Agus Rahardja, The Centre for Computer Studies, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, 535 Clementi Road, Singapore 599489, Republic of Singapore. rahar@np.edu.sg
In this paper, we have suggested looking at web design from the stakeholders' point of views and we have also proposed a systematic and structured user-centred design approach to integrate the goals of these stakeholders. We feel that by looking at web design from "answers first, then questions" viewpoint, that is volunteering significant information to the users, helps the design of the individual detailed web page. Understanding the purposes for interactivity and the various types of interactivity can also guide the design process.
The role of the users in a system development life cycle is an important one. The usability of a system, whether it is an information system, a multimedia product, or a web site, much depends on whether we have identified the right users or the target audience at the beginning of the systems life cycle.
The types of user to be identified and the requirements to be gathered for the user interface of an information system are well documented elsewhere (Newman & Lamming, 1995; Gould, 1995; Redmond-Pyle & Moore, 1995). It often includes those with many years of on-the-job experience and those with lesser experience. When the system is modelled upon the users' requirements, it can better facilitate the completion of the tasks performed by the users.
Similarly, a well-defined audience enables the web designers to define what the audience wants to do and decide how the product can best reach the audience (Morris & Hinrichs, 1996; Kristof & Satran, 1995). Identifying the right audience from the outset, therefore, partly determines the usability of the web site.
But who are these users or the target audience of the web site that we are after? Are they the existing users, prospective users or visitors of the web site? It is often found that the current and future users of a system, those who are to use the system and/or who have experienced similar systems, are identified to be the users or the target audience (Rantzer, 1998). In this respect, Richard Hall [HREF1] divides the general audience of a web site into three key user-centred categories as the passing visitors, purchasers, and the existing customers.
With clear understanding of the types of user the system is to support, we can design an effective, interactive and usable system (Newman & Lamming, 1995). However, can we determine what the users want, think, expect and desire from those who are not familiar or experience with the system? Moreover, could they tell the designer the salient and important information that the users are looking for? In other words, can these people tell the designer what they want if they do not know what it can offer (Miyake & Norman, 1986)?
It is from these perspectives that we are proposing to involve a wider range of people who can elicit the users requirements. In other words, we are saying that instead of the "users" or the "target audience", we should look at web design from the stakeholders' point of views. We define stakeholders as those people who have a stake in the system under investigation.
This paper proposes a systematic and structured user-centred approach to web design which integrates various perspectives of the stakeholders to shape and define the goals of the web site, and determine the wants and desires of the targeted users. Together with the object oriented view of the application context, the designers can better decide how the product will best reach its audience.
One of the basic questions we ask during the design of a system and its user interface is what the users will want to do with the system [HREF4]. If the users of the web site do not know what it can offer to them or what can be expected from it, they cannot tell the designers what they will want to do with the system, let alone their expectation and desires. Miyake and Norman (1986) have raised similar point in a paper entitled "to ask a question, one must know enough to know what is not known."
It is clearer to see the points from the following scenario: Imagine you are tasked to design a multimedia courseware, say for a multimedia interface design module, for the first year students. Do we identify the users as the current first year's students? Definitely it is. They will eventually be the users of the courseware. But do we approach them for the requirements? No, we cannot because they cannot tell the designers what they want from the module in terms of what to be learnt, misconceptions, misinterpretation and other information that are important to enhancing the learning effectiveness. We can, however, collect the requirements from past years' first year's students, and we can also collect the instructional requirements, both teaching and learning requirements, from the teaching staffs who teach the module. The information collected from these people form part of the requirements of the systems and they are not the users of the courseware.
Similarly, a new web site does not have any direct users. How could we obtain the requirements? We can collect it from people who are constantly in contact with the existing customers of the company. These people may be the salespersons, software developers, and managerial staffs, depending on the types of web site under investigation. And who is better informed of the salient features of the products and services? They are the staffs who are dealing with the products and services themselves.
As Terry Swack, founder and CEO of TSDesign puts it: "An intentional user experience only qualifies as one if it both serves the needs of the user and meets the business objectives the company has for that user. It has to do both. Otherwise, why would a company build it?" [HREF3]
In this respect, not only the users, but also the stakeholders of the system will play an important role in the web design.
However, the views and requirements of the stakeholders are not necessary aligned with the goals of the users and if they are not integrated seameslessly, may cause harms to the web site (Fleming, 1998); the web site so designed may only show the perspectives of the company and thus not able to fully engage the users.
