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My agency has historically provided documents within our website and intranet in three formats, HTML (web pages), RTF (Rich Text Format) and PDF. The rationale behind this has been to give customers choice.
It has also allowed us to look at relative usage over time to see which formats are most preferred by our customers and staff.
The ratio we see by visits roughly averages as follows:
100 HTML (webpages) : 12 PDF : 1 RTF
This does suggest there while, as you'd expect, most web users prefer to view web pages, there is a legitimate place in our website for PDF versions. (RTF we're considering dropping altogether.)
There are significant incremental costs involved in delivering documents in different formats.
This includes the issues in managing updating across the formats and, particularly for PDF, managing accessibility and effective searching.
This leads on to the core issue:
If we have a legitimate need to provide different formats of documents in our website and there is a cost to doing so, how do we maximise the effectiveness of the different formats in order to maximise our ROI?
Here's some steps that my agency has taken.
Firstly, looking at PDF-specific issues, many PDFs are not designed to be found easily in search engines. Where they are findable, the text provided in the PDF results is often gobble-de-gook.
This is easily fixed by setting a couple of properties in each PDF, well explained in the article Make your PDFs work well with Google (and other search engines) in the Acrobat user group.
Accessibility can also become an issue. While PDFs are actually quite good for accessibility purposes, many are never optimised for accessibility either due to lack of knowledge or lack of time. Given that government has a legal obligation to deliver accessible websites this could be quite a large issue for some agencies when audited.
Adobe's PDF creator comes with the ability to test the accessibility of a PDF and suggest improvements. I use this regularly on PDFs and find that it's both effective and provides useful suggestions. If you are unsure of what you can do to address PDF accessibility, simply running this report can provide you with a handle on what needs to be done.
The PDF creator also comes with a system for metatagging images within PDF documents with alternative text and structuring the order in which headings and text blocks are read to help people who cannot read the words, such as those who are vision impaired.
The most recent versions of Adobe Acrobat reader also include a screen reader for the vision-impaired, and simply using this tool to listen to your documents while closing your eyes can give you a clearer insight into how accessible your PDFs really are.
Finally, in my opinion, PDFs are not a great format for online use. If you're on the web you expect to find web pages. PDF is a useful print alternative, but isn't really the format of choice for reading online. In my experience PDFs are primarily used when someone wants to print a document for later reference.
HTML web pages are quite simple and fast to update. However PDF (and RTF) require significantly more attention and, often, specialist designers or tools.
This adds cost and time but not always significant value, particularly when changes are quite small and non-critical.
There are approaches that can reduce the cost and time required - and avoid those situations when your PDFs and web pages do not match.
My agency is in the process of implementing a CSS-based replacement for printable PDF fact sheets. Basically we've developed a fact sheet print template for web pages which can be used to generate more effective PDF-like pages.
Another approach we are looking at for the future is to use PDF on the fly generators, which allow the delivery of any web content as a PDF at a click of a button.
The advantage of this approach is that an agency can continue to provide PDF versions, but without the effort and cost of developing them. Only the website's HTML version needs to be maintained as the PDF version is basically generated on request from your website users.
So findability, accessibility and more accurate and timely delivery are all achievable with PDFs with just a little thought. These lift the effectiveness of this format, helping our customers find and access the information.
Of course, most people will still prefer web pages, but if your agency is committed to offering PDF as an option - or the sole way to access documents - with some improvements to their effectiveness you'll be helping ensure that your customers get what they need.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Effective use of PDFs in websites and intranets | Tweet |
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
How many options are too many? | Tweet |
Donna Spencer has written a very thoughtful piece on how many items were ‘too many’ to have in a navigation bar on a website.
Entitled, How many items in a navigation bar it's well worth a read.
She argues that the 7+/- 'rule' is more of a myth and offers some suggestions on how to evaluate when a longer navigation bar is appropriate.
Adding my 2c, I think it's also important to consider the importance of each item to your audience to ensure the menu is appropriately arranged.
This doesn't always mean placing the most popular item at the top of a list, or far left of a navigation bar.
If this occurs it is possible that your audience will stop reading at this first item and not go on to look at other menu choices that would better fulfil their needs.
But what's a better option?
Alphabetical?
By order of steps within a process?
Drawn out of a hat?
Have you ever organised or read about an experiment testing which menu ordering approach maximises use by customers?
Was the Australian Federal Election in 2007 really the YouTube election? | Tweet |
Maybe not - if this ITnews article Study says the 2007 ‘YouTube election’ is a misnomer is correct.
Of course, even using YouTube, Australia is a long way behind the eObama campaign in the US.
When good websites turn bad | Tweet |
I've had a keen interest in the Attorney General's Department for a number of years now.
