Interaction refers to anything that requires some action from the visitor, such as clicking on a link or fi lling out a form, as a way to, or the next step toward, reaching some goal. Interaction design goes beyond visual design, because we now expect visitors to be active participants, not just passive observers.
Poor interaction design is distracting to a visitor, like a small splinter. It annoys even though it might not be truly painful. In contrast, visitors won’t even notice how successful an interface is if we do our jobs properly; the design will be transparent, invisible to the visitor (just like we don’t notice when we don’t have a splinter). An interface that seems so natural and intuitive that the user doesn’t notice it at all is the very defi nition of a successful interface. How many hoops your visitors are willing to jump through to get to that goal depends, again, on its importance to the visitor. Visitors will typically tolerate longand drawn-out processes only if the end result is of high personal salience.
COMPLEXITY
“If you add features to your program that are necessarily complex to manage, users will be willing to tolerate that complexity only if the rewards are worth it. This is why a program’s user interface cannot be complex to achieve simple results, but it can be complex to achieve complex results (as long as such results aren’t needed very often).”
One of the ongoing themes of this article is accessibility, also called universal design, which refers to providing access for all users regardless of physical abilities. As we go through each article, we will look at accessibility guidelines that relate to the topic at hand. Nonetheless, before looking at specifics in the following articles, we need to understand the overarching principles that underlie those specifics. We can, with thoughtful universal design, provide access for everyone. Why should we bother, when the vast majority of our visitors don’t have physical limitations? The foremost reason is for humanitarian purposes it’s the right thing to do. Furthermore, many accessibility initiatives support usability for all visitors. For instance, choosing high-contrast colors to ensure they are legible to those with color vision problems can also render the site easier to read for other visitors with no such impairments.
Yet another reason is that Section 508 of U.S. government regulations requires that technology used within the U.S. federal government be accessible to people with various disabilities. Many local and state governments follow suit and may refuse to do business with non-governmental business organizations that don’t comply voluntarily. The general rule for web sites is that they should provide identical content in accessible formats whenever possible, or equivalent content in a different format when not. We can do so by providing compatibility with a variety of techniques and devices used by people with disabilities. For instance, screen-reader technology can read the words of a web page to people with visual disabilities, as long as we make sureour page is compatible with those screen readers.
Types of Disabilities
What general types of disabilities should we consider?
- Visual impairment. This can range from the extreme of total blindness to a less severe color-blindness or the loss of visual acuity encountered by people as they age. For the former, we accommodate screen readers by including such design elements as column headers on tabular data and alt attributes on all images. For folks with a milder disability, we make sure that our pages don’t override any browser setting that they have specifi ed for larger type or custom colors. (Fortunately, modern browsers won’t allow our specifications to override the visitor’s preferences.)
- Hearing impairment. If we provide content sound (sound that is more than just for entertainment it carries information as well) such as an instructional video or an audio fi le of a lecture, we should provide an alternative for the hearing impaired. For instance, we could offer captioning or a link to a text transcription.
- Physical impairment. Visitors who can’t manipulate a mouse should be able to use the tab key or control keys to access all interactive elements, such as navigation.
Accessibility Guidelines
Although we will defer more specific guidelines until the articles that discuss therelated design elements, some overall suggestions are in order here:
- Design the site to accommodate adaptive technology such as screen readers. Test your site with at least one popular screen reader, such as JAWS or IBM Home Page Reader.
- Provide choice and adaptability in methods of use. For instance, one person might prefer to use a mouse, another visitor the tab key, and yet another visitor the access keys (function or control keys). The more choices we can provide, the more visitors we can accommodate.
- Any time an image, animation, audio fi le, or video carries information content (as opposed to just entertainment value), provide the information in an accessible text-based format as well, either with captioning or by linking to a text-only page.
- Design the site to be simple and intuitive. Eliminate any unnecessary complexity.
- Separate structure from format. For instance, use HTML to identify structural elements such as headers, using standard header tags.
Move content formatting to CSS, where it can be overridden by visitors. Format a document so that it’s still legible (though not necessarily as visually appealing) even if the style sheet is disabled.
- Ensure that pages are still usable when scripts, applets (small programs, usually written in the Java programming language), or other programmatic objects are turned off. If impossible to do that, provide equivalent information on an alternative page.
- Be cautious about creating an Adobe Flash-only page. Although more recent versions of Flash can render a page more accessible than prior versions, some accessibility support is still incomplete. Additionally, the visitor cannot override visual settings like she could with an HTML-based page. If you do build a Flashonly site, you should provide a link to a text-based alternative.
- If, after best efforts, you cannot create an accessible page, provide a link to an alternative page that uses W3C technologies, is accessible, has equivalent informationand functionality, and is updated as often as the original (inaccessible) page.
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06272010
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