We will illustrate these points with the following three examples. The first is the travel agents' web site [HREF5]. A classic example of design from the company's perspective is the inclusion of the "company profile" and "corporate profile" button along with the tour-related buttons. It results in lack of focus and thus reduces the effectiveness of the message the web site will like to bring across to its users. The "itinerary" page shows what it says, the itinerary of a tour package from day 1 to the last day of the tour. Can it satisfy the goals of and tasks performed by the users in terms of attracting the users to the destination? Moreover, these are terminating pages which usually preventing the users from dwelling on a particular point in depth; a design bears resemblance to the print technology.
The second example is also a travel web site that has an aim to promote tourism for a location. From the aesthetic point of view, it can be considered well-designed [HREF6]. When one surfs to the "zoological garden" page for example, there are word descriptions as follows:
"... more than 2,000 animals from over 240 species including 40 from the list of endangered species ..."
"... It is the only zoo in the world where you can enjoy breakfast or tea with an Orang Utan ..."
Again, these are the messages the organisation will like the users to experience. They are not user-centred. When we read "40 from the list of endangered species", do we have the urge to find out which are the forty endangered species so that the users can decide whether the visit is worth while? Can the web site tell the users how does it feel to eat breakfast or having tea with an Orang Utan?
Looking at the home page from the macro view, the "attraction" page does not have any link with the "food and entertainment" page. But would we also like to find out where to consume our meals when we are at the location? The consideration of a web-like web design is de-emphasised.
A well-designed college recruitment page [HREF7] includes these main options in its home page: benefits, culture, search jobs, apply online, hot technologies, business careers, technology careers, and business units.
In the "hot technologies" page, it has the following description:
"From the project inception to the final stages of product development, you will be involved every step of the way."
"You will also gain valuable knowledge from our mentoring program."
"And given the scope of our technologies and business, your career through moves within the company."
Some of the users' goals may be "telling me more about the steps they will be involved in the product development stages" so that the users are bought into applying with the company.
What is this mentoring program? How could the users benefit from it? How long do the users take to move from one path to another? What is the career path like?
The stakeholders' roles are important in web design. From the stakeholders' requirements, the web can be designed to volunteer significant information to the users to facilitate their decision making process (Owen, 1986; O'Malley, 1986). On the other hand, a web-like system is desired. In other words, the information presented to the users is often preferred not to be terminating so as to better satisfy the goals of the users. In this section, we will describe our web design approach, with reference made to a prototype travel web site.
Our design approach is based on a view modified from the object-oriented technique. Moreover, we have identified a set of interactivity objectives to guide us in our design process. The purposes of interactivity we have identified are as follows:
When the system volunteer meaningful information to the users, the users will better be informed of the next move. This idea is also inline with the two functions, direction and confirmation, suggested by Gilbert (1978) in discussing how to improve the information presented to the users.
This is referring to interaction motivation. With this view, all media, including textual information and static images, are to be transformed to a dynamic form. The purpose is to engage the users to want to interact more with the system.
Bearing this in mind will remind the designers to focus on the users' goals and their behaviour. Users' behaviour can come in a form of performing some tasks to fulfil the goals, or taking some actions or raising questions.
When people work in a community of common interests, they will interact with one another more often. When the web is designed to be a one-stop service centre for the community, it encourages loyal users.
We have also identified two types of interactivity as guidelines to web design, namely the static (or global) and dynamic (or local) interactivity. Static interactivity is the interaction elements that are persistently available to the users throughout the web session, while dynamic interactivity exists only in each web page and may vary with the page.
The design approach, in essence, starts with identifying a set of objects or sub-systems in a brainstorming session that the stakeholders may have an interest in. In our travel web site example, these are the "destination ", "promotion", "resource", "activity" and the "advisory" sub-systems (Figure 1.0). While the stakeholders identified for the travel web site are the prospective users of the web site, the host company and the clients of the company, namely the travel agencies, hotels, restaurants, etc. After the sub-systems have been identified and agreed upon by the design team, we will then look at these sub-systems and ask whether they are any relationship between any sub-systems. Lines will be drawn to directly and indirectly related sub-systems. The purpose is to help the designer see the stake of the stakeholders in the system so that appropriate goal for each stakeholders could be defined (Table 1.0). Again, using the stakeholders' sub-systems diagram, we will be able to brainstorm and generate the behaviour of each stakeholder systematically.
When the sub-systems have been identified, and the scenario generated, we can now proceed to identify the static interaction elements of the system. This is achieved through object modelling (Rumbaugh et al, 1991). From the simplified diagram in Figure 2.0, we have identified four static interaction elements to be persistently available throughout a web session, namely the "destination finder", "tour finder", "travel resources", "media resources". We have also included the "special deals" as one of the static interaction elements, as it is a special type of the "tour package" object. However, the "attraction" interaction element is excluded purely from the technical and aesthetic point of views. This "attraction" interaction element can come in a form of attraction list and/or theme travel and can serve as a short cut for expert users of the site or the frequent travellers.
