1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

206 Journalism Online
Ensure the whole package works within the online environment
and seeing what your users think before going live.
Interface and usability
You must ensure that the whole package works within the
online environment – see what your users think before going
live.
You may have settled on your chosen layout and filled it with
content and navigation, but you still have some work to do. You
need to be sure that it works, particularly within the interactive onscreen
environment of the web. Steve Krug defines usability as
making sure ‘that a person of average (or even below average)
ability and experience can use the thing – whether it’s a web site,
a fighter jet or a revolving door – for its intended purpose without
getting hopelessly frustrated’.
Krug’s first law of usability, indeed it is the title of his book on
the subject, is ‘Don’t make me think.’ He believes that a web site
should be self-evident (i.e. it should be immediately obvious what
it is and how to use it) or at least self-explanatory (i.e. just
requiring a little thought to work it out). This is because users
scan web pages, choose the first reasonable option they see and
usually muddle through rather than working out just how the site
works. Faced with this, ‘if web pages are going to be effective,
they have to work most of their magic at a glance’.
Krug believes that anything that makes people think adds to
their ‘cognitive workload’ and increases the ‘mental chatter’. The
sort of things that make users think include:
ambiguous names for sections or functions;
links and buttons that are not obviously clickable;
confusing options for utilities such as search engines; and
poor navigation.
The answer is to consider these and other issues from the outset
but also to user test your site. Designers lose perspective. Users
give it back.