Usability Day focuses on user-friendliness

By Campbell Massie

Published Nov. 9, 2007

Cities worldwide, including Columbia, participated Wednesday in World Usability Day and celebrated the idea of making things more efficient and user-friendly.

The MU Information Experience Laboratory, which focuses on Web site usability, held sessions, which were led by MU doctorate students, on making Web sites more usable for clients or possible consumers. The students also offered a tour of the facilities.

This is the second year World Usability Day has been celebrated at MU.

MU's event focused on making Web sites more efficient and easy to use, but usability refers to anything that could be made more user-friendly, varying from Web sites to coffee pots, IE Lab Director Sanda Erdelez said.

"The task is to promote the usability of things and processes," Erdelez said.

This year focused on three key methods of usability in Web sites that would ensure user-friendliness. The methods included expert review, which focuses on how experts interpret the Web site; time and task, which looks at how long it takes sample users to accomplish a task; as well as focus groups that react to the site, Erdelez said.

The IE lab is finalizing plans with the Division of Information Technology to look over Web sites, such as myZou, that affect MU students, faculty and staff, Erdelez said. The groups will analyze these Web sites for key aspects to improve usability, but there is much to be done, she said.

"MyZou is a very complex application," she said.

Many people who attended the event were former and current clients who maintained an interest in usability after working with the IE lab. Nearly half of the 30 attendees at the first portion were graduate students from the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, which houses the IE laboratory, Erdelez said.

"Our audience was primarily from within MU Web development community," Research and Development Manager Gary Westergren said. "That is people's whose job it is to create Web sites for MU, but also outside people who are interested in usability."

The IE Lab was founded in January 2003 to conduct research on usability methods and to teach in those areas. Erdelez said usability in Web design is a growing field that is helping to position students for good jobs within companies improving Web sites.

She said the lab gives students the opportunity to learn skills and practice them in a practical environment as they work on real projects.

Westergren said the IE lab works primarily for departments, research projects and some outside clients. The lab is also reaching out to international partners such as laboratories in Thailand and Taiwan, he said.

The IE lab has agreed to make recommendations on most large Web sites on campus that reach MU students, faculty and staff and will focus on key elements that would need to be changed to increase efficiency, Westergren said.

"Usability is a process by which Web sites or Web applications like myZou or the library's book catalog is evaluated to help ensure that a Web site or application is as user-friendly as possible," Westergren said.

The conferences raise awareness among Web designers to be conscientious of good designs that will benefit users, IE lab employee Neeley Current said.

"A Web site is not just about looking pretty on the page," Current said. "It is about being functional and being able to find what you are looking for."