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:
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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?
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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@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@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@email.unc.edu
Tom Bowers, JOMC, tom_bowers@unc.edu
Andy Broughton, abrought@email.unc.edu
Brenda Carney, btc.ce@mhs.unc.edu
Kathleen Crook, Sheps Center, kathleen_crook@unc.edu
Frank Di Mauro, UNC-Hosps, fadim@med.unc.edu
Kathy Edwards, OIT, kathy_edwards@unc.edu
Elizabeth Evans, CPC, uevans@email.unc.edu
Howard M. Fried, refried@email.unc.edu
Drew Gilmore, Morehead Planetarium, drewg@email.unc.edu
Marybeth Grinnan, UNC Printing Services, pdmhg@bullhead.adp.unc.edu
Judy Hallman, OIT, judy_hallman@unc.edu
Mark Ingram, Development, mark.dev@mhs.unc.edu
Bob Kessler, Chemistry, bob_kessler@unc.edu
Amy Kreiling, Comp Sci, kreiling@cs.unc.edu
Tong Liu, CPC, tongliu@unc.edu
Lori McRae, Computer Science, mcrae@cs.unc.edu
Scott Niven, ADP, esn.admin@mhs.unc.edu
Charles Pulliam, chas_pulliam@unc.edu
Tom Rutledge, OIT, rutledge@unc.edu
Cheryl Ward, CPC, cheryl_ward@unc.edu
To the UNC Home Page (judy_hallman@unc.edu)