Workshop on Usability and the Web
National Institute of Standards and Technology
4 - 5 November, 2002
Report Submitted To W3C
by Steven Pemberton
(Just as a background reminder: Forrester Research did research, with more
than 8000 subjects, in what makes people prefer one website rather than
another that purports to do the same thing; why do you return to Amazon
rather than Barnesandnoble, or vice versa? There were only 4 properties of
importance, that scored higher than 50%. In order: Good content, usability,
fast download, frequency of updating; property number 5 scored 14%).
About 40 people turned up for the Usability Workshop at NIST in
Gaithersburg, near Washington DC.
http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/uig_w3c/
It was a propitious time and place: 20 years ago in 1982 what is recognised
as the first HCI conference, that caused the creation of the CHI conference
series, happened at NIST.
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/bulletin/1996.1/conf-chairs.html#HDR0
Of the 40 people who turned up, many were non-W3C members, which I think is
a good sign (see below). There were 6 W3C members, and 5 W3C team members:
Karl (QA), Marja (WAI), Matt (WAI), Richard (I18N), Steven.
The companies represented were:
www.sun.com *
www.nist.gov *
www.user-centereddesign.com
www.cna.com
www.ssa.gov
www.lockheedmartin.com
www.spottedstone.com
www.britishairways.com
www.humancentrictech.com
www.sas.com
www.userworks.com
www.bmc.com
www.u.washington.edu
www.cs.umbc.edu
www.nih.gov
www.cognetics.com
www.oncenterconsulting.com
www.gene.com
www.paciellogroup.com
www.stanford.edu *
www.fidelity.com *
www.oracle.com *
www.iao.fhg.de *
www.mindswap.org *
(*=member; the person from Fraunhofer (fhg) didn't turn up because of
illness; I added the www in case your email agent recognises them
automatically as links).
The first day was to set the scene and was taken up with talks from people
selected based on their position papers, or just invited. There were talks
on:
-
Usability effect of technologies
http://www.w3.org/2002/Talks/1104-usability-workshop/
-
Usability of documentation
-
Case study with Semantic Web specs
-
QA and Usability
http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/09/Quality-Usability-Workshop.html
-
Usability enhancements in the W3C Process
http://www.w3.org/2002/Talks/0104-usabilityprocess/
-
Guidelines
-
The W3C Site and Specs
(Other talks' slides, as will as minutes, will be available shortly I'm
told)
The morning of the second day was taken up with discussions on what a
Usability Group
should do, and what should therefore go in the charter.
What was notable was the enthusiasm amongst the attendees for W3C. These
people, despite being non-members, want to do an analysis of the W3C
website, and find ways to improve it. There is even an offer (from member
company Fidelity) to run usability tests on it. They were also brainstorming
on ways to make Usability bring more members to W3C.
We decided that there were 3 areas a Usability Group should focus on:
- review of W3C technology for usability
- guidelines for web usability
- review of W3C site and specs for usability
Before the workshop I was personally not in favour of doing work on
guidelines, since they are being done in several other places. Two arguments
persuaded me otherwise:
- None of the existing sets carry any real authority and are often
contradictory; experience with how the WAI guidelines went shows that the
widespread community review that W3C specs get would ensure that consensus
would be reached for a good and authoritative set; there is also a good set
being offered to use as a basis (in the same way as Trace did for WAI)
- Several people present said "I wouldn't be able to persuade my
company to join W3C right now; if W3C did work on guidelines they wouldn't
be able to resist: they would want to be involved".
There was a lot of discussion on whether there should be a WG or just an IG.
The feeling was that guidelines could not be done by an IG alone. We agreed
to start with an IG, to 'warm up' companies to the idea of participating,
and build a presence in W3C, with the aim of producing as one of the
deliverables a plan and a charter for a WG.
The afternoon of the second day was spent collaboratively writing the
charter for an IG which will now first be reviewed by the group by email
(via a list to be created on W3) and then submitted for consideration by W3.
Workshop Home Page
Last updated: 12/06/2002, W3C Communications Team <w3t-pr@w3.org>, and Paul Hsiao, NIST.
