The My School website, myschool.edu.au, has been heavily discussed in the media. While the website experienced some initial technical difficulties, it is the comparison of ‘statistically similar schools’ via the Index of Community Socio-Economic Advantage (ICSEA) that has been most widely criticised.
Deputy Prime Minister, Ms Julia Gillard claims that the website enables parents to make informed choices about their children’s schooling. However, informed choices are near impossible, without significant effort. In the field of usability, we’d say that the website does not meet with the users’ expectations, in this case parents, when trying to compare schools.
Why have a website that lets you compare schools on an index that doesn’t make much sense to you or does not reflect the practical decision making process when it comes to choosing a school? Rather the government has decided to provide parents with comparison data and selection vehicle they feel comfortable with.
Searching for a school on the My School website
Naturally, parents will want to easily and quickly navigate the website. The My School website clearly prioritises a school search on its homepage. The only way in is by selecting a school from the list that appears. If you don’t select one but type in a name yourself, the site doesn’t work.
Usability best practice tells us, make sure people know exactly what they need to do before they do it. If this fails then the next way to help users proceed is to ensure error messaging is useful. The website doesn’t do this and this makes it even harder for parents. I thought, “Why can’t I just type in my postcode like Domain.com.au or Realestate.com.au and get a list of results presented? Or like 131500.com where a ‘did you mean’ question is used to pinpoint the address.” I guess the website really would rather you did not compare schools, geographically.
Comparing schools on the My School website
While the website’s limited search functionality has been the centre of media attention (for fear that schools will be inappropriately compared), parents are only human and will ultimately want to compare schools according to their own basket of schools. Checking out one school in isolation seems reasonable but for parents looking to the website to help them make an ‘informed choice’ for selecting a school for their child, their needs are overlooked completely.
Vast improvements could be made in comparing schools that are ‘statistically similar’. Most of the schools automatically shown in the search results are not even in the same state. A simple table would be able to show most of this data but the My School website lists only the names of the school and their performance so parents know nothing about the type of school that is performing better or worse, apart from that it’s ‘statistically similar’. And what does that really mean? For those interested in the definition of ‘statistically similar schools’ the site offers not one but two glossaries to explain this, adding further confusion.
What parents really want is to compare a collection of local schools or even better select a group of schools to compare between. Ideally, this comparison should also show more than just the ICSEA scores such as NAPLAN scores and facts about the school. Hoping to find this information on the local schools page proves to be a disappointment. There is no comparison data but only a simple list of local schools. Printing each school page to compare is unadvisable as well, every page prints with a large grey area at the end of it quickly using up valuable ink. An optimised print version via a printer icon on each page would enhance the site’s experience considerably.
Of course parents should be made aware and are clever enough to know that one school differs from another on many different factors but how else are parents going to shortlist schools and make an ‘informed choice’ without greater flexibility in the search function. It’s inevitable that new websites will emerge that will give parents greater flexibility based on the data provided by My School website.
With a ‘real life’ comparison missing, the comparison tables presented are purely there for information purposes. None of the comparison tables allow parents to manipulate the data, such as sort or filter, to make it easier to interrogate and engage with.
Some more general issues that would improve the user experience
It is safe to say legends on the website are necessary to understand the tables however finding them is another story. Serious scrolling is involved.
The colours sometimes fit so well with the visual design of the website that it isn’t always obvious what they actually represent. Perhaps it can be made more obvious. Especially white does not stand out at all.
The use of an arrow icon (generally signifying a link) as a design element in the heading further compromises the user experience. Replacing the phrase ‘selected school’ with a more informal ‘this school’ makes the data more accessible.
Users may feel the font is a bit on the small side and use the enlarge font button present on every page. A useful tool however surprisingly this does not cover the most important information on the page - the comparison tables! This is not a good result as the data is still too small! Equally it is impossible to see if the text can enlarge or decrease anymore unless you click the icon a few times and realise nothing happens. It’s as though the icons are on the page because someone said they had to be but no-one actually understood why they are there!
Perhaps it was imagined the website audience would simply look at the school data and ignore the rest. This is obvious when you look at the other pages. For instance, the Resources page shows a list of PDFs hiding valuable content within these. The About page does not say much about My School and could be bolstered with content from the ‘About the My School website’ PDFs on the Resources page.
Overall, the idea of the My School site is great but its execution leaves room for improvement. Let’s hope some of our suggestions are included in their next update.
“A truly usable world can only be created when we all have insight into our own actions and the effect they have on others, forever.”
Last week I was chairing a conference about web redesign and social media. Darren Whitelaw from the Victorian Department of Justice is talking on social media with his organisation. His preso is worth a read:
It is great to see that social media has encouraged marketing, PR and web people to start talking about motivating staff at work! This social media stuff is all about people and the people doing it have to be:- authentic
- themselves (in their role)
- motivated
- friendly
- engaging
All this requies management to think about keeping people happy at work!
