# Presentation: 744034

## Random Thoughts on Web Usability and the W3C:A View from a Practioner’s Perspective

- Thomas S. Tullis, Ph.D.
- Senior Vice President,
- Human Interface Design
- Fidelity Investments
- tom.tullis@fidelity.com

- W3C/NIST Workshop on Web Usability
- November 4, 2002

## Outline

- Very quick background on Fidelity and our web usability work.
- Overview of four areas I think a W3C Usability Working Group could play a significant role:
- Usability of the W3C site itself
- Usability of the W3C guidelines documents
- Possible Usability Guideline document
- Helping set a Practical Usability Research Agenda

## Fidelity Investments

- The largest mutual fund company in the U.S. and one of the world’s largest providers of financial services.  Managed assets of $732.4 billion.
- Fidelity offers investment management, retirement planning, brokerage, human resources and benefits outsourcing services to 18 million individuals and institutions.
- Some stats as of September 2002:
- 4.572 million online accounts
- $266 billion assets held in online accounts
- 70,955 online trades (buy or sell) daily, on the average

## Fidelity on the Web

- Some of our web sites and applications:

- Active Trader ProSM

- And hundreds of internal apps and web sites

## Usability at Fidelity

- Fidelity’s senior management recognized the importance of usability over 9 years ago and funded the creation of:
- The Human Interface Design (HID) department
- A part of the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology.
- Fidelity’s Usability Lab
- Now in its third incarnation
- In downtown Boston
- Includes two permanent Labs and one portable

## Fidelity’s Usability Lab

## Our Web Usability Testing

- Conducted over 150 usability tests of Web sites or applications in the past 3 years.
- Typical usability test:
- About 6-8 representative users are brought in to the Lab, individually.
- They perform a set of realistic tasks using the site.
- We monitor where they get confused, make mistakes, etc, as well as task time and success.

## Usability of the W3C Site

- Maybe it’s just me, but whenever I go to the W3C site, I have a very hard time finding what I’m looking for.
- Even when I know it’s there!
- What about people who aren’t sure if something is there?
- Try doing a search on “usability” on the _[W3C site](http://www.w3c.org/)_!

## Usability of the W3C Site

- Possible actions that a W3C Usability Working Group could facilitate:
- Do some user analyses– What are people who come to the W3C site looking for?
- Has a serious information architecture study been done for the site?
- Conduct a card-sorting study
- Do some usability testing– Perhaps start with some baseline testing.
- Study Search logs to see what people are looking for.
- And “hand-tune” search results to make the pages most appropriate for a search come to the top.

## Usability of the W3C Documents

- The first screen-full when you see a document:

- Is this the most important information, from the user’s perspective?

## Usability of the W3C Documents

- Most of the W3C documents themselves follow a relatively standard format.
- Has anyone ever done any user testing to verify if it’s a good format/approach?
- Need standard techniques for presentation/navigation (e.g., TOC, glossary, related documents, etc).
- It’s relatively easy to generate nicely formatted PDFs from HTML; what if users want that?
- There’s probably a reason that people like the Nielsen Norman Group sell PDFs of their reports rather than providing HTML versions.

## A Usability Guidelines Document?

- There are quite a few Web usability guidelines, style guides, etc, out there already, e.g.:
- _[NCI’s Research-based Guidelines](http://www.usability.gov/guidelines/index.html)_
- _[IBM’s Ease of Use Guidelines](http://www-3.ibm.com/ibm/easy/eou_ext.nsf/Publish/572)_
- _[Yale’s Web Style Guide](http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/contents.html)_
- And the various books
- What could the W3C add in this arena?
- A voice of authority and reason
- Capitalize on the NCI effort
- Empirically-based, not just someone’s opinion
- Tie-in with HTML implementation issues
- Information on how to measure Web usability?

## Web Usability Research Agenda

- The W3C could be a driving force behind developing a *practical* Web usability research agenda.
- There are huge numbers of Web usability issues that we just don’t know the answers to *today*, e.g.:
- Are frames evil or not?  In what cases?
- What approaches to navigation work best in what situations?
- And a host of others

## Web Usability Research Agenda

- An example of some great *practical* Web usability research:
- _[Wichita State’s Software Usability Research Lab](http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/)_
- And some industry groups (like mine) are doing practical Web usability research.
- But we need more.
- Perhaps a research agenda would help encourage others.
- Maybe include pointers to ongoing research in various areas?

## Questions/Comments?