Summary

Innovation is the process of continuously improving the usability and quality of the web to meet and exceed user expectations.

Innovation involves finding creative or unique ways to improve the elements of the web or engage the web's audience.

Key Innovation Practices

Key Innovation Resources

Discussion

A web is not usually a static product that can be deployed and then abandoned. New information, users with unique needs, and opportunities for additional services constantly are introduced to the online world. Therefore, you'll need to use a process of continuous innovation to improve and expand your web's service, usability, consistency, and the integration of the web with all your organization's communications systems.

An Innovation Overview

The innovation process works closely with the other processes of web development. In fact, innovation is a complement to each of the web-development processes; it draws information from them about the current web and identifies new needs for the web to serve users. No one person on a web-development team is designated as the single web innovator. Instead, all the team members participate in innovation.

Innovation involves using a variety of techniques and strategies that evolve as web developers gain experience. This chapter describes techniques that relate to the characteristics and qualities of the web as a medium and the needs and experience of users. These techniques should help web developers creatively meet the needs of users, continuously improve the web's quality, and use technological innovation to increase the web's usability.

Web Innovation Techniques

Innovation is a creative, dynamic process that can't be fully encapsulated in a series of how-to steps. Instead, innovation is a repertoire of skills in creatively monitoring and understanding user needs and developing web structures to meet those needs.

Because the World Wide Web is dynamic, highly enmeshed, competitive, and often a continuously available, global service, developing a web never stops. The information space in which a web operates constantly changes, and, possibly, the domain information of a web changes. The amount that a web changes depends on users' needs, the nature of the domain information, and other factors such as the growth of competitive webs. The key to approaching this need for continuous development is to keep all web-development processes operating. After plans are made for a web, those plans should be reevaluated and adjusted to new conditions. People working on the planning, analysis, design, implementation, and promotion of a web need to communicate with each other, work together to accomplish many tasks, and continuously strive to improve the web for the good of the user.

Monitor the User's Information Environment

Web developers should keep informed of similar or competitors' webs that may share the web's purpose and audience. If appropriate, developers might consider collaborating with competitors' webs so that each organization can focus on a specialization and share the benefits of greater user service.

Web developers also should be aware of their audience's professional societies, trade shows, conventions, periodicals, related Net resources, and changing interests. Web developers may have to accomplish this through off-Web channels (on the Net) or through print magazines, journals, and newsletters. Knowing what information the audience is involved with and how its members' interests and pursuits are changing can help identify new needs that a web may serve.

Web developers also should be aware of how their users perceive the web. Building a web's reputation for quality, comprehensiveness, and user service can help increase a web's value in the audience's perception. A continuous process of defining what value means for users can help a web improve. How does a web's objective statement imply a definition of value for the user? Do the users share this definition? Innovators can consider how to integrate the user's definition of value into the planning and analysis processes. In this way, innovators can aggressively meet the defined audience's needs and purpose, and identify new services before competitor webs.

Continuously Improve Quality

Web innovators should seek to creatively meet and exceed user expectations and needs by improving the web's value, accuracy, currency, competitiveness, and user interest. Increasing these aspects of a web is a multiprocess effort: the techniques described here blend with and borrow from the other processes of web development.

What Is Quality for the Web?

Quality is a difficult term to define specifically for a particular domain or product. Total Quality Management, derived from W. Edwards Deming's principles, includes ideas such as continuous, measurable improvement and multidisciplinary responsibility for improving a product. Information quality has much in common with product quality. Like a physical product, information should meet user needs (satisfy the customer). Meeting this principle in specific information-development practices and web-design features, however, is not so straightforward; the type of needs a user has varies greatly from application to application. A general statement for web information quality can be made, however.

Web Quality
Quality as a goal for web information involves a continuous process of planning, analysis, design, implementation, promotion, and innovation to ensure that the information meets user needs in terms of both content and interface.

The definition of quality that appears here can be useful as a touchstone for developing specific practices.

Quality therefore is more a process of continuous improvement than a set of characteristics of a finished object (a web). Due to the dynamic nature of Web information and the context in which it exists, any outward sign of a web's quality can change over time even if the web itself doesn't change.

An overall principle such as this can guide an information developer to view quality as something emerging from processes. More specific characteristics describing the quality of products resulting from these processes can be stated, however. Quality Web information is:

What Information Providers Can Do to Increase Quality

Specifically, the growth of Web information challenges information providers to increase quality in the following areas:

Innovation

Unceasingly work for innovative techniques used for a web's presentation and content so that it meets and exceeds the users' changing needs. Creatively experiment in nontraditional expression to exploit new hypermedia features and techniques that meet the users' needs. Adjust a web's development processes to allow for new ideas, approaches, and techniques, so that creativity can flourish.

