Welcome to the Astoria WebLog

CG: Rahel, thanks for allowing us to interview you today. For our readers who don’t know much about World Usability Day, when is it, what is it, and how did you get involved?

RB: The pleasure is all mine, Chip. Usability is a topic I’m quite passionate about. For those who are unfamiliar, usability refers to the elegance and clarity of the interaction between a person and a product or service. It's about the ease with which people can use tools to accomplish specific tasks.

World Usability Day takes place on November 14^th this year, with different usability events happening around
the world for a full 36 hours. It was started last year as a way to promote usability among people in related professions (technical publications, web content management, training) and to let users know that when a product doesn't work right, it's likely not their fault. Instead, it can be traced to lack of focus on usability. You might be surprised how many people still blame themselves when they have a problem using software or physical products. So when the STC asked if I’d co-chair their World Usability Day committee, I could think of a lot of reasons to say yes, and very few to say no.

CG: As I understand it, you are working specifically on two STC World Usability Day events – a usability contest and a card-sorting exercise. Can you tell us a little about the Usability Competition? How does one enter the competition?

RB: The usability competition is actually the brain child of Jerome Ryckborst, who is my co-chair on the committee. We’d actually talked about this for a while. For years, the STC has run competitions for all sorts of communication products – hardware manuals, software manuals, online help, and so on – but as technical communicators migrated to the usability field, there was no competition for them. This has been a significant gap because STC competitions are peer-reviewed. It’s only if you get top honors at the local level that your entry progresses to the international level, and at that point, the competition is pretty stiff. Also, the awards are based on merit, so it’s possible that no one wins an award if the work doesn’t pass muster. As you can imagine, the awards are highly respected; winning an award is a great accomplishment.

It’s a bit premature to think about entering the contest. To put together a competition that can be judged against some sound benchmarks takes a fair bit of time to put together. On World Usability Day, the STC is launching their effort to set out all the competition criteria. They’re currently calling for volunteers to be part of the committee that puts it all together. At the same time, it’s a heads-up for usability professionals who want to enter the competition to start thinking about their entries for the following year. It gives people time to think about a project they want to document for the competition.

CG: The second STC-sponsored World Usability Day event is getting some significant attention in the IA and user experience world. It’s likely because it has been dubbed the “World’s Largest Online Card-Sort”. What exactly is a card-sort? And how does one undertake such an effort online with remote users around the globe?

RB: This one is my brain child. When I was on the STC board, I was always thinking about how to serve our global membership – STC has about 15,000 members around the world – so it was natural for me to think about something that could involve any members who want to participate, no matter where they’re located. And as I had just done a remote card sort where I was in Vancouver, the Web developers were in northern BC, the client was in California, and the users were scattered around northern California, an online project seemed like just the ticket.

A card sort is a way to get users to quickly and easily organize information the way it’s most helpful to them so that someone like me can design information that you can find. For example, if you go to a website, what do you expect to find under the various menu options? If I give a bunch of users the same 40 or 60 topics, I could end up with an idea of how they think about that information and where they would look for it. It’s much better than trying to divine that information on my own! The same technique also works for old-fashioned manuals, by the way. If a client is having a hard time focusing on what should be in a manual, I’ll just gather information and write the topic names on index cards – that’s where the name “card sort” comes from – and then get the client to sort them into piles and, voila, we have the beginnings of a table of contents and can see where the gaps are.

For the World Usability Day card sort, we first put together an organizing committee that is designing the card sort with a topic that affects everyone equally, and we came up with weather as our topic. At the same time, we’re signing up people who either want to participate as individuals or to organize people in their local area to do the card sort. So far, we have participants in a dozen countries over five continents, and more people signing up every day.

We were fortunate enough to get a corporate sponsor who offered us their online card-sorting tool for WUD. They’re called WebSort and I want to mention them here because if you’re curious about the technique, you can go to their site and try the demo card sort or create a small card sort for free. It’s easy to use, and once we collect all the results, they’re going to help us analyze the data so that we can look at response variances.

CG: So, now that we know what card-sorting is, how does one register for and participate in this online event? What does participation entail? And, are there any fees involved?

RB: Participation is absolutely free of charge. We’re all volunteers running this. To be a part of the card sort all your readers need to do is register. Participants get some instructions and the URL, and they can participate from the privacy of their own homes or, if there’s a group near them doing the card sort, we can connect them. We have participants doing the card sort in an academic setting, organizers taking the card sort into a nursing home, STC chapters gathering people to do the card sort in the same room – all sorts of great ideas.

CG: How can card sorting benefit content management professionals? For those who are just beginning to move to content management, for instance, is card-sorting a skill they should employ? And if so, for what purposes?

RB: Card sorting can definitely help you figure out your taxonomy. When you build a re-use strategy, it’s important to organize the information in a way that will let you find it two months from now or two years from now. A card sort can help with that. Another consideration is whether your inventory of terms is complete enough to move forward. A card sort can help with that, too. And finally, a card sort can help you determine where you list the content in your display view, particularly if your content management project is for a website or intranet. It’s not an entire solution, but it’s definitely an important tool for your toolkit. For our card sort, I asked members of Content Management Professionals to step up, as I knew we had some strong taxonomists among us. I wouldn’t have been able to pull this all together so quickly without those volunteers.

CG: Usability isn’t often a prominent topic in content management circles. Do you see usability linked to content management?

RB: Absolutely! Content management is about usability in two ways. First, the content management system itself has to be usable. The system developers need to understand the mental model of users in order for clients to be able use the system efficiently. Usability testing is critical here, to understand how the system can support business processes, instead of contorting processes to fit the system - which still happens all too often, I might add. Then, the CMS output has to be usable by the front-end users.

Accessibility is definitely on the map, particularly after the recent California court ruling supporting the position that corporations are responsible for making their customer materials accessible to users with disabilities. Because so many jurisdictions have their own accessibility guidelines, it’s hard to navigate each set of guidelines individually, so I’d recommend starting with the W3C guidelines.

One of the things I warn clients against is thinking that meeting accessibility guidelines means adding alt-text to graphics on a web page or using a Cascading Style Sheet. I will enter one of their pages into Cynthia Says™, which spits out a report detailing the guidelines and letting them know if they’ve met the minimum standards. The results are quite revealing, actually.

CG: I understand there are many events taking place around the globe, both in-person and virtual events like podcasts and webinars. What other World Usability Day events might be of interest to content professionals? Is there a complete list of events we can consult?

RB: All the participating groups have been asked to register their events on the World Usability Day website. There is an amazing array of events taking place that day, from webcasts to conferences to live events to workshops – the list goes on and on. Some of the other events have an online component, so people can choose to participate in a local event or something happening on the other side of the world.

CG: What are you most looking forward to on World Usability Day?

RB: Hmmm, I think what I’m most looking forward to is breathing a sigh of relief on the evening of November 14^th, once the event has successfully taken place.

CG: Thanks so much for sharing information about World Usability Day with our readers. We really appreciate your taking time out of your day and we wish you much success in your World Usability Day activities.

RB: Well, thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk about one of my favorite subjects.