webqem blog

The Hiser Group is one of Australia’s leading usability design firms - providing specialist consulting services for developing intuitive interfaces in any situation where humans interact with machines.

At webqem, we’ve had the pleasure of working alongside Hiser on a number of projects - from complex online banking solutions to government web applications. We asked Mike Floyd, GM of Hiser Sydney, about the changes he’s seen in Usability Design in Australia over the last few years.

What kind of projects are clients coming to you with at the moment?

We�re seeing lots of evaluation and testing, large scale information architecture work (building top notch menu systems), and some large scale redesigns.

What are you seeing now in web site trends compared with 12 months ago?

Sites that were designed three years ago have grown at a much faster rate than clients anticipated. Content has been poured into them and their structures are bursting at the seams.

Clients are coming to us asking for a major redesign, with the emphasis on developing a robust information architecture that will support the current content and provide for similar future growth.

How are users changing?

People are more net savvy these days. They are more likely to scan pages quickly looking for a piece of information, and their ability to understand page structure has improved. Expectations about where things should be on a page are beginning to standardise more.

What challenges are clients facing?

A perennial problem is managing content to support web sites and intranets effectively. Budgets are allocated to particular business units, but content is organised around users� topic interests. For instance, one section might contain content from six different business units.

Organisations are working out ways to work together better so that they can support this user-centred, topic-based approach. Typically, some kind of central oversight helps to keep this under control.

Another challenge is cross linking, for much the same reason. For instance, business units may be in competition with each other internally, for resources, or clients. Yet they want to promote their products or services to another business unit�s customers.

Sometimes they can be so internally focused that they don�t even see opportunities for this cross-promotion on their own sites. An organisation-wide approach to this can be very beneficial.

What kind of advertising on sites works best from a user perspective, in your experience?

The most effective type of advertising from a user perspective (based on the design evaluation sessions we run) has one or more of these characteristics:

• it contains a piece of factual information that�s clear and simple to understand.
• the information is relevant and useful to the user within that particular context.
• the information is seen as helping the user, e.g. to make a decision, or providing additional benefits.
• It is text-based and integrated into a task context that makes practical sense for the user (ads on Google pages are the prototypical example of this but promotions on commercial sites work in a similar way).

While it is not usually an explicit part of our design research, we do still observe a strong �tune-out� effect on explicit ad types such as banners, islands and skyscrapers. This doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that people don�t notice, �use� or click through on these ads in the real world.

Where is the Hiser business heading?

At the moment, we’re investigating some interesting new products and services at a more complex�level than simply usability.�Watch out for announcements in the next few months.�In the meantime, our business has expanded, adding new staff in all our offices, and our international work is also increasing.

If you want to know more about usability and why it’s so important for your web application contact Steve