1996-01-17: designing for the largest number of users

Summary of January 17 Web-Walkers meeting (UNC-CH)

Summary of January 17 Web-Walkers meeting

Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 10:53:42 -0500

From: Judy Hallman (hallman at gibbs.oit.unc.edu)

To: web-walkers at unc.edu

Cc: "Elizabeth A. Evans" (uevans at email.unc.edu)

Subject: Summary of January 17 Web-Walkers meeting

To Web-Walkers:

Summary of January 17 meeting on
designing for the largest number of users

Preliminaries:

The group agreed to begin a series of weekly meetings to redesign the
campus home page. The next meeting was planned for January 31, but I was
not able to get a room, so I changed it to February 7, 3:00, room 209
Manning. I have to wait until after Jan. 31 to block off 3-5 in 209
Manning for additional weekly meetings.

Discussion, lead by Elizabeth (Libby) Evans

Libby distributed the following handout:

----

Walking a Tightrope on the Web: How to Design a Web Page for your Audience

UNC-CH Web Walkers, January 17, 1996

Netscape, Mosaic, AOL, lynx, or others? Do you care what your users use?

If you do care, how do you maximize the benefits to the users while
minimizing staff time?

eg. If you keep text and graphics versions of a page, how are the two
versions maintained?

Graphics: How long is a user willing to wait for a nice graphic?

Should large graphics be inline or links?

Should you define alt text for images for non-graphical users?

How do you take a document designed for print and redesign it for online
access? Do you try to design it to be read, scanned, or printed? Are
there differences?

What kind of organizational structure will make information easy to find?

How do you create a structure that's useful to both internal and
external users?

(Are internal and external users likely to need a different organization?)

What do you do about equations?

----

Discussion:

What browsers are people using? Stats can show the browser. OIT should
provide info on the browsers people are using when they access
www.unc.edu.

There are 25,000 UNC-CH free e-mail accounts on Isis. The people
accessing the Web from these accounts are often using Lynx.

Statistics indicate that 70% of Web users are using Netscape; but the
remaining 30% that are not using Netscape are a LOT of accesses.

Some commercial Internet service providers (like America OnLine) use
their own browsers. How can those of us on campus designing Web pages
check what they look like with these browsers? Perhaps there should be a
"lab" on campus that's equipped with a large variety of browsers for web
page designers to use to check out their pages.

Remember that people don't always download graphics, even if they can.

Libby mentioned the Java users group meeting the night before. Attendence
was good.

Libby brought up her bookmark file
(http://www.cpc.unc.edu/~evans/ww.html) and started with
Health Sciences Library Calendar of Classes Events
(http://www.hsl.unc.edu/classes.html). The image map for the
calendar is very nice, but it is difficult for Lynx users to find the
schedule, because the calendar is not replicated in text.

While we were talking about Library calendars, I mentioned the nice
calendar of worldwide Library-related events
(http://www.hsl.unc.edu/libcal96.html) maintained by Barbara Tysinger
(btysingr.hsl at mhs.unc.edu). If a conference has a Web page, the calendar
links to it. (I had a bad link to this page in the campus Web; but the
correction from Barbara was waiting in my mailbox and I've fixed the
link).

Libby showed the really nice job that Geography has done with their table
of theses (http://www.geog.unc.edu/thesis.html) and dissertations. The tables
done for Netscape are very nice. But a text version is also provided
(http://www.geog.unc.edu/thestxt.html).

Someone mentioned that the content of tables isn't searchable; someone
else suggested including a keyword section for the content of a table in
the text.

Libby showed the home page for University of Tennessee Knoxville
(http://www.utk.edu/). The design of the home page is very nice in
graphics mode, but nor very good in Lynx. She noted that the FindIt button
is both at the top of the page and at the bottom of the page, making it
easy to find. In Lynx, [IMAGE] appears VERY often. The page would look
better if the used alt="".

Somehow we got into ethics -- what you keep in your logs and what you do
with the information in the logs. It's possible to pretty clearly
indentify who is looking at what, and that's at least not ethical, if not
illegal.

