Position paper for The Emerging Science of the Web
Universal Usability: A grand challenge for web science research
Ben Shneiderman (draft 9/11/2005)
The promise of a universally used World Wide Web will not materialize from wellintentioned statements. Fundamental technology research breakthroughs are needed to
ensure that every user can derive the full benefits of information access, social support
through communication, and fulfilling self expression that are possible in a Web
environment.
We have the opportunity to promote creative contributions from young children and older
adults, from struggling novices to proficient experts, and from low literacy to multilingual users. Human diversity is a strength, and accommodating this diversity is a grand
challenge that we should enthusiastically embrace. It will enrich our technology, advance
our basic research, and bring the greatest benefits to the greatest number.
Ensuring Universal Usability has at least three baskets of challenges:
Technology variety: Support broad range of hardware, software, and network access
Enable access to the web by users with slow and fast network connections, small
and large displays, new and older hardware, diverse software platforms. There is
strong progress in web access design for small mobile devices, but many
breakthroughs are needed. Compression algorithms have made many applications
for music, photos, and video possible, but many further possibilities exist to
broaden access for novel applications.
User diversity: Accommodating users with different skills, knowledge, age, gender,
disabilities, literacy, culture, income, etc
Design for diverse users can take modest extra effort, but there is growing
evidence that accommodating the needs of diverse users can improve designs for
all users. There is a good lesson from civil infrastructure design. Sidewalk
curbcuts were required to benefit users with wheelchairs but they also benefit
parents with children in strollers, delivery workers with large loads, and users of
skate boards, scooters, and Segway transporters. Similarly electronic curbcuts,
could benefit many users. For example, enabling user control over color palettes
to help users with color vision deficiencies also helps when lighting conditions
change, projection devices distort color, and limited display devices must be used.
Novel strategies for usability testing with diverse users are needed.
Gaps in user knowledge: Bridge the gap between what users know and what they need
to know
No matter what level of computer experience and domain knowledge a user has,
there is often a need to learn something more when using a web site. Rapid,
flexible, user-controlled strategies to enable a wide range of users to acquire new
knowledge are still needed. Current online help strategies are ineffective,
especially in challenging situations, such as life-critical information provision,
voting, and e-commerce, where high success rates are required. Multi-layer
interfaces that enable users to start simply and gracefully evolve to more
complexity are one solution and animated narrated demonstrations are another.
What further strategies are possible?
Selected References
Chadwick-Dias, A., McNulty, M. and Tullis, T., Web Usability and Age: How Design
Changes Can Improve Performance, Proc. ACM Conferences on Universal Usability
2003, ACM Press, New York (2003), 30-37.
Christiernin, L. G., Lindahl, F., and Torgersson, O., Designing a Multi-Layered Image
Viewer, Proc. 3rd Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordCHI 2004),
ACM Press, New York (2004), 181-184.
Hochheiser, H. and Shneiderman, B., Universal usability statements: Marking the trail for
all users, ACM interactions 8, 2 (March-April 2001), pp. 16-18.
Horton, Sarah, Access by Design: A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers,
New Riders Press, Indianapolis, IN (2005).
Keates, S. and Clarkson, P.J., Countering Design Exclusion Through Inclusive Design,
Proc. ACM Conferences on Universal Usability 2003, ACM Press, New York (2003), 6976.
Newell, A. F. and Gregor, P., Design for older and disabled people – where do we go
from here?, Universal Access in the Information Society 2, 1 (Nov. 2002), 3-7.
Plaisant, C. and Shneiderman, B., Show Me! Guidelines for producing recorded
demonstrations, Proc. Conf. on Visual Languages/Human-Centric Computing, IEEE
Press, Piscataway, NJ (Sept 2005).
Shneiderman, B., Universal Usability: Pushing human-computer interaction research to
empower every citizen, Communications of the ACM 43, 5 (May 2000), 84-91.
Shneiderman, B., Promoting universal usability with multi-layer interface design, ACM
Conference on Universal Usability, ACM Press, New York (2003), 1-8.
Shneiderman, B. and Hochheiser, H., Universal usability as a stimulus to advanced
interface design, Behaviour & Information Technology 20, 5 (Sept-Oct 2001), 367-376.
Vanderheiden, G., Everyone interfaces, In Stephanidis, C. (Editor), User Interfaces for
All: Concepts, Methods, and Tools, Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., Mahwah,
NJ (2001), 115-133.
Selected Web Resources
Universal Usability in Practice: Principles and strategies for practitioners designing
universally usable sites. Resources website
http://www.otal.umd.edu/uupractice/
Defining Universal Usability
http://instone.org/universalusability
http://instone.org/node/40?PHPSESSID=d785b97f1d3c4f9c749c0d405a5ff4df
ACM Conferences on Universal Usability
2003: http://www.acm.org/sigchi/cuu2003/
2000: http://sigchi.org/cuu/
European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics.
Workshops: User Interfaces For All
2004: http://ui4all.ics.forth.gr/workshop2004/
2002: http://ui4all.ics.forth.gr/workshop2002/
Springer Journal:
Universal Access in the Information Society (UAIS):
http://www.springeronline.com/east/journal/10209/
An international, interdisciplinary refereed journal that solicits original research
contributions addressing the accessibility, usability, and, ultimately, acceptability of
Information Society Technologies by anyone, anywhere, at anytime, and through any
media and device. Universal access refers to the conscious and systematic effort to
proactively apply principles, methods and tools of universal design order to develop
Information Society Technologies that are accessible and usable by all citizens, including
the very young and the elderly and people with different types of disabilities, thus
avoiding the need for a posteriori adaptations or specialized design. The journal's unique
focus is on theoretical, methodological, and empirical research, of both technological and
non-technological nature, that addresses equitable access and active participation of
potentially all citizens in the information society.