Monday 11th - Tutorials and Workshops

onday dawned, and with it a day of tutorials and workshops. Delegates had to nominate their first three choices of these sessions via email some weeks previously, so this was a day without deliberating over what session to attend.

Designing and Maintaining a highly Usable Site

This half day tutorial was run by Jakob Nielsen of Sun Microsystems, and gave an overview of the design decisions behind the public and the internal Web server systems created and maintained by Sun Microsystems. Initial worry that this would be half a day on someone telling us why Sun's Web site/Sun itself was so great proved to be unfounded, and a lot of reasoned Web design strategies were discussed in the session.

Jakob gave a summary of the analysis of the use of Sun's public Web site. Some of the many points of interest were:

People used a considerable number of different browsers to look at the Sun site. For each of these browsers, significant numbers of people used different versions; several versions of Netscape and Mosaic, for example, were used in the same time interval by large numbers of people.
It became evident that if the pages linked from the home page were not as impressive/stylish as the home page, then people were put off, or spent less time, looking at those pages (no matter what their content).
Simple changes to the look and interactiveness of the pages had a dramatic effect on how people navigated through the Web site. For example, when the "What's new" button was moved to a more prominent position on the main page, it resulted in a 416% increase in the number of people who used it.
Users were often reluctant to scroll; links to other pages at the bottom of a page were usually traversed less than those at the top of the page. Evaluation of how users "read" the Web pages showed that many of them were reluctant to "read" in the conventional sense, preferring to home in on links (and the surrounding text) to other pages.

A summary of some of the considerable log analysis was given, showing the changing patterns in the geographic distribution of users, how the pages were browsed, access growth rates.

One aspect of the design criteria that was stressed several times during the morning was the desirability of "directing" browsers to the Web pages they would most likely want to go to, rather than just presenting them with a long list of linked items on the Web site.

(Trying to) email home

In the afternoon and evening, the on-line rooms were opened to conference delegates. The two rooms consisted of some 80 PCs and Macs. Boston City Library

All the computers allowed telnet access so you could (remotely) read and send email from your account back home. Inevitably, all of the computers also allowed Web access, with most having Mosaic and Netscape mounted. Having said that, it was noted that as the conference progressed, an assortment of browsers gradually appeared on many of the machines, probably downloaded and set up by delegates who did not use Netscape/Mosaic as a first choice browser.

The first big disappointment of the conference came when trying to make a telnet connection back home, to read/write email. Connecting before late afternoon to the UK was impractical; even in the early/mid evening, characters crawled slowly across the telnet interface, frequently freezing for several minutes at a time. Frustration was further fuelled by seeing people from other European countries, such as Sweden, France and Italy, typing away more or less in real time. Web access to the UK was also very slow; in the time it took to access the home page of a Manchester university, a group of Swedish delegates at the adjoining PC managed to explore all of the Volvo Web site.

The one advantage of the relatively slow connection to the UK was that it was easy to spot other UK delegates in the on-line rooms; they were usually the frustrated delegates apparently not doing anything :-)