Designing for User Engagement on the Web

10 Basic Principles

Cheryl Geisler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134056422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Designing for User Engagement on the Web: 10 Basic Principles is concerned with making user experience engaging. The cascade of social web applications we are now familiar with — blogs, consumer reviews, wikis, and social networking — are all engaging experiences. But engagement is an increasingly common goal in business and productivity environments as well. This book provides a foundation for all those seeking to design engaging user experiences rich in communication and interaction.

Combining a handbook on basic principles with case studies, it provides readers with a rich understanding of engagement: extending a welcome, setting the context, making a connection, sharing control, supporting interaction, creating a sense of place, and planning to continue the engagement. Based on research funded by the Society for Technical Communication, the case studies illustrate how designers build community in order to support education, connect kids to community resources, introduce users to other cultures, foster collaboration, encourage activism, and much more.

Whatever your motive, if you aim to create engaging user experiences, you will want to explore Designing for User Engagement on the Web.

Principle 1

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Design for Diverse Users

James P. Zappen

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To design for diverse users is to recognize that nothing is intuitive to everybody. Once the designer gives up the impossible ideal of designing a match between diverse users' needs and system affordances, the design agenda moves toward developing a set of differential experiences. In designing and redesigning a photo gallery as part of a youth-services information system, Zappen and his team addressed the design challenges of creating differential user experiences.

The Concept of the User

Users of web-based communication systems are not like audiences or even users in the traditional sense of these terms (Brinck, Gergle, & Wood, 2002, pp. 1–11; Nielsen, 1993, pp. 26–37). Increasingly via the Internet and the World Wide Web, they are users who are also potential contributors or producers who modify systems to meet their own needs (Johnson, 1998, pp. 25–40, 43–67; Spinuzzi, 2003, pp. 1–23); contribute and retrieve content from systems (Bruns, 2008, pp. 9–36; Tapscott & Williams, 2006, pp. 124–150); and interact with systems and with other users (Potts, 2009; Warnick, 2005, 2007, pp. 69–90).

Users in this new and enlarged sense are not constant even for any one system but change and emerge in time and space and are subject to varying conditions of reception (Warnick, 2007, pp. 25–44). Unlike audiences of a speech or a performance, they often experience systems as individuals, in isolation from each other. Unlike readers of a book or a magazine, they interact with systems and sometimes also with each other. Moreover, given differences such as age, gender, ethnicity, literacy, and technical experience and expertise, a diversity of users is virtually inevitable. As a consequence, no system and no interaction will be intuitive for every user. Designers, therefore, need to provide a variety of system capabilities and user options, and perhaps even invite users to modify systems, to accommodate these differences. They also need to test systems with sensitivity to these differences in both users and the contexts of use.

Traditional approaches to usability emphasize functionality and efficiency in the performance of user tasks. These approaches advocate a fundamental shift from a system to a user orientation. Nielsen (1993, p. 26) emphasizes features such as system learnability, efficiency, memorability, and reliability (“a low error rate”) and user satisfaction—all directed toward user performance and productivity. Brinck, Gergle, & Wood (2002, pp. 2–3) offer a virtually identical set of features for web-based systems, which should, they argue, be “functionally correct,” “efficient to use,” “easy to learn,” “easy to remember,” “error tolerant,” and “subjectively pleasing.”

More recent approaches to usability envision a more active role for users in system development both before and after implementation. Johnson (1998, pp. 31–33) urges not only a shift from systems to users but an expansion of user roles to respect the knowledge that users bring to systems and to embrace their activities of “ learning, doing, and producing.” Whereas traditional approaches to usability emphasize learning and doing—that is, learning a system and using it to perform a specific task—Johnson's expanded view emphasizes users' more active role in producing systems—that is, developing and maintaining systems and thus taking part “in a negotiated process of technology design, development, and use” (p. 32). To illustrate, Johnson recalls the University of Washington study of Seattle's traffic-flow problem, which suggested that “the traffic problems might be best addressed by giving people daily information about traffic patterns so they could make choices about which route to take on a given trip” (p. 65).

Spinuzzi (2003, pp. 1–5, 18–22) urges a still more active role for system users that recognizes users' creative adaptations both before and after system implementation. Unlike traditional approaches to user-centered design, which leave the designer in control and devalue the user as “victim,” Spinuzzi recognizes users' creative contributions to system development: “Workers produce solutions that are devious, wily, and cunning, … solutions that work”—though he also recognizes that workers frequently need designers to promulgate their solutions “so that other workers can take advantage of them” (pp. 8–9, 19–20). This recognition of the more active role of users as producers seems prescient, given recent developments in web-based information systems.

The blurring or merging of the roles of user and producer has deep roots. Barthes (1977, p. 148) maintains that a text is not singular but multiple and that its locus of meaning is not the author but the reader:

A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.

Drawing upon Barthes's insight, Warnick (2005, pp. 330–331) argues that a web-based text is similarly diffuse and dispersed—“a de-centered ‘tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture.’ ” Moreover, she argues, the entire context of information exchange fundamentally changes in a web-based environment: Authors are typically not singular and readily identifiable but corporate, multiple, or simply unknown to us; readers/users, in a sense, become authors by choosing their own paths through a hypertext; texts are not only texts but a complex mix of media forms; and readers/users are no longer mass audiences but individuals with attitudes, values, and beliefs largely unknown and unknowable, dispersed in time and space and subject to the constraints of widely varying systems of access (Warnick, 2007, pp. 28–41).

