Comic Relief raised over £63 million in 2007 to help poor and disadvantaged people in Africa and the UK.  Organisations large and small give their services to Comic Relief for free to help them achieve their vision of a world free from poverty.  This year System Concepts joined in by providing usability and accessibility guidance for the red nose day website, helping to make it effective, efficient and a pleasure to use for people of all abilities.

Leslie Fountain, Director of System Concepts explains “The website development was well underway when we first got involved so we decided the best way to help was to conduct expert reviews of the usability and accessibility of the rednoseday.com site.”

Usability

The usability review was guided by our Web Experience Assessment Tool which measures users’ experiences with websites and scores them on eight different dimensions.

                  
A spider diagram like this one gives a clear overview of how well the website performed.  The rednoseday.com site scored well overall with particular strengths in efficiency and visual design.  The lower scores, typically those under 60%, represent areas which could be improved, here navigation, consistency and feedback.

Our report identified usability issues under each of the eight dimensions and made recommendations for improvement, prioritised to suggest which would give the greatest benefits.

For example, good navigation and feedback are very important in making sure users know where they are on a site, how they got there, and how to get back to the previous page.  We identified that the use of ‘breadcrumb trails’ was inconsistent, feedback showing users clearly which page they were on was not always present, and there was not a clear link back to the home page.  We recommended a complete and consistent ‘breadcrumb trail’ and navigation tabs which highlight or change colour to show which page the user is on.

Accessibility

We carried out a second audit on the Red Nose Day site using our Accessibility Guidelines, which combine the WCA Guidelines with our own wide-ranging experience, to identify and prioritise issues which would make it difficult for people with disabilities to access the site.

The biggest problem we found was for people whose means of accessing the website did not allow them to see graphics or run programmatic objects such as scripts or applets.  This group includes not only those who are blind or partially sighted and use screen readers, but also people accessing the site by mobile or who do not allow scripts for security purposes.  For these people the site was unusable because navigation relied on the graphics or scripts and no alternative was available. 

We recommended that all graphical items should have a meaningful ‘alt’ text and that scripting for navigation bars should be replaced with standard HTML.  These changes alone would allow most users to access most parts of the website, although other changes were needed to get the site to a high level of compliance.

Rachel Moriarty, Project Manager within Comic Relief’s new media team says “Accessibility and Usability were areas that Comic Relief was really keen to embrace for Red Nose Day and sought System Concept’s expertise to help with these areas.    The methodology Systems Concepts employed broke the analysis of our website into different areas, providing clear explanations for each problem area with examples and recommendations for making improvements.  This approach was very clear and easy to understand and also helped us to build knowledge for future projects.   Working with System Concepts provided us with a fresh approach, highlighting usability and accessibility problems that we would not otherwise have considered.  Due to their input, we addressed many of these for Red Nose Day and are already building on these insights and working with Systems Concept’s again for our next big fundraising event, Sport Relief.”

Leslie Fountain concludes “We enjoyed working with the team at Comic Relief and are delighted to be involved in the design and planning stages of the Sports Relief website for 2008, to help them put users of all abilities at the centre of their design process from the start.”