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Spirituality and Usability

This research explores the usability of an existing religious website and compares the original design with an enhanced version. Users' evaluations and feedback are analyzed to improve the usability of spirituality and religious websites.

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Spirituality and Usability

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  1. Spirituality and Usability Aaron GarrettJacqueline HundleyDavid Thornton

  2. 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

  3. Background • Few resources on spiritual/religious websites • View users ethnographically like elderly or disabled • Community design and social interaction • E-commerce • Cognitive factors

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. E-Commerce • Fong presents a model of how fundamental personnel work together in an online business Marketing, 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

  8. 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

  9. 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

  10. Seacoast Ministries Case Study • Local Christian group – Seacoastministries.org • Educational materials for churches • Community interaction • Training for custom certifications

  11. 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

  12. 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

  13. Original Design • Dull • Confusing

  14. Modified Design • Cleaner • Simpler • Unified color scheme • “beachy”

  15. 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.

  16. Experimental Setup • Participants also responded to a questionnaire about each site. • The questionnaire attempted to measure user satisfaction using several Likert scales.

  17. Results 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?

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

  19. 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

  20. 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.

  21. 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.

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