The advent of newer web-based information systems—the so-called Web 2.0, the new web, the social web—exacerbates these changes and further blurs the line between users and producers. Tapscott and Williams (2006, p. 37) explain that “the new Web is principally about participating rather than about passively receiving information.” It is “a global infrastructure for creativity, participation, sharing, and self-organization.” To illustrate, they describe the old web as a digital newspaper, the new web as a shared canvas: “Instead of a digital newspaper, think of a shared canvas where every splash of paint contributed by one user provides a richer tapestry for the next user to modify or build on” (p. 37). To extend the illustration, we might recall the Seattle traffic study referenced above: In a traditional communication model, traffic controllers would distribute traffic information to motorists, who would then be able to make informed decisions about their travel; in the new and complex digital communication environment, motorists themselves could communicate immediate (not daily) traffic updates to a central system for electronic posting or directly to each other via a variety of mobile devices.

Bruns (2008, pp. 15–23) captures these new users/producers in his description of “produsers” who both use and produce information. According to Bruns, produsers openly participate and communally share, examine, and evaluate information; operate in a fluid heterarchy in which anyone can contribute; engage in projects that are not holistic but granular, modular, and always unfinished, in “an openly accessible information commons”; and share information as common property even as they reap individual rewards from their participation (pp. 23–30). To illustrate this new communication environment and the new user as a user/producer of information, we might complicate the relatively simple traffic-flow situation by referencing the more complex instance of a disaster situation in which the normal routes of traffic and communication are disrupted.

Potts (2009) documents the uses of the new communication technologies in her case studies of several such disasters. She notes the limitations of the Hurricane Katrina CNN Safe List, for example, which posted valuable information but did not permit everyday users “to interact with the system to add important details, edit names, locate duplicates, or point out incorrect entries” (p. 283). She notes similar potentials and problems in the uses of Flickr during the aftermath of the London bombings, such as the instance of a user who was able to locate a loved one in a photo but was unable to post a comment (pp. 292–293). To address these problems, she concludes, we need enhanced social software tools “for coordinating and authenticating information, especially across multiple platforms and disparate systems” (p. 294).

Given this new and complex communication environment, designers need to recognize the inevitability of diverse users (and users/producers) and to design systems accordingly; to assume that no system is intuitive to everyone, either to users or to themselves; and to provide a variety of system options, including options that permit users to contribute and share information with each other. For diverse users, therefore, a system might be several systems, or several interfaces, not one; it might, and probably will, change dynamically over time; and it might be experienced differently by different users in different contexts of use. Testing of such complex systems, therefore, also needs to be sensitive to these differences.

Users of the Connected Kids Gallery

The Connected Kids information system (http://connectedkids.rpi.edu/index.php/) addresses these differences among kinds of system users. Designed as a youth-services information system for Troy and Rensselaer County, New York, Connected Kids initially included a single image gallery for children that seemed to be natural and intuitive for these users. However, when we tested this original design with older users—college students—we found that these users expected much more sophisticated system functionalities and user options. We therefore retained the image gallery for children and designed a new gallery as a photo and information gallery for teens and adults, with a range of options suited to the needs and expectations of these older users.

Recognizing That Nothing Is Intuitive for Everyone

In the process of testing, we recognized that what was natural and intuitive for younger users was not so intuitive for older users. We also recognized that we could not test a system designed for younger users with older users and expect to get meaningful results for younger users. Our intuitive hunch that we could test with average or typical users turned out to be counterintuitive. We cannot, therefore, conclude with confidence that the children's gallery either does or does not offer a quality experience for younger users, and we continue to make this gallery accessible to parents and children as a component of the larger system. We can, however, conclude that the children's image gallery is not suitable for teens and adults, so we designed a new gallery for these users.

Designing for the Inevitability of Diverse Users

Given our recognition of the diverse experiences of users of different age groups, we determined that we needed two distinct galleries, not one. Our original design of the image gallery for children included drawings and photos of children's activities representing several local youth-services organizations, including schools, after-school programs, and public libraries, plus a collection of images about local art, culture, and history, as shown in Figure 1.1. The images were arranged in three main groups: one for artwork, one for photos, and one for art and history. Within these groups, the images were arranged by organization, primarily to serve the organizations' publicity needs, and presented in simple slide shows, with a main page for navigation. We initially tested the children's gallery for functionality and efficiency in the execution of user tasks, such as retrieving an image of a particular type, and, largely as a convenience, we tested with college students, readily available in our classes. For these users, according to the results of the heuristic testing, the original gallery seemed “very casual and not task oriented,” more like “slide shows rather than true ‘galleries,’ ” “very linear” with “no hierarchy of information, no search functions, no category scheme or navigation system to assist users in finding images,” no “library of types of images and thumbnail images,” and “no help functions or contact information.”

Given these results, and aware that our users would likely include teens of high school age as well as children of grade school and middle school age, we developed the first redesign of the gallery as a photo and information g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: From Usability to User Engagement
• Principle 1 Design for Diverse Users
• Principle 2 Design for Usability
• Principle 3 Test the Backbone
• Principle 4 Extend a Welcome
• Principle 5 Set the Context
• Principle 6 Make a Connection
• Principle 7 Share Control
• Principle 8 Support Interactions Among Users
• Principle 9 Create a Sense of Place
• Principle 10 Plan to Continue the Engagement
• The Case Studies
• Afterword: Beyond Engagement
• References
• Appendices
• Index