What's going on at the UPA? It's not Usability and it's not very Professional.

In July 2003 the Usability Professional Association publication "The Voice" re-appeared after a few months absence.

The new producers of the "The UPA Voice" have given the newsletter a re-paint and have managed to break a number of usability guidelines (and links) in their haste to modernise it.

I produce a list of links to articles from this newsletter and have had to edit all of my UPA article links since the regime change.

For example: under the old regime the "Why ask Why in a Usability Evaluation?" article by Larry Wood had this URL:
[ http://www.upassoc.org/voice/vol2no2/technique.htm ]

The new URL for this article is now:
[ http://www.upassoc.org/upa_publications/upa_voice/volumes/2/issue_2/technique.htm ]

The old URL used to have 10 backlinks in the Google index, including links to UPA articles from Usable Web (It was Keith Instone who inspired me to produce UsabilityViews.com).

There are also old style links in the EServer TC Library that are now broken.

Don't the designers at the UPA realise what damage they are doing by destroying these connections?

Here is some advice on linkrot from the W3C:

We just reorganized our website to make it better.
Do you really feel that the old URIs cannot be kept running? If so, you chose them very badly. Think of your new ones so that you will be able to keep then running after the next redesign.

and some more advice from Mr Nielsen:

At other times, it becomes necessary to re-architect a site and impose a new structure. Even then, the rule continues to be: you are not allowed to break any old links.

As linkrot is not the only problem that the UPA are having with their re-design, here is a useful tip from the Usability.gov guidelines that are promoted in the current issue of "The UPA Voice".

9.5 Provide Descriptive Page Titles

Guideline: Put a descriptive, unique, concise, andmeaningfully different title on each Web page.

Comments: Title refers to the text that is in the browser title bar (this is the barfound at the very top of the browser screen). Titles are used by search enginesto identify pages. If two or more pages have the same title, they cannot bedifferentiated by users or the Favorites capability of the browser. If usersbookmark a page, they should not have to edit the title to meet thecharacteristics mentioned above. Remember that some search engines only list the titles in their search resultspage. Using concise and meaningful titles on all pages can help orient users asthey browse a page or scan hot lists and history lists for particular URLs. Theycan also help others as they compile links to your pages.To avoid confusing users, make the title that appears in the heading of thebrowser consistent with the title in the content area of the pages.

Note: At time of writing all of the articles in the November issue of the newsletter had this page title : [ UPA Voice - Sep 2003 Cover ]
Hopefully these page titles have now been changed.

Comments

[Geoff Sauer]

Thanks for your comments. As the director of the EServer TC Library, I'm consistently amazed at how badly usability professionals--who offer advice to web designers--are themselves with fixable issues such as link rot. (Of course, because our site's been around since the days of the Gopher, we've seen a lot of links come and go.) But nothing I've ever written to organizations such as UPA seems to have helped. More power to you for saying what you do, so articulately.

We've fixed all the links to the UPA and UPA Voice we could, and simply deleted a dozen or so, when we couldn't find the new URL addresses of some resources from the old UPA site.

--Geoff, sighing

[ben]

I am continuously amazed by how often you see such tings on sites that are about usability and the like. How can we expect others to follow usability advice when it is not adhered to by our own. I can understand why the url's were changed but surely the old addresses could have simply been left in place with a simple non-obtrusive redirect?
Interesting to see if they heed your comments - but it sounds like it will be too late by then as you will have done the hard work already.
Shame on them is all I can say - off to see if I can find any more problems on the site...
! tanks for all your efforts !

[Matthew Oliphant]

We've got a couple of link on the User Experience part of the site that are still broken, too. Have you let the Voice people know about your post? upavoice_fb [at] bunnyfoot [dot] com.