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: Usability BlogWorld Usability Day 2007
World Usability Day is an international, annual event that will be held on November 8th this year with the theme of Health.
The main goal of the event is to promote and encourage usability in the wider community and will be held at various locations world wide .
Last year 40,000 people in 35 countries in 175 cities around the world participated in World Usability Day. This year marks the events 3rd anniversary.
- Sydney UPA
If you’re interested in hearing about what’s going on in your city, have a look on line and think about attending an event if you can. Some events have sessions running all day, which makes it much easier to attend even some of the presentations.
While my focus is always on web usability, the World Usability Day event will look at a usability in a wide array of settings. For example, Melbourne’s event will be touring the learning facility of St Vincents hospital.
If you’re in London, 15 free places are available in a 1 day course offering an Introduction to User Centred Design.
Of course, there are dozens of events going on world wide, so have a look …
Why Accessibility? Because It’s Our Job!
I go through phases of complacency and disbelief when thinking about web accessibility.
Working at SitePoint HQ, I’m fairly lucky in that everybody here is on the same page when it comes to accessibility; we spend time making sure our sites are accessible, that our applications degrade gracefully, that our JavaScript doesn’t create barriers for screenreader users. We do this ad-hoc, without even a firm sense of whether our target demographic ultimately requires it. And for no reason other than it’s our job. In the books, articles and other content we publish, best practice is right at the top of the priorities list.
But not everyone in our community agrees, as the original forum thread over the Target case and the recent catfight on TechCrunch illustrated. And I think that’s pretty sad — not because these folks are disagreeing per se (I’d rather see healthy debate than tacit compliance), but because so many of the anti-accessibility arguments are ignorant rhetoric, which cloud the issue and make useful discussion harder for everyone. They generally follow a familiar pattern, taking a peculiarly American line in favour of market forces determining everything, and criticizing any idealistic intentions as political-correctness gone mad.
Whatever. I’m not …
Usability: More than Skin Deep at Web Directions
At Web Directions South 2007 in Sydney, SitePoint usability blogger Lisa Herrod (aka Scenario Girl) proposed a new way of looking at usability and accessibility within the web design process. Not only does her approach point the way to better user experience design, but it also brings formal accessibility testing within reach of small web development teams!
Lisa led off boldly with what I felt was a tough sell to some members of the audience: that user experience design is by definition incomplete unless it takes accessibility into account at every stage of a project. To soften the blow, however, she demonstrated how the ‘personas’ used in usability work could be adapted to include common disabilities without diminishing their usefulness for gauging other usability factors.
No matter how you approach it, of course, accounting for accessibility within the development of a site is going to mean more work. But whose work should it be? Most businesses can’t afford to have a full-time accessibility expert on staff, and will either call in a contractor to do a last-minute accessibility review, or put the responsibility on the shoulders of the front-end designer.
User testing in Second Life
Oz-IA ran over the weekend in Sydney and it was a fantastic event.
There were some really interesting presentations, and while I didn’t get to all of them, without doubt the most interesting for me was User Research in Virtual Worlds, a presentation I highlighted earlier as being one I wanted to see.
Gary Bunker and Gabriele Hermansson, both from Hyro, spoke for close to an hour about their experiences in setting up and running an experimental focus group within Second Life.
Now that virtual worlds (such as SecondLife and World of Warcraft) are becoming vastly more popular, Hyro set out to build a research platform that would allow us to research users within those worlds, not only for their experiences there but also for their needs outside of it. We wanted to know if we could use virtual research – focus groups, interviews and user testing – in a practical way in design projects requiring complex user input. We also wanted to understand how user behavior would change between real-world and virtual forums.
Going into the presentation I was somewhat skeptical about how they might have conducted the evaluation, but by the end of the session …
And the Inaugural ‘Electric Floor’ Award goes to…
Gee, aren’t floors great? All flat and clean and smooth, they do a faultless job of preventing us from plunging headlong into the voids beneath them — a particularly useful trick in multi-story buildings.
It’s interesting to reflect that, although the wonders of electricity have been available for over 100 years, no one has ever sought to improve the humble floor by making it totally dependent on electric power to operate.
Floors that disappeared or collapsed whenever the power was cut — even if that was only occasionally — would be inconvenient, to say the least! While electricity has often been used to improve the usability of our floors by heating, cooling or lighting them better, no floor would ever cease its basic operations without the presence of electricity.
