long before I felt ready for 'public' viewing, people began to find my Website. As a starting point, I'd converted my bird care and information sheets to HTML and posted them. It wasn't long before I began to get emails asking for more information—this was great, but did I know anything about that? Often I did, and if so, I'd put up a Web page about it.

Soon I had such an influx of email that I had difficulty answering it all, so I used a free bulletin board service offered by a now-defunct Internet company. This way visitors could browse answers to others' bird questions, and post their own. By answering their questions on the message board, I gave more people access to the information I was sharing, and saved me time, so everyone was pleased.

Without realizing it, I had made the best possible choice; I had made it easy for people to talk to each other as well as me. More importantly, I had made it clear that I wanted to know what they thought, and hear about they wanted to see. I named my new service the Birds Board, little realizing that it would grow to be one of the most popular small bird discussion forums online.

It was about that time that I decided to begin using the free 'Site Meter' service to count visitors ( www.sitemeter.com ). I chose this service mainly because of the quality of the statistical reports, which focused on unique visitors and page views, rather than 'hits'. I found it particularly interesting to note that the percentage of visitors to my Website using WebTV was, on average, roughly three times higher than the reported norm for most Websites.

That led me to begin to post simple surveys. This is an always-useful means to gather information, but with online surveys, it's important to remember that unless you offer your visitors some incentive to take your survey (eg. a chance to win a prize), you'll only receive responses from those who care enough to respond (so they can't really be taken to reflect the attitudes of your visitors on the whole). Still, even these kinds of surveys can provide some very useful data.

I found to my great interest that a full half of my visitors were middle-aged or more, and that most had several birds, with over 20% of respondents having thirty birds or more. The biggest surprise was finding that a whopping 98% preferred to find relevant advertising when they visited a bird-oriented Website -- a fact which may have had something to do with the fact that they also reported spending an average of $20 -- $40 a month on food and supplies for their birds.

Compatibility and Display -- How Does it Look?

Some of the comments posted on my new bulletin board made me realize that my site looked quite different to people using other set-ups than mine, and I began to do some research into how different browsers and operating systems would display my Web pages. Eventually I found that it was possible to design each Web page so it would display reasonably similarly, no matter what it was viewed with.

Once I knew what I needed to do, I could settle down and, so to speak, get my hands dirty. First, I went through the entire site and tried to see that each page displayed properly, no matter what it was viewed on. To do this I:

• tested all my pages at various resolutions, from 640 x 480, to 1024 x 728, and everything in between. Big surprises here! I highly recommend that all Webmasters maintain an up-close and personal familiarity with how their sites display under different conditions. Content may be king—but without Display, it's nowhere.
• checked the view in Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Opera at each resolution with graphics on, and graphics off, and then checked using the free WebTV simulator available from www.webtv.com
• began to pester my friends who use Macs (as I have a PC but not a Mac), being sure that they knew that I wanted honesty, and not politeness. I even found a few people with Web access on their handhelds, and bugged them to visit my site, and tell me what they could (and could not) see and access.

Once that was all over, it was back to the drawing board, repeating the reviews as necessary. This process is on-going, so don't ever expect it to end. You may find plateaus along the way, but at the rate the Web grows and changes, you can expect to find lots to learn for some time yet.

The new bulletin board also proved useful in another way I hadn't expected — I could ask people how they found the site to use, and what kinds of improvements it needed. This is an important feature lacking in many Websites, and often deliberately — it can be a lot of work to answer comments and implement suggestions! Still, it needs to be done, as without ongoing feedback, eventually you'll be dead in the water.

Gradually, I began to assemble a clear picture of how to go about producing the results I wanted so that everybody could access my Website.