Will the need for a Human Resources department dissolve? Will that department simply organise pay and conditions? Will staff motivation and management fall on the line managers? Or will staff motivate and manage themselves through social media?
Too funny!
Thanks John from http://www.successfulresumes.com.au/Recently, I watched a usability test, with no eye tracking, and this happened:
The participant, describing an issue, said - ”You can see here how … “.
In the observation room my client and I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about! We couldn't see where his finger was pointing at the screen!
If we had the eye tracker running we could have easily seen what he was talking about, because, as he described the issue, he would have been looking at that exact spot on the screen. Seeing this real time video footage would have added so much more value to our experience as observers.
I can't understand how people can do usability testing without eye tracking!
Over the weekend I was alerted, somewhat strategically with a Twitter DM, to the launch of a new eye tracking simulation product by 3M. Per Nystedt from Tobii eye tracking was first expert eye tracking guru to blog about the 3M Visual Attention Service VS Real Eye Tracking.
Following on from Per’s post about I did a little more analysis.
3M’s perspective
Tobii eye tracking perspective
Very similar, no?
I undertook additional analysis, based on my incredibly popular post - You look where they look - that describes how facial imagery can be used to guide people’s attention in advertising. Using another image, from the same data set that Per quotes, I found that the 3M tool shows nothing about how people respond to faces looking in different directions.
Here’s the analysis
Per’s 3M markup:
And my 3M markup:
Almost the same!
Here’s Per’s 3M heat map
And my 3M heat map:
Almost the same!
Here’s Per’s real Tobii heatmap:
And the one I did from the same data set:
Completely different!! Of course the child is looking the text and drawing peoples’ attention there. Just like happens when someone stops in the street and looks up!
This 3M tool is not taking into account anything about how the image is designed (or photo taken) and seems to be treating the images in exactly the same way, given a simlar mark up area. This misses the key point about faces on designs! What about the emotion displayed, direction of view, context on the page, age of person in image, gender. Not to mention many other factors impact how someone’s gaze will be affected.
The only use that this tool will be is to have designers “consider” their designs during the design process. This is a helpful and noble endeavour, however, the tool provides no use beyond that.
Opportunity Analysis
For years I have been looking for a better name for the competitive review service we provide at Objective Digital. When doing this service, we generally ask the client for a list of sites they consider competitive to review.
Found a notebook I took to Vietnam in Dec 2006 when I started thinking about my new business. It started with a mind map of my future.
Happy to say almost all has been achieved already!
You wanna achieve something? Write it down…
Recently, I conducted a project with a client in a particularly political environment. This meant that every decision made during the redesign had to be well reasoned. The client needed to see exactly how each of the various features, functions and content items (FF&C) were understood during the research process. In particular they wanted to know;
”How do you choose the right cards to do a card sort with?”
This made me realise that, in many user centred design projects, the research is simply used to educate the Information Architect (a person). Often the client doesn’t see an overt relationship between the research findings and the final design choices. They simply trust the IA.
User centred research
To show the relationship between each research exercise and each FF&C I created a simple Excel spread sheet like this (click to enlarge).
Across the top I used the following headings:
Research types
- User focus groups suggestions
- User Survey support
- Online user forum support
- Competitor analysis support
- Stakeholder suggestions from Face to Face Research
- External stakeholder suggestions
- Recommended content & features (cards for sort shaded)
Strategic decisions
- Priority (1, 2, 3)
- Justification
- Additional info
- Phase
- Responsible
Features, functions & content
Then I listed all the possible FF&C down the left, including:
- everything on the existing site
- all the stakeholders’ business requirements (preferences)
- competitor ideas
- requirements uncovered and tested, and
- new ideas.
Next I simply went through each FF&C and checked whether it ‘passed’ each research ‘checkpoint’.
This can be done very quickly with a client in a workshop. That way the client has full visibility of what is in or out in the design, and most importantly, why?
The last thing to be done is putting a priority on each FFC.
Just last week I used it for another client. We did less research therefore there were less columns. Here’s a partially completed example (click to enlarge):
Table of content, features and functions in IA
This method was incredibly successful!
It allowed us to generate valuable and insightful discussion with the client and their senior colleagues. In this case, the colours on the left were used to show the priority that people gave in the cards sorted in the face-to-face workshops.
By looking at the spreadsheet you can very easily see if each of the things that stakeholders thought they needed was also a requirement of users. And also what new ideas users had come up with, and whether they are in or out. The list provides the information architect with a checklist, a heuristic framework, to ensure nothing is missed. It also lets the client quickly see that everything is justified.
How do you choose cards for a card sort? Don’t just guess, make use of all of the research that you have completed.