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Usability 2.0
: Usability BlogTwitter’s turning me to drink
About a year and a half ago I was totally over Twitter. When I say “over it”, I mean So Over It that I couldn’t even get Into It. Twitter was new, I didn’t know many people using it, and all the twits and tweets seemed so utterly self indulgent… some would say, many still are. To make matters worse, my husband is an EEO (early, early, adopter); if he can beta test something, he will. So when Twitter came along, he was pretty excited.
Like many others, I didn’t really get the relevance of Twitter. To some extent I thought it was a prime display of insecurity via the Look at Me channel. As someone who really struggled with the decision of whether or not I should even enable comments on my blog, Twitter was a real challenge.
I saw it as a one-on-one activity (i.e. person - device) rather than a one-to-many relationship via the device. Face to face conversations were interrupted by regular mobile beeps alerting a DM (not a Deep and Meaningful, but rather a Direct Message), and in one instance I was even woken up at 3am no less, by a message alert on my …
Oprah’s Book Club? I don’t think so…
Some of you will already know The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) mail list. For those that don’t know it, the website and mail list are great resources and sources of discussion for anyone interested in interaction design, user experience and design.
The IxDA is a member-supported organization committed to serving the needs of the international interaction design community. With the help of more than 1,500 members worldwide, we provide a forum for the discussion of interaction design issues.
Now, as Michael Jackson once said: “I’m a lurker, not a writer”.. OK well maybe that was me. But all the same, there’s been a really good discussion going on over the last few days that I’ve been watching with great interest. List members have been posting ‘The One Book’ they’d recommend to Engineering Management folk (or anyone else for that matter, I’d venture).
So without further ado, here’s a summary of some great reading on User Experience, Usability, and Interaction Design:
- The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper
- Designing from Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engineers Can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology, Ellen Isaacs & Alan Walendowski
- Communicating Design, Dan Brown
- The Design …
WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has released a last call for comments on the working draft of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0… again:
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group invites you to review the second WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft published on 11 December 2007. WCAG 2.0 explains how to make Web sites, applications, and other content accessible to people with disabilities. Please submit any comments on the following document by 1 February 2008.
This second WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft is provided for public review of the document now that it has all resolutions from previous comments incorporated. The WCAG Working Group hopes that it has resolved all substantive issues with this draft, and looks forward to progressing to the next stages in completing WCAG 2.0.
Leave your comments on whether you think any progress has been made here at the W3C site.
Design Great Billboards
We can learn a lot about designing usable web sites from the offline world.
For instance, when I was in Adelaide a couple of weeks ago visiting family, I took a drive around the Adelaide Hills. Cruising along the freeway at 120 kms/hr, I passed the sign in the picture on the right. The first thing that popped into my head was “What the heck does that mean?”
I’m not sure what it’s like in your part of the world, but when I was last living in Adelaide, South Australia, the term arrester bed definitely wasn’t common language.
(I was half expecting to see an intimidating king-size mattress in full police uniform step out from the bushes and order me to pull over.)
The second thing that popped into my head — and this is possibly an indication that I spend far too much time online — was this:
“Imagine if something similarly obscure was used to describe a tab on a web site. No-one would know what the text linked to!”
Steve Krug wrote about this very concept — that we should think of our users as driving by in a car, …
World 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 …
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