Techlink :: Tech Practice :: Digital Technology

One of the biggest lessons web designers learnt from the bursting of the Dotcom Bubble in 2001, was that if an organisation is to benefit from going online, its site has to be more than fluff, smoke and mirrors. Users and potential users of a site have to be able to use it easily and not be turned away by unnecessarily complicated or time-consuming demands. For the creators of Te Ara, it was a lesson they took to heart.

Te Ara is the new official encyclopedia of New Zealand. The previous national encyclopedia was published in 1966. Instead of printing volumes of hardcopy, the Government's Ministry of Culture and Heritage (MCH), is publishing the work online – the first time any country has created an official national encyclopedia in this way.

The 1966 encyclopedia was a large work – together, its three volumes weigh as much as a small child – even so, it is dwarfed by the new edition. Te Ara will contain over two million words of text and more than 20,000 images, recordings and movie clips. The challenges of creating such a massive work are legion. A massive amount of content has to be researched, written and edited; images, both still and moving, have to be sourced, credited and manipulated and then slotted into place. The technology used to create and operate the site has to be stable and able to cope with ever-growing volumes of content and link with a constellation of other sites in New Zealand and offshore.

But of all the issues the MCH and its technical partners had to consider when designing the site, the issue of usability dominated. To succeed, the site had to be usable and useful for a wide range of users. To ensure this came about, Te Ara's design process was user-centred from the very beginning.

COP Brief development

Even before the formal design process began, project leader Dr Jock Phillips spent a lot time looking at websites, figuring out what worked and what didn't. Dr Phillips, a historian, had previously developed displays for Te Papa – the Museum of New Zealand, and had a keen understanding of the need to present information in a clear and engaging way.

To create Te Ara, the MCH partnered with Wellington web design company Shift and Wellington software company Optimation. Shift developed the "look and feel" of the site – the front-end graphics and user interfaces – while Optimation developed the invisible infrastructure that underpins and drives it.

The team put a lot of early effort into identifying, then understanding, who would use the site. While it was recognised that a very diverse group of users would find their way to the site, particular attention was paid to students as it was felt that not only would the site be used as a teaching and learning resource, but by pitching the site to students, the needs of the wider user group would be well served as well. (In focussing on students, the development team had selected a demanding audience. Students, because of their familiarity with computers, particularly gaming, expect systems to be fast, intuitive, predictable and adaptive – in other words systems that are consistent with their other computing experiences.)

A great deal of effort was put into getting into the heads of students and figuring out what made them tick, so designers could base their decisions on what they knew, rather than on what they assumed. Questionnaires were used for a simple Task Analysis .

Task analysis is the process of identifying and understanding users' goals and tasks, the strategies they use to perform the tasks, the tools they currently use, any problems they experience, and the changes they would like to see in their tasks and tools.

COP Outcome development and evaluation

Students were probed about their use of the internet. How often and where did they use it? What sites did they visit? What were their motivations and expectations? The design team also wanted to know what kind of school projects the students did and the kind of online and offline processes they used to do their research.

During development, a representative cross-section of well over 100 student test subjects was used to solve design problems and to answer specific questions. Student input was used to shape initial ideas and evolve these ideas into workable solutions as the site developed.

A market researcher conducted sessions with primary school students, Years 9 to 10 and 13 students, university honours students and students from Māori Immersion Schools, such as Te Kura Kaupapa. To make sure her work was useful, the researcher created a number of personas. Personas are a design tool, used in many types of industrial design, consisting of a set of stories that capture the goals and motivations of characters representing discrete user groups. Personas are a quick and effective way of providing a project team with insight into user needs.

Armed with an understanding of their target "clients", the design team set to and began designing the information architecture of the website. How best to organise Te Ara's information to maximise its accessibility? In the 1966 edition, content was presented in alphabetical order, with some subjects grouped under broader headings, such as "Defense" or "Education". Te Ara means "the pathway". The new encyclopedia offers many different pathways to data, and there lies the challenge in accessibility. These knowledge streams branch and intersect like the neurons in a brain. To be of any real value, the site has to allow users to locate information easily, if not intuitively. To achieve this, the team created mental models of their sample users, using a technique called card sorting. Mental models describe the way users expected information to be categorised and organised and named on the website.

