A valuable lesson in web usability (and humility)

Skills

Learning from mistakes

Background

In the early 2000s, I was fortunate enough to be working as a “Intranet Developer” for a large organisation. In this role I used Notepad, FrontPage, ASP and other advanced technology to create intranet sites. One site remains etched in my memory – an intranet site for a regional office in Holland, Europe.

It was this web site that made me consider the people that use our products and services, and how their needs require understanding and addressing.

Challenge

The stated goal was to assist local staff to engage with the wider organisation by reading news, events, site information and other useful content.

The real goal was to create a “rich”, “compelling” website with as many cool features as we could add.

Actions

We stayed for late nights in order to complete the project, the site was launched and looked great.

The site design has been lost – but website design in 2000 looked something like this

Results

It was a defining moment in my career when we examined the site logs, weeks later, after hearing no feedback from users.

First, we found that 99% of traffic was from Australia and not Holland. To our horror, we realised that nearly all the traffic was only from our building.

The site – for all its javascript timezone clocks and automated events system — was not used.

We determined the reasons from local staff:

The site offered no content or features that would have been of some use to its users
The site was not offered in Dutch, only English.
The local staff already had a very popular site

It struck me then that all these factors could have been addressed by working with the people who were going to use the system to make sure it was useful and usable.