After the static interaction elements have been fully identified, the object model will be expanded to identify the interaction required in each web page. An expanded simplified object model is shown in Figure 3.0. With the object view 1 designed for a "city" page (Figure 4.0), we have included "attraction", and "travel resource" interaction elements. Deriving from the latter, we have also included "facts for travellers" as one interaction element. The relationship between the "attraction" and its "theme attraction" also gives rise to the interaction elements, "Indus Valley Civilisation in Gujarat" (Figure 4.0), which when clicked pop up a window as shown in Figure 6.0. Another interaction element, the "state locator" and "country locator" is also catered for so that the users can have an overview of all the attractions in a state and for the country (from object view 2, see Figure 7.0).
The interpretation for the object view 1 is as follows: a country makes up of many states, and state is made up of many cities, and each city has many attractions, and each attraction belongs to a theme attraction. With this view, the "destination finder" page (Figure 5.0) is designed to enable the users to find destinations based on a theme attraction. By clicking on a theme attraction, the web will display the destinations satisfying the goals of the users through displaying icons of varying size on the world map. In this case, we are employing the direction (directing the users what to do) and confirmation (size of icons and location of icons help the users to confirm the next step) functions as suggested by Gilbert (1978) to improving the information presented to the users.
In this paper, we have suggested looking at web design from the stakeholders' point of views. We have proposed a systematic and structured user-centred design approach to integrate the goals of these stakeholders and suggested using object oriented view to design the static and dynamic interactivity of the site. From the experience we learn from designing a prototype travel web site and the feedback from the team as well as our clients, we feel that the interactivity elements are meaningful to the users and can support the behaviour of the users. We also feel that looking at web design from "answers first, then questions" viewpoint, that is volunteering information to the users, helps the design of the detailed individual web pages. By understanding the purposes for interactivity and various types of interactivity can also guide the designing process. However, we can only be sure of the effectiveness of our design thinking and approach until the web site has gone live and we have collected information from the users of the site. We will apply our design approach to more projects in the future to fine tune the process and techniques.
FIGURE 1.0. The stakeholders' interest in the system. Both the users and the travel agency have an interest in the destination system. The goals of each, however, are not the same.
TABLE 1.0. Specifying the stakeholders' interests in the system. By explicitly specifying the interest of each stakeholder, their goals and intention, we could better see the picture and thus taking their interest into consideration. The solutions, aids, or tools can then be devised for the needs of these stakeholders.
|
Focus |
Destination |
|
User |
Frequent Travellers |
|
Goals |
|
|
Behaviour |
|
|
Stakeholder |
Travel Agencies |
|
Goals |
|
|
Behaviour |
Want the users to buy the tour packages from the travel agency |
|
Stakeholder |
The Company |
|
Goals |
Provide travel destination information |
|
Behaviour |
|
|
Solutions |
|
|
Aids / Tools |
|
FIGURE 2.0. Using object modelling concept, we manage to see the persistent interaction elements much more clearly.
FIGURE 3.0. An expanded object model. A line drawn between two objects indicate the relationship. The three legs on the line indicate many relationships, and one indicates only one.
FIGURE 4.0. A mock-up screen of a "city" page for illustration purposes only. From object view 1, we are able to see the links between the attraction and its theme attraction, and thus be able to cater for a dynamic interaction element within the page.
FIGURE 5.0. A mock-up screen of the "destination finder" page showing a world map for illustration purposes only. When a theme attraction is selected from the "theme travel" drop down list, the system will display on the map the destinations satisfying this query. Bigger icons indicate most important, significant or recommended destinations.
FIGURE 6.0. A mock-up screen of the "theme attraction" page for illustration purposes only. Using the "direction" and "confirmation" functions, this pop up window shows the directions of the specific theme attraction. It also includes other surrounded attractions. The click-able button models the task flow of the users from finding out about the archaeological sites to getting around the sites. The "attractions in gujarat" and "sites around" in India are the "confirmation" function, views from micro to macro levels. In this way, the system helps the users to make his decision, upon positive reaction, the "excursion" button brings the users to the tour agent.
FIGURE 7.0. A mock-up screen of the "state locator " page for illustration purposes only. The design idea is similar to the one shown in Figure 6.0. The users' task flow is considered, and the two functions suggested by Gilbert (1978), Direction and Confirmation, are applied.
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Agus Rahardja, © 1999. The author assigns to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The author also grants a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web.