WWW 6 Conference Notes

April 7-11
Santa Clara, CA
http://www6conf.org

Contents

Workshop Session: Addressing the Toughest User Interface Problems

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User Centered Design: Making Usability a Level One Problem

Most WWW development efforts ignore the user. The rush to get to market or production ignores the user, the ultimate customer, in the process. This usually results in having to build the whole system over again.

The workshop's organizers, Human/Computer Interface specialists from Bellcore, advocate a design process where everyone involved in the creation of the Web site or application: managers, coders, graphic designers, marketers and users work together.

The workshop attendees broke into teams and worked on two design problems using the following process:

Observations

Panel Discussion: Managing Large Web Sites

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Some questions to ask about your site:

http://www.monster.com

Monster Board is a job/resume listing service. People enter their resumes, companies list jobs. Companies and people search for matches. Their traffic increased tenfold over the past year. About 10% of their hits are database searches.

They were experiencing pending process storms which killed their performance. To fix it they did three things:

  1. Run monster.com off the biggest servers they could find. Two high end Digital Alphas. Farms of large numbers of NT boxes are not cost effective here because of the high per CPU cost of Oracle used for web serving.
  2. Multithread the server. HTTP requests are handled by Open Market's server which supports multithreading.
  3. Tune Oracle. This was hard: buy memory, index the right tables, find and pay for the best consultants.

They also use a private back channel for moving log files and updates to and from the server.

http://www.msnbc.com

MSNBC is the partnership between Microsoft and NBC. The web site operates in parallel to the Cable network. They use a server farm of some 100 Compaq Proliant NT boxes. Most servers shovel pages, some handle Microsoft SQL server requests.

The bottlenecks they have been dealing with include:

The Web and broadcast people have to learn each other's cultures. In broadcast TV dead air will cost you your job. The Web cannot make no-downtime guarantees.

http://www.wraltv.com

WRAL is a network affiliate (CBS?) in the Research Triangle of North Carolina. Their Webmaster talked about two problems.

User Storms

Random events cause regional Web sites to get hammered. If there's a major storm or news story in North Carolina, WRAL's server will feel it.

Content Management

http://www.concentric.net (a.k.a.: http://www.heavensgate.com)

So what happens when a customer kills themselves in a mediagenic fashion?

Concentric is an ISP which sells dialup and Web hosting services. They also provide connectivity for the Web TV and Sega Internet Services from points of presence across the country.

If you are supporting a large number of customer domains, there's the possibility that one will become famous or popular for one reason or another. (Concentric apparently hosts some of the popular adult web sites.)

After the mass suicides in Rancho San Antonio, and the realization the cult had a web site. Concentric's traffic on a general purpose server started increasing. They responded by 'hot swapping' the domain and content onto a dedicated NT server.

Panel Discussion: Payment Systems

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Panel discussed a base model of electronic commerce, the current costs and limits of transactions and how the Secure Electronic Transactions standard proposal may improve the situation.

A Base Model

  1. Shopper Connects with Merchant over Internet using Secure Sockets
  2. Shopper sends merchant their credit card number and order.
  3. Merchant processes shopper's request by communicating with a credit card processor over dedicated, secure line.
  4. Processor arranges for payment, minus interchange rate, of merchant.
  5. Shopper pays the issuing bank.

Problems with the Base Model

There are two problems with this system. Both add to the merchant's overhead costs.

The merchant must arrange for a connection to a processor (Verifone?) The other is the interchange rate collected by the processing agency.

The Interchange Rate

The Interchange rate is a risk premium paid by the merchant to the credit card processor. It is supposed to cover losses from fraud and theft. The rate varies from 1 to 5% of the total transaction. Currently, almost all Internet transactions are charged the 5% rate. This is the same rate which telephone-based catalog sales transactions pay. Since the merchant does not have the physical card, the person or their signature, the opportunity for fraud is great.

Secure Electronic Transactions (SET)

The SET protocol proposed by Visa and Mastercard is intended to replace step three (above) with secure transactions over an open network. The key technology is public key encryption using certificates.

Certificates

A certificate is a document attesting to the identity of a party. For instance, I can get a digital certificate from Verisign, Inc. attesting that a public key I use to sign mail and transactions is really and truly mine. If you trust Verisign, then you trust my signature. I don't have to use Verisign, just an authority you trust. That may be a bank, the Postal Service, or private individuals.

Panel Discussion: Good Web Design, an Essential Ingredient

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This panel put a group of designers and human/computer interface gurus with a very opinionated audience.

Out of that group, I found Jakob Nielsen's advice the best:

He breaks down the site design problem into three areas. I took the comments the audience made and slotted them into those three areas:

  1. Management
    • Consistent guidelines for content creators.
  2. Design
    • No Clutter
    • No Frames
    • Downloads fast.
    • Doesn't break the browser.
    • No gratuitous backgrounds or animation.
    • Gives user absolute (1 of 5) instead of relative (previous, next) links. (Note: not talking about absolute v. relative URLs.)
    • Consistent across sites.
  3. Content
    • Three or less clicks to get to what you are looking for.
    • Knows user or audience and their expectations.

Closing Session: Accessibility Issues Wrap Up

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Gregg Vanderheiden of the University of Wisconsin's TRACE center summarized the discussions on accessibility to the Web by the disabled:

"Disability access helps you do what you're trying to do."

Operating Under Constraint

Anyone has to operate under different modes. Vanderheiden give examples: you can't use your hands or look at a screen while driving, it's hard to hear in a loud environment like a mall or pump room. But these are places where we want to take the next generation of electronic access tools, so we can be nomadic.

So, he argues, if you build systems which can be used by the disabled, you are most of the way to having nomadic systems. People building web sites which can be viewed by people with nomadic tools can get most of the way by designing for the disabled. The screens on Newtons and Cellphones aren't going to handle detailed graphics well, and the processors and memory won't be up to handling complicated page layouts. Simple design works for Nomadic and Disability access systems.

Vanderheiden gave examples from other areas of how building systems for use by the disabled benefited everyone: the Jacuzzi, vibrating pager, audio cassette, talking caller ID, completion delay, closed captioning.

Building accessibility technologies for web will benefit everyone as well. These techniques may lead to tools for indexing graphical and audio data.

He finished by reminding the audience that functional disability increases in a population as it ages, so even if we are not disabled now, we may be eventually.