One of my favorite challenges is to create the information layout of web sites.  I’ve worked on similar projects numerous times, and each situation has it’s own caveats.  However, especially working on sites in the present day, the one major fact that I have learned is that people, when using the web, don’t read.  They scan.

Jakob Nielson, a well-known usability professional, has published findings indicated that people rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan picking out individual words and sentences.

When working on re-creating a major website used by fiscal specialists at the UW, we had to make some decisions as to how information was displayed.  Some of the questions that were posed included:

• How much do people want in one visit?  How connected is the information?
• Am I overloading my site visitors?  How long is the web page?
• What’s the download time?  (We have many users who are overseas and may have expensive internet time)
• Will people want to print?  How much will they want to print?

Here was the original site.
Notice how long the page is based on the scroll bar!

Working to re-create the site with an easier (and more modern) site, there were a few objectives in mind.  This included:

• Breaking up large documents.  We wanted to think “topics,” not “book”.  This required the division of web content by time or sequence, task, people, type of information and to consider the kinds of questions people ask
• Decide how much to put on one web page.  Considerations  were placed on deciding how much information people wanted in one visit, how connected the information was, how long the web page was and if users will have the desire to print the information for future reference

The new site was a much more organized view of the same information.  However, we were also able to incorporate University branding into the site as well.  In addition, multi-media content was added, such as e-Learnings and handouts to help aid users to use the financial system.

Feedback was phenomenal.  Users appreciated the simple breakdown of information, and the yellow callouts on the right side of the screen for additional aids.

With escalating concerns about technology’s impact on the environment, understanding the concept of sustainability in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is becoming increasingly important. Many definitions of sustainability exist, but perhaps researchers Kristin Hanks, et al. put it most succinctly by defining sustainability as the viability of our collective future. Once only discussed in smaller panels or sessions, entire conferences and publications in HCI are now devoted to the topic. For example, in 2009, User Experience Magazine published a special issue titled, “Designing a Sustainable world” and in 2011, the International Professional Communication Conference will explore the theme of “Communicating Sustainability.”  It’s becoming clear that the next generation of HCI practitioners must be knowledgeable about sustainability and its implications to the field.

Our reading list hopes to impart some knowledge on the topic. To guide our choice of readings, we first identified three different perspectives that would be important for practitioners to consider:

• Present and future users
• Supporting sustainable behaviors
• Environmental and global repercussions of technology

Empirical research in the fields mentioned can be difficult to locate, as the overall topic of sustainable design is still in its infancy.  However, these articles we selected each exemplify one of these perspectives and, taken together, serve to form a coherent glimpse of what sorts of HCI-related empirical studies are being conducted in sustainability.

This is our two-minute elevator pitch ’madness style’ presentation to help introduce our paper.

View the complete report, Designing a Viable Future: Sustainability in HCI (.pdf).
Co-written with Robert Racadio.