The Usability of Online Content
Content carries many usability issues, argues Pete Benedict
29 August 2001, 1 pm GMT
Usability specialists need to learn more about content, something rather vital that ‘the field has traditionally ignored’, was a point recently being discussed in ‘usability’ circles.
“I still remember Jared's first UIE report on the web (in 95-96?) where he discovered the web had this thing called content that he'd never seen in software development, and no one knew how to design it properly....
No one except writers, designers, film makers, who might just have a little experience in this area” commented recently George Olsen, a usability professional.
Traditional content producers (writers, graphic designers, filmmakers, etc.) can bring to the table some useful skills when it comes to usability.
The chief skill, which can be lacking in someone from a hardcore IT background, is the ability to empathize with your reader, listener or viewer, to put yourself in their shoes and think clearly about what their informational needs are.
For journalists who take their jobs seriously, haven't become jaded hacks and still believe in the service they are offering to the community, this kind of thinking becomes second nature.
Because if it isn't, you can take a lot of heat from your readers.
Diplomacy of content strategy
In this respect it's diplomacy of content strategy, if you will. It's not a science. It involves other intangible qualities like an eye for clarity and sense of fairness for example.
Without having much of a background in usability, I approach things from a practical standpoint. The reason I got involved in information architecture was that for many years I had been thinking about how best to convey information as a newspaper reporter, editor and graphic designer -- for example, how to make it accessible (you know, put the essence of the story in a "short and sweet" lead paragraph or two), timely,
fair, comprehensive, accurate - and it seemed to me that usability and IA were a
natural extension of those skills, but with a new dash of functionality and process not found in the static world of print, which is exciting.
While it was a good experience to have to think more about functional
requirements, flowcharts and the like, it seemed from my short life as an IA engineer that our work was heavily process-oriented (though e-commerce projects, I realize, are by nature more process-oriented).
We barely touched on aspects of IA that I thought I could contribute more to, such as labeling (e.g. links, sections of a website), organization of textual content.
Complementary Skillset
The skills of traditional content producers like writers, can be complemented by process-oriented thinkers in usability, software, engineering.
Content is creating something beautiful
The way I look at it is we're all striving to create something that's both intelligent and beautiful. And it takes a lot of different sets of skills to
do this.
I sometimes think of it like designing a human being -- a brilliant, compassionate, attractive person. You would need to know poetry and
spirituality as well as biochemistry and genetics, to name but a few fields.
www.benedictdesign.com
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