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Vinson Kurian

Thiruvananthapuram , Dec. 11

WHAT distinguishes the Web sites you frequent from those you don't, despite the similarity of their offerings?

An investigation undertaken by MIT Technology Review involving more than 8,000 subjects revealed that four factors influence Web site popularity. The top-scoring factor was "good content." The third most important factor was speed of downloads; and factor number four, freshness of content.

What was the second-most important reason that made users like a site? Surprisingly, it was "usability."

Surprising not because it is unexpected that users want sites to be easy to use, but because Web site builders report that whenever a company wants to cut costs of Web site development, usability is scrapped or at least postponed.

Apparently, people do not realise that usability cannot be added on later. It must be built into a site (or a product of any kind) right from the start.

Many laypeople think that usability is only a veneer over a programme and that it involves such issues as button placement and colour choice. But in fact usability goes much deeper. This is because the method of designing usability into a product involves doing an analysis of the user's needs first, and then designing around those needs. If you haven't done the analysis, you have to redo the design later on.

Usability involves the optimisation of three factors: how quickly users can do what they want to do, how correctly they can do it, and how much they enjoy doing it. It has long been known that the underlying design of a computer system can affect its usability.

Usability thus forms one of the touchstones around which the next generation Web markup language - called XHTML2 - is being designed at the World Wide Web Consortium. Already, several pieces of XHTML2 have been published, such as the recently released electronic forms markup XForms.

This improves usability by checking on the client, allowing the browser to warn the user about incorrectly filled fields before the form is submitted to the server.

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