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WAI Site Analysis Summary

Version: 2005.03.21

The WAI Site Task Force (WSTF) is redesigning the WAI Web site following a user-centered design process (UCD). This document summarizes the analysis work. Details of the analysis are linked below and listed on the WAI Web Site Redesign Project page.

Vision

The redesigned WAI Web site:

User/Audience Analysis

User/audience analysis is documented in:

  1. The User Group List includes 32 user groups that are organized as:
    Primary user groups are:
    Most of the users fall into two categories:
  2. The User Matrix lists the Web experience, HTML knowledge, disability knowledge, Web accessibility knowledge, and frequency of use for each user group.
  3. Three primary Personas are: Additional personas include Web developer, Web accessibility specialist, manager, student with a disability, educator, legislator, and reporter user groups.

User Analysis Key Implications

User/audience analysis reveals the following aspects that will heavily influence the site design:

  1. Finding: There are a large number of different users with very different characteristics and motivations.
    Implication: Some content should be presented for novice users - especially the highest level documents (including home page and navigation pages) will need to err on the side of novice users. Some advanced, technical documents can focus more on the experienced users. However, because novice users are likely to end up on a more advanced, technical document (from an outside link or search), it would be good to make it easy for them to get to more simple, introductory documents.
  2. Finding: Almost all users have low knowledge of disability and Web accessibility when they first come to the site; for example, users don't know the basic language and concepts of Web accessibility, WAI, W3C guidelines.
    Implication: Important to support novices: for example, have very basic introductory material "up front" as well as linked from other documents.
  3. Finding: Many users do not visit the site regularly; rather, they visit it often at first or when they are working on a particular issue, and then visit it seldom or not at all other times.
    Implication: In making specific design decisions, easy-to-use for first-time and infrequent users is higher priority than efficient-to-use for frequent users (with the possible exception of areas and documents targeted for working group members).

Task/Purpose Analysis

Task/Purpose analysis is documented in:

  1. The Task List includes more than 50 tasks.
  2. The Task-User Matrix table shows how much of the time spent with the WAI site is spent doing specific tasks, by each user group.

Information Architecture Analysis

Information architecture work is still in development. A draft site map is available.

Current Site Heuristic Evaluation

WAI Site Heuristic Evaluation documents an evaluation of the current WAI Web site.

Document Information

Please send comments to: wai-site-comments @ w3.org

Editor: Shawn Lawton Henry. This Web page is is under development by the WAI Site Task Force of EOWG. Last updated $Date: 2005/03/22 04:29:56 $ by $Author: shawn $

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