Spirituality and Usability

Aaron GarrettJacqueline HundleyDavid Thornton

Introduction

Preliminary case study to enhance the usability of an existing religious website– Experiment compare original and enhanced site– Users’ evaluation of sites

Sites dealing with religion and spirituality– Created by believers with little experience due to

low financial profit by designers– Possible high customer base

Background

Few resources on spiritual/religious websites– View users ethnographically like elderly or

disabled– Community design and social interaction– E-commerce– Cognitive factors

Community Design / Social Interaction

Important to developing web-based community of believers

– Require honest social interaction– Share personal experiences– Facilitate empathy– Privacy and trust

Bob’s ACL Bulletin Board– Shared common injury needing rehabilitation– Common love of sports– Need for empathy – frustrated and depressed

Community Design / Social Interaction

Four-components of design criteria for online social interaction systems (Girgensohn and Lee)

– Common ground Shared understandings among collaborators Use of personal profiles

– Awareness Good orientation and navigational cues Differentiate unread/new posts from old

– Enablers Opinion polls, rating systems, or discussion boards to self-determine

group’s course of action– Place-making

Discussion board policies may emerge over time...self regulating

E-Commerce

Spiritual and religious organizations are entering the world of online business

Profitability not necessarily a goal of spiritual websites, but a strong business model allows flexibility services offered

Many factors contribute to the success and failure on an online business

Traditional retail activities may not be the same online

E-Commerce

Fong presents a model of how fundamental personnel work together in an online businessMarketing, content, transactions, customer service

– Attract customers into the primary site Advertising via mailings, emails, banners on other sites Sales > temporarily change of information on the site

– Interact – customers interest in the information on the site Static or dynamic information

– Act – capturing and processing an order Shopping carts, order tracking, taxes, shipping, payments

– React – customer service Help desk or webmaster email

E-Commerce

Customer assurance– Small unknown online businesses at a disadvantage

Methods – Assurance protocol

Timely acknowledgement of transaction by seller Known trusted third party vouches for trustworthiness of small

business

– Umbrella assurance Known entity acts as a host for the small business

Cognitive Factors

Website developers should utilize a user-centered design process

– Meaningful items vs. unfamiliar jargon– Concrete words vs. abstract words– Retrieval cues and standardization

Humans use known problem solving strategies and – Can block solving a problem by using wrong interaction– Design should allow for correction without penalty

Seacoast Ministries Case Study

Local Christian group – Seacoastministries.org

Educational materials for churches Community interaction Training for custom certifications

Design Goals

Look and feel– “Wow”– “sea coast” motif– Not “business-like” or “too religious”

Clearer navigation Accessible to large demographic (many

types of users) Easily maintainable and modifiable

Cascading Style Sheets

Simpler, more manageable HTML code Documents look good at any resolution Finer and more predictable control over presentation Define the look of a site in one place, modify whole

site by changing just one file Older browsers can still see pages People with disabilities have better access Simple syntax – uses a number of English keywords

to specify the names of various style properties

Original Design

Dull Confusing

Modified Design

Cleaner Simpler Unified

color scheme

“beachy”

Experimental Setup

Each site was evaluated to determine how long it took users to complete a given task.

Participants were asked to perform the same five tasks for each site.

Times for each task were recorded. Tasks were chosen to represent typical

information of interest to most users.

Experimental Setup

Participants also responded to a questionnaire about each site.

The questionnaire attempted to measure user satisfaction using several Likert scales.

Results

Comparison of Average Task Completion Times

0.0

20.0

40.0

60.0

80.0

100.0

120.0

1 2 3 4 5

Task

Ave

rage

Tim

e (m

s)

.

Original Site

Modified Site

How much does it cost to receive a year's subscription of the Baileys' newsletter? What telephone number should be called to reach Seacoast Ministries?

Results

Comparison of Satisfaction Survey[1 = Strongly Agree, 4 = Strongly Disagree]

0.0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

3.5

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Question

Res

pons

e

e

Original Site

Modified Site

This website provides enough information about the services offered. The purpose of this website is always clear to me.

Remarks

Seacoast Ministries “requested” that specific design features be included.– Dealt primarily with look-and-feel– Time-consuming to implement

Two design considerations had to be omitted:– Empathic communities– E-commerce

Conclusions

Modified site was successful in decreasing users’ times to complete tasks (easier navigation)

Users felt that modified site made information accessible and clear (consistent design)

Anecdotally, users generally felt that the modified site was more aesthetically pleasing.

References

Andrews, D. C. Computer Supported Cooperative Work Audience-specific online community design: Supporting community and building social capital. Communications of the ACM, 45, 4, (2002), 64-68.

Badros, G. J., Borning, A., Marriott, K., and Stuckey, P. Constraint cascading style sheets for the Web. Proc. of the 12th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology , ACM Press, (Nov 1999), 73-82.

Fong, S. and Se-Lang, C. Modeling personnel and roles for electronic commerce retail. Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGCPR conference on Computer personnel research. (April 2000), 45-53.

Girgensohn, A. and Lee, A. Making web sites be places for social interaction Proc. of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. New Orleans, LA, (2002), 136-145.

Hewett, T. T. Tutorial: Cognitive factors in design: overview and some implications for design. Proc. of the 5th conference on Creativity & cognition C&C '05. ACM Press, (April 2005), 318-321.

Lie, H. W. and Saarela, J. Multipurpose Web publishing using HTML, XML, and CSS. Communications of the ACM, 42, 10, (1999), 95-101.

Lyon, G. E. Assurance protocols and small Web retailers. Proceedings of the 2000 ACM symposium on Applied computing, 2, (March 2000), 904-908.

Preece, J. Empathic communities: reaching out across the Web. Interactions, 5, 2, ACM Press (1998), 32-43. Andrews, D. C. Audience-specific online community design: Supporting community and building social capital. Communications of the ACM, 45, 4, (2002), 64-68.