That's not because they may - or may not - be the government department most likely to have James Bond, Triple X or the Men In Black working for them.
It's because they do a lot of important things across a range of areas, but rarely seem to get much credit for it.
For example, while their name suggests a dry, boring legal portfolio - and indeed they do have a large role in the intersection between Australia's legal system and government - they are also responsible for developing emergency management systems and supporting emergency management services, which become pretty important to people when there is an earthquake, flood or other disaster.
They also look after the Family Relationship Centres, which play an enormous role in supporting families around the country and manage Comlaw, THE source for legislative information in Australia and Australian Law Online, equally the source for legal and justice related information.
That's not to mention counter-terrorism, or engagement with the justice systems across the Pacific.
These are all important and useful activities and would make the AG's Department a very interesting place to work.
But what have they done to their website?
The other day I visited the main AG's website for the first time in awhile and was surprised at what I found.
I have my views on attractive and usable web design and they don't match what the AG's Department has done to their site.
The URL icon in the web address bar is cute - a scale of justice, much clearer than using a Commonwealth crest which suffers at a 16x16 pixel size. Unfortunately this was also the high point for me.
The site is coloured a very bright orange, fading through to blue with black highlights. The crest is nicely positioned at a good size at top left, but doesn't blend well with the page - it sits on a solid dark background and has harsh lines separating it from the rest of the design.
The website homepage has more than 70 visible links, organised into topic area throughout the left half two-thirds of the website - basically exposing much of the site navigation, using up most of the visible area to do it rather than neat dropdown menus.
It does have a right-hand column with several news items, Ministerial links and a couple of publications.
However that left hand area with all those links! It doesn't make the site very attractive or usable, it's simply overwhelming!
I did go to the site for a specific purpose, but after one look at the homepage, I fled back to Google and searched for the content instead - finding it within seconds.
I think that many other users similarly overwhelmed with options would react in a similar way.
So what mistake has AG's made - the concept that if links are good, more links are better?
That a home page, being largely a navigation page, should simple be a list of links?
Certainly that was the peak of user design back in the mid-90s, when Yahoo launched with a groundbreaking list of lists, neatly categorised by type. But I do not see any of today's popular sites taking a similar approach - perhaps the world has moved on.
I'm sure the department had good intentions for this design and was aiming to making it easier for the many audiences that visit the AG's site, for many different reasons.
However I do not think the approach selected will maximise the utility of the site - and look out for that 'bounce' rate!
Bounce rate (From Google Analytics' definition)
Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Redesigning sites to put customers at the centre of the universe | Tweet |
From our latest usability review, my agency's customers are saying that our website is looking a bit old, tired and dated.
They say it is very "about us" focused, covered in agency news items screaming 'look at me!', rather than "about them" - the customers!
Certainly many of our news messages are important (to customers), but news isn't what draws our customers to the website, it is information they become aware of when they go there to use our tools.
In the current design news is positions front and centre - where people look for important content. However the tools and resources important to our customers are pushed to the fringes - the far right or the bottom of the site.
So we're listening to our customers and I've received a go-ahead to make some changes.
The scope is the homepage and overall site template - we're not touching the primary navigation or content throughout the site.
I have set four rules for my team:
- Put customer needs first
- Use less words
- Minimise disruption
- Lift the look
Use less words:
Our home page is currently text rich - we want to cut down the words to the essential information to help customers move deeper into the site.
Minimise disruption:
We don't want to make regular visitors work harder to find tools. Even if we make tools easier to reach, this can make it harder for regulars who are habitualised to finding specific tools in particular places. This particularly goes for our main navigation, search and secure site login - none of which we want to make harder to find.
We are prepared to cause some disruption - you cannot adjust an interface without affecting some people - but we want to keep it as minimal as possible while achieving the other goals of the work.
Progress so far....
So far our web designer has put a lot of time into understand how people use our site, using all our data sources, and even asking a few real people.
From his preliminary rough design, we've had a very productive collaboration session to develop a wireframe (pic below) of how the homepage should be structured, using input from our customer research and website stats.
I've also conducted some preliminary ad hoc user testing to verify that this is regarded as a better design (it is from my small sample).
We're now fleshing out the wireframe to develop an appropriate interface pallette based on our corporate colours and fit the words we have to have before getting the design into a formal review process.
All opinions welcome!
New homepage initial wireframe
Key features
- Crest at top left
- Top menu realigned to left
- Search untouched
- Left/bottom menus untouched
- Secure login unmoved but more visible
- Important tools centred, in logical groups
- Frequently used tools buttons at right
- News items below tools with less text
- Subscribe options besides news