COP Outcome development and evaluation

Card sorting is quick and cost effective way of creating models. Test subjects were given a deck of cards representing all the pages of content on the website. Then each user organised the cards into groups that seem logical to them and named them with appropriate titles. The design team used special software to analyse the results and built up some simple site structures. The exercise was repeated several times, using a mixture of school students and adults. The differences in mental models observed between the subjects were small enough to allow a single information architecture to be used.

Dr Phillips says card sorting will continue to be used as the site grows. Card sorting will be particularly important as the science-based sections are developed, as the expectations of the science writers and experts may well be different from those of students who come to the site with a lot less science knowledge.

Card sorting by itself didn't produce the architecture of the site, but it did give the team a good starting point. To test early ideas, the team produced some quick and very basic prototypes, no programming or content management systems were involved, just very basic HTML with a few hyperlinks, pictures and content samples, and tested on representative groups of users.

The team wanted to make sure that things were going to work from the students' perspective and catch anything tricky or confusing early on, rather than wait for later stages of development when the cost of making changes was higher because code would have to be changed and links upgraded and tested. This rapid prototyping allowed generations of design iterations to be tested in days. Once the team had a prototype that they were happy with, they moved into the interface/visual design and programming stages.

While this stage was highly technical, the focus of the work remained firmly on the user and usability. Usability of a site is strongly related to the extent to which a user's mental model matches and predicts the action of the software system.

A software system may be represented by three models: the Implementation Model, the User's Mental Model, and the Designer's Model. The Implementation or Programmer's Model is the way a system works from the programmer's perspective; the User's Mental Model describes the way a user perceives the system works; and the Designer's Model is the way the designer represents the programme to the user, including presentation and interactions.

The Design Model or interface determines the usability of the software by mediating the interaction between the user and the behavior of the system. To maximise usability, the interface designer hides the system model and indulges the user's mental models – a person doesn't need to understand how a new car is engineered to learn to drive it.

Poor system design places too many demands on users and forces them to adjust the way they work to accommodate the system. The result may be a minor frustration or inconvenience, but in complex systems, such as an airplane or a nuclear reactor, the results can be disastrous.

COP Outcome development and evaluation

Since mental models simplify reality, Te Ara's designers were challenged to simplify, simplify and simplify again. Their aim was to make the site's basic, most frequently used functions immediately apparent, while making its advanced functions less obvious. A good, uncluttered, interface that supports users' tasks fades into the background and allows users to work efficiently. In some ways, the designers' aim was to make their work invisible.

The concept of usability also includes learnability and retainability. A good interface allows users to build on prior knowledge and get started quickly and make progress immediately. In the past, the onus was on a user to learn how a software application worked. Today, it is up to system designers to analyse and capture user expectations and build these into their programmes. The 1966 encyclopedia didn't come with a 100-page user manual. Nor does Te Ara. (To help MCH staff built up their knowledge of how to run the site, Optimation participated in a programme of skills transfer, training and mentoring.)

As the work progressed, test subjects were given sets of tasks to perform that they were likely to want to achieve on the live website. After observing subjects completing the same set of tasks, it became clear that some aspects of the site worked well, while others caused enough people to struggle to warrant further refinement. As a result of this research, a prioritised list of improvements and enhancements were drawn up and put into place.

Besides catering for those seeking information, Te Ara's designers also had to cater for the people working on the site, adding and editing information. The site had to be straightforward enough for non-technical researchers, writers and editors to use productively. Writers throughout the country contribute words to Te Ara ; their words are accompanied by a wide range of visual, sound and film resources from public and private collections in New Zealand and offshore, and all this material is compiled by a small MCH team in Wellington.

COP Planning for practice

To simplify things, the visual design and the content of the encyclopedia are kept separate. This allows Te Ara's editorial staff to update and maintain the site's content without interfering with its layout. Where possible, tasks have been automated for ease of use and consistency. Besides making the whole structure more robust, this de-coupling of information from its presentation means content can be easily published in alternative formats, such as book form or as a CD-Rom.