It was also pointed out that resolution and color can vary between Macs
and PCs, and from one machine to another. Background colors, can make text
difficult to read. Check, in particular, how the links look. As an aside,
Libby pointed out that it is possible to make text *look* like a link
when it is not -- why would anyone want to do that???

Two of Libby's bookmarks had the same name (Point Communications Corp.)
but brought up different pages (http://www.pointcom.com/text/reviews/h.htm
and http://www.pointcom.com/text/reviews/hmfm.htm). Remember that your
title will become the name of the bookmark, and make sure your title
describes the page.

As an example of a particularly well designed page, Libby showed the page
of Davis Rust (http://ezinfo.ucs.indiana.edu/~drust/). Look at this one in
both graphics mode and with Lynx. Note that the Welcome graphic (picture
and graphic of his name) is replaced by just his name in the text only
version, and the nice graphic word "Welcome" is replace with the simple
word "Welcome" in the text version. His page looks very good in Lynx as
well as in Netscape.

On the other hand, Primo Angeli (http://www.primo.com/) was designed only
for graphics mode. The Lynx version is all caps and difficult to
read. It says:

IF YOU ARE NOT USING A

NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR BROWSER,YOU CAN OBTAIN ONE BY [2]CLICKING HERE

How do you "click here" with a text only browser? Some people actually
try to do that.

While Libby typically does not like backgrounds (they can be irriatating),
she really liked the way the background is used in the Morehead
Planetarium home page (http://rtpnet.intercenter.net/~dataman/) -- black
with little stars. That home page has a pleasing effect. The white text is
large enough to be easy to read on the black background.

Question asked but not answered: How do you specify the true Carolina Blue?

Next Libby showed the Hall of Fame at http://www.pointcom.com/text/reviews/h.htm.
You can get ideas from this site for good design and also for bad design.
It's not clear who does the judging; looks like one person.

General discussion:

Printing and Duplicating is using Adobe Acrobat and providing instructions
on how to download the reader. UNC-CH users who have publications printed
by P&D can ask to have those publications provided in PDF format for
display by Acrobat. OIT puts up both formats, Adobe Acrobat and html.

Hardly anyone in attendence had dealt with equations. Libby said that one
professor put up both graphics and Lynx version of math formulas.

We briefly discussed the need to have some pages in the campus Web that
use the latest and greatest technology (like Java and VRML) to attract
people to the UNC-CH Web.

There was considerable interest expressed in the new Java group, headed
by Jason Purdy (jason_purdy at unc.edu). John Smith (computer science) is the
faculty advisor. Java applets are being developed on a CS machine.

Three or four of the attendees had also attended the Java meeting (Jan.
16) and were impressed. Looks like that group will meet every Tuesday
evening at 7:00 in Sitterson 011.

Attendees:

Deb Aikat, JOMC, daikat at email.unc.edu

Tom Bowers, JOMC, tom_bowers at unc.edu

Andy Broughton, abrought at email.unc.edu

Brenda Carney, btc.ce at mhs.unc.edu

Kathleen Crook, Sheps Center, kathleen_crook at unc.edu

Frank Di Mauro, UNC-Hosps, fadim at med.unc.edu

Kathy Edwards, OIT, kathy_edwards at unc.edu

Elizabeth Evans, CPC, uevans at email.unc.edu

Howard M. Fried, refried at email.unc.edu

Drew Gilmore, Morehead Planetarium, drewg at email.unc.edu

Marybeth Grinnan, UNC Printing Services, pdmhg at bullhead.adp.unc.edu

Judy Hallman, OIT, judy_hallman at unc.edu

Mark Ingram, Development, mark.dev at mhs.unc.edu

Bob Kessler, Chemistry, bob_kessler at unc.edu

Amy Kreiling, Comp Sci, kreiling at cs.unc.edu

Tong Liu, CPC, tongliu at unc.edu

Lori McRae, Computer Science, mcrae at cs.unc.edu

Scott Niven, ADP, esn.admin at mhs.unc.edu

Charles Pulliam, chas_pulliam at unc.edu

Tom Rutledge, OIT, rutledge at unc.edu

Cheryl Ward, CPC, cheryl_ward at unc.edu

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Last modified:
1996 Jan 22

Suggestions to:
(judy_hallman at unc.edu)