Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

Weblogs are a form of website. The therefore apply to them, as do But weblogs are also a special genre of website; they have unique characteristics and thus distinct usability problems.

One of a weblog's great benefits is that it essentially frees you from "Web design." You write a paragraph, click a button, and it's posted on the Internet. No need for visual design, page design, interaction design, information architecture, or any programming or server maintenance.

Blogs make having a simple website much easier, and as a result, the number of people who write for the Web has exploded. This is a striking confirmation of the importance of ease of use.

Weblogs' second benefit is that they're a Web-native content genre: they rely on links, and short postings prevail. You don't have to write a full article or conduct original research or reporting. You can simply find something interesting on another site and link to it, possibly with commentary or additional examples. Obviously, this is much easier than running a conventional site, and again indicates the benefits of lowering the barriers to computer use.

As a third benefit, blogs are part of an ecosystem (often called the Blogosphere) that serves as a positive feedback loop: Whatever good postings exist are promoted through links from other sites. More reader/writers see this good stuff, and the very best then get linked to even more. As a result, with disproportionally more links to the best postings.

Some weblogs are really just private diaries intended only for a handful of family members and close friends. Usability guidelines generally don't apply to such sites, because the readers' prior knowledge and motivation are incomparably greater than those of third-party users. When you want to reach new readers who aren't your mother, however, usability becomes important.

Also, while readers of your intranet weblog might know you, usability is important because your readers are on company time. (As an example, see -- among the ten best intranets of 2006.)

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Creating a Universal Usability Agenda

“HAVA called for improved standards for voting systems and required that they allow individuals with disabilities to vote “in a manner that provides the same opportunity for access and participation (including privacy and independence) as for other voters.”

Disclaimer: The views in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Elections Assistance Commission or the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

How do you keep usability, accessibility, and user experience requirements on track while developing standards? It is part of the very nature of standards to focus on details—and in the process, to sometimes lose sight of the real goals. This is especially true when a standards-making process goes on for a long time, a situation is highly political, or most people are focused on technology issues. For over two years, I’ve worked in just such a situation as part of the (TGDC) creating federal standards for voting systems in the United States.

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) mandated the TGDC and its members—who include election officials, members of the US Access Board, and other experts, working with scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The TGDC is an advisory committee, so we don’t actually create regulations or standards, but offer our advice to the (EAC).

For most people, the mention of voting systems conjures up one of two thoughts: either the hanging chads of a terrible usability disaster during the 2000 presidential election or the need for paper audit trails and the importance of security in voting systems. With everything that people have written and said about security, transparency, trust, and the necessity of our being able to accurately recount ballots, it’s easy for something like usability to seem like a trivial “nice to have.”

But it does matter, and HAVA called for improved standards for voting systems and required that they allow individuals with disabilities to vote “in a manner that provides the same opportunity for access and participation (including privacy and independence) as for other voters.” (HAVA 301(a)(3)). The subcommittee on Human Factors and Privacy is responsible for drafting guidelines for usability and accessibility, according to the provisions of this law.

“Standards are all about details, and it’s only too easy to lose sight of the big picture while writing and debating specific requirements.”

This article looks at how we created an agenda to guide our work, including decisions about how to create the new requirements. Our approach is also applicable in other situations, such as creating usability guidelines for a product or focusing corporate attention on user experience.

Standards are all about details, and it’s only too easy to lose sight of the big picture while writing and debating specific requirements. A committee of appointed members not only brings together different perspectives, but means there will likely be process, political, and administrative overhead. Sound familiar?

To combat this entropy, we created a set of guiding principles and voted to adopt them as official Viewed as a whole, the following resolutions created an agenda for a universal approach to the usability and accessibility of voting systems:

• By agreeing on basic principles in advance, the committee could focus on the details of a complex standard with a shared understanding of its goals.
• By defining relationships and important dependencies at the beginning of the project, longer-term work could start immediately, so it would be ready when needed.
• The resolutions could span the development of several versions of the standard.

These resolutions provide both a high-level view of our usability and accessibility goals, as well as specific directives for how to organize the work. This was important for a committee that included many stakeholders, not just user experience and human factors experts. Most importantly, the resolutions define the full scope of the project, and we can use them as a measure of success for the completed standard.

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