Best Practices in Web Evaluation

Mark A. Greenfield

Mark Greenfield

Higher ed web professional, consultant, keynote speaker, futurist, uwebd overlord,

lacrosse coach, tennis player, music lover, dog rescuer, volleyball dad

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The Entire Site Matters

Operations

Evaluation

Strategy

the .edu lifecycle

Why do you have a website?

1. Too busy

2. Consensus on what makes a good website

Challenges

Time Management Matrix

I

No

t Im

po

rta

nt

Im

po

rtan

t

Urgent Not Urgent

II

III IV

• Crisis• Pressing problems• Deadline-driven projects,

meetings, preparations

• Preparation• Prevention• Planning• Values clarification• Relationship building

• Needless interruptions• Unnecessary reports• Unimportant phone calls,

meetings, mail• Many popular activities

• Trivia, busywork• Time wasters• Some phone calls, mail• “Escape activities”

Time Management Matrix

I

No

t Im

po

rta

nt

Im

po

rtan

t II

III IV

25 - 30% 15%

50 - 60% 2 - 3%

Urgent Not Urgent

Time Management Matrix

I

No

t Im

po

rta

nt

Im

po

rtan

t II

III IV

20 - 25%

25 – 30%

65 - 80%

15%

15%

50 – 60%

Less than 1%

2 – 3%

Urgent Not Urgent

What makes a good website?

HiPPO

HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion

what a site looks like

is NOT the only thing that matters

What makes a good website?

The lens through which you view the world

Paradigms

Know what you don’t know

What makes a good website?

What do students think?

Form over Function

Simple and easy:73% juniors77% seniors

Cool design/features:27% juniors23% seniors

Facts vs. Feelings

Facts, dates and details:

80% juniors84% seniors

Get a feeling for the school:20% juniors16% seniors

Photos or Words?

Words are most important:

72% juniors76% seniors

Photos and videos:28% juniors24% seniors

Evaluation Methodologies

How many of you evaluate your website based on

Analytics

Web Analytics

• Know your KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators)

• Analytics should be an ongoing process

• Focus on trends

• Be wary of the macro view

When is a redesign that results in a decrease of 500,000

page views a good thing?

How many of you evaluate your website based on

The User Experience

“Most senior administrators understand usabilty about as well as they understand the average air speed velocity of an unladen swallow.”

- John Rhodes

We need more people with UX expertise

UCD Methodologies

Affinity Diagrams Benchmarking BrainstormingCard Sorting Cognitive Walkthrough Contextual InquiryExpert Evaluation Eye Tracking Field Study Five Second Tests Focus Group Functionality MatrixHeat Maps Heuristic Evaluation InterviewJourney Maps Mental Models PersonasSurveys Task Analysis Usability Tests

UCD Methodologies

Affinity Diagrams Benchmarking BrainstormingCard Sorting Cognitive Walkthrough Contextual InquiryExpert Evaluation Eye Tracking Field Study Five Second Tests Focus Group Functionality MatrixHeat Maps Heuristic Evaluation InterviewJourney Maps Mental Models Personas Surveys Task Analysis Usability Tests

Usability Tests

Wisdom from Steve Krug

• Testing one user is 100% better than testing none

• The best kept secret of usability testing is that it doesn’t matter much who you test (recruit loosely and grade on a curve)

• Think about the implications of “domain knowledge”

• Focus on scenarios, not tasks

analytics can tell you what people are doingbut not why

Focus Groups / Usability Tests / Surveys

• Focus groups are good for understanding attitudes and perceptions

• Focus groups are not a good way to get usability information.

• Focus groups are numerically impossible to generalize to a larger population so they can’t replace surveys.

• What people say they do and what they actually do are often very, very different

Heuristic Evaluation

A usability evaluation method in which an expert performs a systematic inspection of a web site based on a set of design principles (commonly referred to as heuristics)

Task Flow Analysis

Task flow analysis critiques what a user is required to do in terms of actions and/or cognitive processes to complete a task on a web site.

Taskonomy instead of Taxonomy

How many of you evaluate your website based on

Speed

The Need for Speed

#marks911

Response Times

0.1 second The limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously.

1 second The limit for the user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay.

10 seconds The limit for keeping the user's attention.

People will visit a Web site less often if it is slower than

a close competitor by more than 250 milliseconds

(a millisecond is a thousandth of a second)

www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/technology/impatient-web-users-flee-slow-loading-sites.html

delicious.com/markgr/speed

How many of you evaluate your website based on

The Quality of the Code

How many of you evaluate your website based on

Credibility

How many of you evaluate your website based on

Security

How many of you evaluate your website based on

Uptime

How many of you evaluate your website on

A variety of devices and platforms

How many of you evaluate your website on

Accessibility

mark greenfieldmakayla greenfield

What 3rd Graders Can Teach Us About Web Accessibility

We are all temporarily-abled

- Rachael Scdoris

How many of you evaluate your website based on

The efficiency of your web operations

Operations

Evaluation

Strategy

the .edu lifecycle

Concluding Thoughts

Measure both the product and the process

How good is good enough?

All evaluation efforts must be actionable

Evaluation should be iterative and ongoing

Thank You

mark a greenfield

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