BC Museums Association Conference 2005: Website Usability Workshop
Introduction
In parallel with "visual usability", we have to be concerned with "technical usability".
Q: Who uses the site?
A: More "people" than you think
Intended audience - people you plan for
- Museum / gallery visitors
- researchers / educators
- inquisitive public
- etc.
Unintended audience - people you don't plan for
- stumble on through search engines
- links from unexpected locations
- search engines themselves
users that fall under the "intended audience" category may still be foreign to you:
- impaired (visually or otherwise)
- non-English speaker
Of the last 70,000 visitors to aggv.bc.ca, 75% arrived with no referrer (bookmark, typed in the address, etc). 25%, or more than 17,000 visitors, arrived via links from other pages. And more than 50% of those were links from Google.
Deep
linking
- 1,000 were from Google Images (http://images.google.com)
- catalogue browse = 3rd most popular "entry page"
More important than ever to create a site that is as accessible as possible by EVERYONE and EVERYTHING
Many examples of standards and guidelines to allow access to specific groups
- Dublin Core - general indexing metadata (http://dublincore.org/)
- CanCore / IEEE / IMS - learning object resource metadata (http://www.cancore.ca/)
- CSS 1 / CSS 2.1 - cascading style sheets (http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/)
- HTML / XHTML (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/)
- Section 508 - U.S. government accessibility guidelines (http://www.section508.gov/)
Rather than get tied up in specifics, best approach is overall philosophy: "The Semantic Web"