A Success Story in Usability: The University of Michigan Business School Web Site

Tom Brinck, Seunghee Ha, and Kara Lock
DiamondBullet
home page

7:00pm
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
411 West Hall (Ehrlicher Room) directions...

(NOTE: because people will be at the CHI conference on April 9th, we have moved the meeting to the following week.)

The University of Michigan Business School has recently created a new web design to update their visual look, consolidate disparate designs into a single consistent framework, and make the site considerably easier to navigate. This new site will be online by the time of the talk.

Diamond Bullet was brought in last May to lead the redesign and code the new design. Our process was grounded in user testing of over 150 target users and target metrics that would determine the success of the site, by aiming to achieve user performance levels that exceeded other leading business schools.

Through a process of iterative design of both the page design and information architecture, informed by user performance and reactions in user testing, we achieved impressive scores for the site, both in terms of objective performance and users' subjective reactions. For example, the user success rate at completing tasks on the previous site was 61.7%, on the best competitor site it was 76.1%, and in our final design we achieved a 92.5% success rate.

Our "pervasive usability" process kept the project on budget and on schedule, and produced a site that is demonstrably more effective and more compelling to the Business School's audience.

About the Speaker

Co-founder of Diamond Bullet, Tom Brinck now serves as Vice President and Chief Usability Officer, heading the company's usability and accessibility initiatives. Backed by the conviction that technology should be painless, empowering, and accessible to everyone, Tom is an avid author, researcher, and innovator in the fields of human-computer interaction, usability, and accessibility. A people person with a passion for good design and human-centered technology, Tom ensures that every Diamond Bullet product and service meets the company's high standards for technological innovation and ease of use. Tom believes that good design respects users, with all their very human limitations and diverse needs in mind.

Tom's work with Diamond Bullet caps an impressive career dedicated to understanding the potential of human-centered technology. His career in the U.S. and abroad has included work for Apple Computer, Toshiba, and Bellcore. He is the founder, with Stephen Markel, of RetroAccess and the co-creator of AccessEnable, an innovative software platform designed to evaluate and improve website conformance to a variety of public and private accessibility standards. He holds advanced degrees in cognitive psychology and computer science from the University of Michigan and Stanford University, respectively. He is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Michigan School of Information and the principal author of Usability for the Web: Designing Websites That Work, along with numerous other publications. Tom is a frequent speaker on usability issues nationwide, and maintains a usability website at simplytom.com.