With this in mind, isn’t it remarkable that large, successful, multinational corporations can build the foundations of their online headquarters on a technology — in this case, JavaScript — that may or may not be available to their users. Disabling JavaScript completely disables the fundamental operations of these sites just as surely as would removing the floor from the company’s real-world lobby.
So, without further ado, I’m pleased …
Don’t make users take responsibility for our problems
You know what, I really hate CAPTCHA.
The other day I was speculatively signing up for a Facebook account (I’m not particularly interested in being on Facebook, I just wanted to have a nose around its code), but signing up was a tricky process. You didn’t correctly type the text in the box, it said, referring to the security check image of two words you have to type-in to confirm you’re a real person.
Yeah sure, except I can’t see any words, all I can see is a message that says Loading….
Now admittedly that’s a bad example — presumably they’re using some dodgy Ajax which doesn’t work in Opera for Mac (my browser of choice), and usually such images are generated server-side without the need for scripting, hence this problem doesn’t occur.
But I still hate them because CAPTCHA tests are an accessibility black spot. What are you supposed to do if you have a reading or cognitive disability and simply can’t make them out? Man, I have perfect 20-20 vision, and more often than not I can’t read the damn things; it’s very common for me to have to make three or four different attempts before I get it right.
(I might also …
Four events to keep you learning
I wouldn’t call myself a conference junkie by any means, I’d be lucky to attend one or two a year. And I certainly don’t think of myself as the eternal student, but when I gave it some thought a few minutes ago, I realised that I’ve studied, while working, for ten out of the last 14 years… So it got me thinking, and I’m pretty sure what it comes down to is that I like to learn new things.
Now, given that you’re on a Sitepoint blog reading about Usability, it seems to me that perhaps you like learning new things too…
In any case, one of things I frequently lament is the cost of attending overseas conferences and the distance Australia is from the rest of the conference-hosting world. So, it gives me great pleasure and a mild dose of illicit delight to share with you a few upcoming Australian conferences that focus on or include user experience topics.
OZ-IA
OZ-IA is a conference that’s held in Sydney over the weekend of September 22nd and 23rd. It’s primary focus is on Information Architecture, though there are also presentations on related topics as diverse asEthics, Analysing quantitative data and …
Creating a Tactile Interface
As AJAX has come into the spotlight over the past few years, many web developers have been creating some great applications that handle data more like a desktop application. However, much of the interface mechanisms from the desktop have not been brought to the web. Here are a few techniques to make your web application feel a bit more like a desktop application.
Twitter Recruiting Members for User Testing
Like it or hate it, Twitter has caused a stir in the online social networking space.
In a nut shell, Twitter allows users to pump out infinite amounts of (usually) ego-driven noise to the intarweb with a multitude of widgets, mashups and plugins that make it even easier to do. Take a look at Twitterific for the Mac or Twitterlicious for Windows - two apps that do just that.
Now one of the things that intrigues me about the deluge of 2.0 apps and sites is the notion of the perpetual beta, “a term used to describe software or a system which never leaves the development stage of beta”. To me this is a perfect example of informal user testing, where the design team of an app are able to harvest the feedback of users directly from the app, or via feedback mechanisms on the site.
Interestingly, Twitter has just announced that they are recruiting users who have been a member for two months or more to participate in some user testing.
You can help us improve Twitter by participating in a user test. Your feedback will directly inform the design of future features.
But before …
Text Book ‘Mash App’
I’m experimenting with Tumblr and Jaiku at the moment, and I have an idea that by combining them, I’m going to create a really useful ‘Mash App’ for my User Focus class at SIT next term.
Tumblr
Tumblr is a free blogging tool that I’ve been using lately, and I don’t think I’ve ever fallen so quickly for a web app like I have with this one. Tumblr in fact likens the tool to scrap booking, which may soften its appeal to some users, but have a look; I see multiple uses for it that are tougher than that!
One thing I especially love about Tumblr is that comments are disabled; they aren’t even an option. It’s quite a mind freeing experience and more intimate too. Posts are listed chronologically, in a linear fashion, and there are five different types of articles a user can publish:
- Text
- Photo
- Quote
- Link, and
- Video
Jaiku
Jaiku is also a free web app that aggregates various types of content, as decided by the account owner. As the owner I can pull a whole range of data into my stream, which Jaiku will aggregate for me chronologically. This includes blogs, photos, bookmarks, music, places, events, video and Atom or RSS feeds. …
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