A recent column by web useability expert Jakob Nielsen should be of particular interest to trade unionists. Nielsen is an internationally recognized speaker and author who has pioneered studies in how people actually use the Internet, leading to some major shifts in the way websites are designed.

While Nielsen and others have carried out many studies of how older people and the very young use the net, only now he has the numbers on what he calls “mainstream” users, aged 25 – 60, and there are implications for trade unions in his research.
The most chilling statistic is this one: people’s ability to use websites declines by 0.8% per year. As he explains, “a 40-year-old user will take 8% longer than a 30-year-old user to accomplish the same task. And a 50-year-old user will require an additional 8% more time.” Nielsen says that this occurs “mostly because they spend more time per page, but also because of navigation difficulties”.
This matters for trade unions, as the average age of our members is considerably higher than that of the general population.
I saw some of this myself at a recent training session I ran for trade unionists from a dozen Asian countries. Each sat in front of a computer screen and all of them had computers back home.
When I asked everyone to go to a particular web page it took approximately ten minutes for the entire room to get on to the same page. I found that about half the people had difficulty locating and filling in the address bar in their web browser. Others were challenged by the notion of scrolling down a page.
And the average age of these unionists was considerably lower than that of the typical British trade unionist.
Nielsen predicts that over time, this age differentual will disappear as increasingly people will have been using the net for much longer periods of their lives. But for the next decade or so, it’s critical for those who design and manage websites aimed at trade union members to take this research into account.
The only way to know for sure if your website is useable, Nielsen says, is to test it with real users. I wonder how many of our unions actually do that.