Information Quality Web

As part of an effort to gather information about information systems quality, the Coombs Computing Unit of The Australian National University has created a page that points to some good ideas about improving the quality of networked information (see Information Quality).

Testing and Evaluation

During the analysis process, the existing web was evaluated for its usability. During the innovation process, these same evaluations can be done to invent something new or to identify a need for users that hasn't been met before.

Testing and evaluating user experience of a web is a way to monitor the web's overall health. If users get the information they need, the web is doing a good job. Maintaining a web at a high level of service, however, is not easy. A web innovator needs to make an effort to anticipate how to keep a web relevant to the audience's needs and to keep it accurate and complete.

To develop the quality of a web, results from the analysis process of the existing web can be a first step. The access logs of a web might show patterns of user interest that may be at odds with the planner's intent in building the web.

A web innovator also can directly contact users to find out what they think of a web with a survey form or through a voluntary email list. Here are some other specific innovation checks:

Content Improvements

In the course of improving processes for information retrieval, selection, and presentation, web innovators also can work on the following:

Advances in Technology

The excitement of the Web still is very much married to the glitz of new toys: new browsers, graphics techniques, integration with VRML systems, and advances in HTML features. These technological changes often can be very helpful to better serve user needs as well as to create or sustain interest in a web. Technical innovation should never be equated with progress, however. Improving a web sometimes can be accomplished best in redesign or more careful wording of the language on pages. Technological change also shouldn't be an end in itself; new technology sets up monetary as well as social barriers to access and has a risk and a cost associated with it.

One cost of technological change is web developer training and knowledge. Changes in HTML, possibilities for VRML, and other languages such as Java make training developers an ongoing process. Although web developers might grasp the technical operation of a feature in a short amount of time, the deeper integration of that feature into the design and delivery of meaningful service to users can take longer or might never occur. The hollow use of technical features for their own sake results in design problems such as K00L design that may stray far from user needs.

Other costs of technological change are passed directly onto the users of a web. If new multimedia features are added, users might need to have new hardware, software, and training in how to understand and use them. Already frustrated with installing upgrades and new releases of existing software, users might stop following a web into new technological areas and instead seek other webs that meet their needs at a lower cost.

As part of the strategic-, systems-, or policy-planning process for a web, planners might have made a decision about technological change rates for the web. Choices for proven technology give users consistent service and give web developers a chance to improve on their strengths, talents, skills, and artistry in working with reliable tools. A plan to build on proven technology follows a stable migration path for adopting new technological innovations.

A choice for cutting-edge technology might propel a web into the attention of audiences who are concerned with always having the latest in gadgetry. This path might turn off those who just want to get their work done or want to use proven technology to obtain information or interact. A path to follow cutting-edge technology might involve much risk and usually higher prices for the human talent and skills needed to work with these technologies.

A choice even beyond cutting-edge technology-for bleeding-edge technology-is the most risky. Bleeding-edge technology involves systems that are just in the early development stage and not even ready or proven for reliable work. In-house development of bleeding-edge technology is extremely expensive. Although it might interest the earliest innovators in a field, practical users might be turned off by the unreliable service it offers. Web innovators should be aware of such bleeding-edge technologies that might be of interest to users, but should use them only if users need what they can offer, and they can balance it with the risks and costs.

Overall, innovators can turn to the original plans for the web-its purpose and objective statements, audience, and domain information-and should question whether proven, cutting-edge, or bleeding-edge technological change is best for the audience.

Wrap-Up

The dynamic characteristic and the competitive quality of the web drive the need for constant innovation to meet the needs of a web's audience. With all processes of web development operating continuously and working together, an innovator can monitor the users' information environments to identify users' new needs.

An important technique for web innovation is continuous quality improvement. Quality web information meets users' needs for correctness, accessibility, usability, understandability, and meaningfulness.

Testing and evaluation by observing users or feedback from users plays a large part in analyzing as well as identifying the new needs users have.

A web's content can increase as a result of accurate sources, fresh links, reduced redundancy, improved annotation, and alternate views of information.

The choice to employ new technology in a web must consider the trade-offs among user needs, cost, and risk. Choosing fast-breaking, bleeding-edge technology often might not be the best course.

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2023-06-19 · John December · Terms © johndecember.com