More testing would have prevented online exam-result frustration

They juggle multiple passwords and user IDs to access websites such as Bebo and MySpace for their entertainment just as naturally as their parents' generation picked up a copy of the Jackie magazine or dipped into an adventure book. Therefore, the thousands of pupils throughout Scotland who were let down this week by the Scottish Qualification Authority's (SQA) exam results website must have felt badly disappointed and frustrated. I am sure the SQA's online results service was meant to be a big step forward in the service it provides. But children place so much hope in the outcome of their years of study at school, that the SQA should have made Herculean efforts to ensure its online results delivery was as good as it could have been. For a website to work, it is absolutely crucial that it is easy to use. That may sound like an absurd statement of the obvious, but so many websites have serious usability issues. I decided to audit the SQA website after criticism of it by upset pupils and their angry parents. It fell down in nine key areas and, significantly, the glitches started appearing from the log-in page at the start. A usable log-in should be simple to access and guidance should be clearly available for anyone who is struggling. The SQA's log-in was convoluted and jumped users past the explanation page. Information about what to do if a user forgot their details was on the page before the log-in and, to complicate matters, if a pupil entered the right password but the wrong ID they would get a message insisting their password was wrong. Inexplicably, if the SQA site did acknowledge users had entered the wrong details, it did not give them any assistance to resolve this at this point. In my view, there was no need to add the extra requirement for users to set their own password. The website would have worked just as well with the ID and security code supplied to pupils by the SQA. And, to make things even simpler, as pupils registered to the site by e-mail, that address should have been their ID. I could not understand why the SQA made the password rules so complicated. Pupils had to dream up a word that was memorable, yet contained an uppercase letter, a lower case letter and one numeral. It also had to be at least eight characters long. By this stage, pupils could have been trying to reset their password while, all the time, their ID was at fault. Finally, the help option for forgotten IDs or security codes was an online bottleneck. An online prompt should have operated with previously requested questions such as: "What's your mother's maiden name?" The SQA has said it wants to learn lessons from the problems thousands of pupils faced this year. If the SQA's website had been less confusing and, crucially, had been user-tested for usability more creatively earlier in its construction, then perhaps many more pupils would have got their results on Monday. • Emma Kirk is the strategic director of User Vision, an Edinburgh-based firm that assesses website usability.