It’s true, today is the Usability Challenge 2008. I have chosen this page:
This is part of an ongoing project I am working on with the Lumina Foundation for education. This page is a new way of visualizing and finding a large amount of information.
Lumina has amassed a large amount of publications over the last several years that all are related to their mission which is helping people achieve their potential though education. People who work in this area directly with youth and adults who want to go back to college are called college access professionals, and my hat is off to these hard working people. Of course there are plenty of researchers who also work in this are, usually in education departments. I have met many in both groups. What all these people including Lumina’s staff members rely on is high quality resources like the ones that have been gathered, but how does one search through these?
Instead of search all of the resources have been tagged (with multiple tags for each item, usually including the year of publication). These tags have been presented in a tag cloud, where larger text means more things with that tag. The really new thing is that if you click on one item, it shows you how many things are in that tag, and you may keep on clicking on tags to narrow your results. The total number is shown at the top on view results tab. When you are ready you can click on that tab and see all the items. It is a very cool way of browsing, and the reaction of people once they understand how to use it is very positive. The problem here is that it is a new convention, with very few affordances. There is a “view demo” but most users don’t see it, and many users often have the volume down on their computer even when the video comes up.
The solution I am proposing for this particular page is a short lightbox popup that shows the user to click on a tag, then a second and then click view results, showing it graphically, textually and then quickly fading to a point on the screen with a question mark on it. Clicking on the question mark will replay it slower and have the option for sound as well as givign a link for an even lengthier explanation (which would be around the length of the current demo).
It will be important to use cookies so that once a user has successfully clicked on the view results tab the lightboxed pop-up will no longer show, and that the whole strategy be evaluated regularly to see if it can be improved and when people understand it well enough we can eliminate the lightbox, but keep a pulsing question mark or something like that.
I am also emailing the results of this to Lumina so that it can be implemented. Usability Challenge 2008 is in the can.