JasonMorrison.net

Visualizing the web

Although web technologies are constantly changing, most users still browse the web the same way they did back in 1995—typing keywords into search boxes, clicking from home page, to section, to subsection on a navigation bar, or following link, to link, to link. The fact that it is called a “web” suggests that there should be other ways of navigating websites, and there are a number of projects attempting to employ information visualizations and spatial maps to do so.

All web pages organize information visually, but “information visualization centers around helping people explore or explain data that is not inherently spatial, such as that from the domains of bioinformatics, data mining and databases, finance and commerce, telecommunications and networking, information retrieval from large text corpora, software, and computer-supported cooperative work.” (“InfoVis 2003 Symposium”) Spatial metaphors are used to communicate different levels of information. A simple, static example would be a personal homepage built to look like the designers home, with links to favorite movies in the living room and recipes in the kitchen. A more advanced example would be a customer relationship management system for a large company which instead of presenting a list of technical support problems and solutions, displays an interactive map of problems, with more common problems in a larger font size, and recent problems in red. In both cases, users get an immediate grasp of complex information.

Such visualizations are intended to help solve two current web usability problems: the lack of a wide view to web structure, and the lack of query refinement based on relationships of retrieved pages (Ohwada 548). But they must do so without creating additional usability barriers. This paper will describe three current information visualization projects and describe some of the usability issues these sorts of projects face.

Many visualizations, including the three below, are not designed for specialists but instead are “targeted toward guiding the public through newly accessible oceans of on-line information.” (Morse 637) This means that many of their target users will be unfamiliar with both the interface and the particular information they are looking for.

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Note: this usability review as done as part of my graduate coursework at Kent State University.

Usability

My Lycos is a substantial player in the portal/personal site market. The site is owned by Terra Lycos, which is currently seventh on the list of parent sites with the most visits (Nielsen//NetRatings, 1). The site offers a wide range of services, tools, and options, and allows users to log into accounts with other Terra Lycos sites like Tripod and Quote.com (My Lycos, 1). A previous paper (Newton, 1) examined the site and analyzed some user tasks. This paper will also re-analyze the tasks in the original paper, and take a second look at the site, through four usability guidelines from the textbook (Dumas, 56) and five from a popular usability site (Nielsen, 1).

1. Giving the user control

The original paper and a cursory examination of My Lycos show plenty of opportunity for users to take control. Users have 35 possible content boxes to choose from in eight categories. Some boxes can be further customized—the News box, for example, gives users the ability to pick up to 13 different types of news, rank them, and pick out local news sources. The main user control problem is the lack of a central place to change all settings or an easy walk through of the options available. It is likely many users miss that they can customize news, because the only indication is a small edit tag in the news box itself.

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Note: this usability review as done as part of my graduate coursework at Kent State University.

Usability Review of My.Go2Net.com

There is bound to be argument over what the primary, or first rule of usability is. But before any other rules or guidelines, a site must first satisfy the “zeroith” rule of usability: users must be able to get to the site. Go2Net fails this test because my.go2net.com is completely unavailable (Go2Net, 1). This is a problem first because competing sites already follow the my.[sitename].com URL convention (Welcome, 1). Worse, at one point my.go2net.com was a valid domain and had some amount of user recognition (Nasser, 1). This is especially bad for prospective portal sites, where the intention is that users will use the site as a launching point for the rest of the web. Anyone that had set their homepage to my.go2net.com has had to either update their homepage setting in their browser or pick a different site altogether. Portals need to seem stable and established–making major changes to a site’s navigation might counter that impression, but changing domain names around is even worse. Also, many users will only find Go2Net through links on other sites and pages. Although a Google search of sites linking to my.go2net.com comes up empty today (link:my.go2net.com, 1), Go2Net may have lost out on traffic from older links that have since been removed.

Additional usability rules are easy to find, but there is no authoritative list. This paper will consider four guidelines from the textbook (Dumas, 56) and five from a popular usability site (Nielsen, 1).

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