Heavy Content Web Sites: Users and Tasks

modified from http://ijhcs.open.ac.uk/shneiderman/shneiderman-nf.html

As in any user interface design process, we begin by asking: Who are the users? and What are the tasks?

Specific knowledge of science, history, medicine, or other disciplines will influence design. A website for physicians treating lung cancer will differ in content, terminology, writing style, and depth from a website for patients. Communities of users might be museum visitors, students, teachers, researchers, journalists, or professionals. Their motives may range from fact-finding to browsing, professional to casual, or serious to playful.

Knowledge of computers or websites can also influence design, but more important is the distinction between first-time, intermittent and frequent users of a website. First-time users need an overview to understand the range of services and to know what is not available, plus buttons to select actions. Intermittent users need an orderly structure, familiar landmarks, reversibility, and safety during exploration. Frequent users demand shortcuts or macros to speed repeated tasks, compact in-depth information, and extensive services to satisfy their varied needs (Kellogg and Richards, 1995).

Since many applications focus on educational services, appropriate designs should accommodate teachers and students from elementary through university levels. Adult learners and elderly explorers may also get special services or treatments.

Evidence from a survey of 13,000 Web users conducted by Georgia Tech (Pitkow and Kehoe, 1996) shows that the average age of respondents is 35, the median income is above $50,000, and 80% are male. A remarkable 72% are daily users, and are likely to have a professional connection to computing or education. These profiles have shifted from previous surveys and will probably continue moving towards a closer match with the population at large. Of course, the survey was voluntary and drew upon the Web community, so the sample is biased, but still thought provoking.

Identifying the users' tasks also guides designers in shaping a website. Tasks can range from specific fact-finding to more unstructured open-ended browsing of known databases and exploration of the availability of information on a topic:

Specific fact-finding (Known item search)

Find the Library of Congress call number of Future Shock

Find the phone number of Bill Clinton

Find the highest resolution LANDSAT image of College Park at noon on Dec. 13, 1997

Extended fact-finding

What other books are by the author of Jurassic Park?

What kinds of music is Sony publishing?

Which satellites took images of the Persian Gulf War?

Open-ended browsing

Does the Mathew Brady Civil War photo collection show the role of women?

Is there new work on voice recognition in Japan?

Is there a relationship between carbon monoxide levels and desertification?

Exploration of availability

What genealogy information is at the National Archives?

What information is there on the Grateful Dead band members?

Can NASA datasets show acid rain damage to soy crops?

The great gift of the Web is its support for all these possibilities. Specific fact finding is the more traditional application of computerized databases with query languages like SQL, but the Web has dramatically increased the capability of users to browse and explore. It is an equal challenge to support users seeking specific facts and to help users with poorly formed information needs who are just browsing.

A planning document for a website might indicate that the primary audience is North American high school environmental-science teachers and their students, with secondary audiences consisting of other teachers and students, journalists, environmental activists, corporate lobbyists, policy analysts, and amateur scientists. The tasks might be identified as providing access to selected LANDSAT images of North America clustered by and annotated with agricultural, ecological, geological, and meteorological features. Primary access might be by a hierarchical thesaurus of keywords about the features (e.g. floods, hurricanes, volcanoes) from the four topics. Secondary access might be geographical with indexes by state, county, and city, plus selection by pointing at a map. Tertiary access might be by specifying latitude and longitude.

This focus on tasks leads to a model (Section 4) for designers that emphasizes objects and action in the task domain and their presentation in an interface. It also suggests possible improvements in search and navigation (Section 5).