The question of accessibility also had to be addressed by the creators of Te Ara. The standard Web browser on a PC is the by far the most common type of way of accessing online content, but there are others, and these are particularly important to people with disabilities. People with disabilities use a wide range of technologies to access Web content, these include: speech or voice browsers, and text-only browsers. In addition, a wide range of assistive technologies are available to help people with computer accessibility. Examples include: Speech recognition software, which can be useful for those who have difficulty using a mouse or a keyboard; Screen magnification software, which magnifies what is displayed on the computer monitor, making it easier to read for vision impaired users; Keyboard overlays which can make typing easier and more accurate for those who have motor control difficulties. Screen reader software, which can read out, using synthesised speech, either selected elements of what is being displayed on the monitor (helpful for users with reading or learning difficulties), or which can read out everything that is happening on the PC (used by blind and vision impaired users).

Work on the site remains very much user-centred. Commercial sites provide their owners and operators with fairly immediate feedback: customers either use the site or they don't, and revenue reflects this. However, on a site like Te Ara, it is a little more difficult to gauge user satisfaction. But if early reactions are anything to go on, the user-centred design of the site has been successful. The site – officially launched in February 2005 by the Prime Minister – has already been recognised with several awards.

COP Brief development

The sheer volume of material to be housed by Te Ara, combined with a publishing process that involves input from a variety of internal and external contributors, researchers, authors and editors, meant that a robust, scalable and flexible content and workflow management platform was required. In addition, the technology base had to be 'future-proof' and standards-based, given the long-term nature of the project.

The Ministry for Culture and Heritage (MCH) opted for a Microsoft-based solution, with the foundations being Microsoft Content Management Server (CMS) and ASP.NET. A Sharepoint Portal Server, Microsoft Content Management System, and Microsoft SQL Server are also part of the content management solution. Standards such as XML and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative were used to ensure interoperability and longevity.

Software company Optimation implemented, configured and integrated these software systems and custom-developed a number of .NET web services to handle specialised tasks such as automated content upload. Optimation also used .NET technology to build the 'engine' that underpins the public website.

One of Optimation's big challenges was designing a framework capable of accommodating and handling the massive volume of data Te Ara will eventually contain. The system also had to be flexible enough to deal with complex hierarchies of information and offer different ways to navigate and drill down through the content. The site's search engine had to cover many media types held not only in the main encyclopedia but also by the additional resources available through the site, such material from the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand and the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. It also has to be effective in either Māori or English, and return results across a number of different categories – 'Te Ara ', 'Images and Media', 'Biographies' and '1966 Encyclopedia'.

The content crawling and indexing features of SharePoint Portal Server were used to provide the search facility, but some specialised fine-tuning was needed to provide the kind of search functionality required by Te Ara. Optimation used advanced search techniques within the Sharepoint programming library and customised the logic and functionality to enable search features such as: Boolean search using 'and', 'or', 'not', 'near' and exact phrases, and the use of keywords to increase the relevance of search results. Optimation used MS Indexing and SharePoint components to exclude the contents of footers, citations and picture captions from search results. Entry synopsis which included text before and after search words, so results are presented as short text abstracts.

Publishing Te Ara, involves input from a variety of internal and external contributors, researchers, authors and editors. The site's underlying software has to be straightforward and intuitive enough for non-technical contributors, researchers, writers and editors to use productively, and without constraining their creative options. This was achieved by designing templates and workflow processes that leveraged familiarity with the standard Microsoft desktop environment.

The publishing process involves generating, editing and approving content in SharePoint, and then transferring that content to the Microsoft Content Management Server (CMS), with both a staging server and a live server being used. Te Ara's website pages are generated dynamically using the information stored in the CMS database. The pages are generated by ASP.NET templates which contain presentation logic that pulls content from the database. This de-coupling of information from presentation makes changes to layout simple and straightforward, and the entire architecture more robust.

Where possible, tasks have been automated for ease of use and consistency. All the functionality and logic of the content transfer system is contained in the publishing system, which was custom-built by Optimation to run on the staging server.