Usability Basics: Getting to Know Your Web Site Users

It is hard to design for people you don't "know." The goal of the following descriptions is to help developers see users as "real people" and understand the richness of the ways in which they use the web, too. These are personas, not real people, created by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Mr. Lee likes to shop on the web but he has difficulty reading the text on many web sites. He has a common visual disability: color blindness, which means he can not distinguish between red and green text. Often web site instructions use red text to indicate required fields or discounted prices. But all of the text looks brown to Mr. Lee. The websites that he prefers and bookmarks to use again use redundant information for color for example, asterisks (*) next to required fields or the names of the colors.

Mr. Yunus uses the Web to manage his personal finances and household services. He has several aging-related conditions: central-field vision loss, hand tremor, and a little short-term memory loss. He uses a screen magnifier to help with his vision and his hand tremor; when the icons and links on Web pages are bigger, it's easier for him to select them, and so he finds it easier to use pages with style sheets.

He finds financial websites with scrolling stock tickers distracting. They move too fast for him to read and sometimes the pages would update before he had finished reading them. Therefore he prefers sites that do not have a lot of movement in the text, and that do not auto-refresh.

On some websites new browser windows would pop open without notifying him, and he would "get stuck" on some pages, finding that he could not back up. Mr. Yunus has gradually found some sites that work well for him, and developed a customized profile at some banking, grocery, and clothing sites.

Mr. Jones is a reporter with repetitive stress injury (RSI) in his hands and arms who must submit his articles in HTML for publishing in an on-line journal. Since it has become painful for him to type, he uses a combination of speech recognition and an alternative keyboard to prepare his articles and he avoids using a mouse.

He has not been able to use the same Web authoring software as his colleagues, because the application that his office chose for a standard is missing many of the keyboard equivalents that he needs in place of mouse-driven commands. After some research, he found an authoring tool he liked with full keyboard support. Several of his co-workers have switched to the new product after they found that the full keyboard support was easier on their own hands.

Mr. Jones also likes websites that have implemented an access key feature. It lets him shortcut a long list of links that he would otherwise have to tab through by voice, and instead go straight to the link he wants.