Posted by Dan Eastwell
http://www.hashtags.org/tag/interesting2008/
This is an aggregation of everything on the web tagged '#interesting2008', which was the conference I went to the other day.
Now *that's* web 2.0. You can keep your astroturfed social networks...
Posted by Dan Eastwell
Simple usability testing as advocated by Jakob Nielsen with five users showed that user testing did not need to be an expensive procedure; products such as Morae allow 'usability labs' to be constructed from two laptops and a webcam.
This has made Usability Testing as practical and almost exclusively necessary part of the building of any interface (e.g. a simple website) or application (e.g. a website with any form of interaction)
Usability practitioners advocate testing throughout the design process, and not just as an afterthought once an application is built - this can be a simple procedure, with the most trying part being organising your five participants, but regular testing days can return rewards beyond optimising an interface for ease of use.
You can fairly quickly get feedback not only on how or whether your site works, but also on your users' general experience of similar sites, or real-world alternatives. How do your users normally find sign-up procedures? Are they worthwhile? Do they have trouble with so many passwords? Do they like newsletters? Are they familiar with RSS? And so on...
37 signals paved the way with progressive rollouts and testing constantly through this process allows you to fine tune your application. The danger of course is knee-jerk redesigns every time a user misses a button.
People will have volunteered for your user testing, especially if you've advertised through Craiglists or Gumtree, and you reimburse people for their time. Your test subjects will probably see this as something of a fun day out and should by the end of it be in a good mood. People love being asked their opinion, and enjoy being part of the process.
Regular testing will mean you have a constant stream of users who have not only seen your site, but have seen you and know you are keen to get things right. This will mean they're pretty likely to tell people about their fun day out and the nice people there. This can only be a good thing...
In the same way a telephone call is better than an email, regular face-to-face meetings with your user base can lead to a positive reflection on your app/site.
Your users will be more forgiving of any future problems if they know that you're the kind of people who'll look into it, or probably are already.
Through showing people how your site works, possibly in much greater detail than they would find coming to it cold, you also get the equivalent of old school software 'training days', and a set of users who should end up knowing the workings of your site fairly well and, at best, are able to pass this knowledge on.
With all this in mind, it's probably worth conducting testing days even if you've got no significant changes to make to your site.
If you keep a database of past testees and those that you didn't have time for, you have the ability to keep in constant 'real-world' touch with your user-base.
User testing can be a very positive way of getting to know your end-users, and in a very focussed way - you have:
Your users:
Posted by Dan Eastwell
I can happily watch Vimeo videos such as the one illustrated below, within my feed reader, google reader
The great thing is, not only is can I watch the embedded flash movie, I also have the other site's interface within my reader, in that I can favourite the video. When I return to the vimeo site, my favourite has been added.
Posted by Dan Eastwell
being the modern world, anything that does go wrong automatically comes attached with the thought-bubble, "at least it's something to blog about."
from Flip-flop flyin'
Posted by Dan Eastwell
You've spend months on a project, place it on your portfolio with pride. A year or so later, you go back to the site and - horrors - it's completely changed!
I've had that feeling twice recently.
Firstly I was looking for an old image gallery I'd created for the javascript I'd used. When I got to the site all I could see was a 404.
One to change on my portfolio.
This evening I saw an advert on TV for a company I built HTML/CSS templates for, that I was fairly proud of.
Then I did a double-take.
If they've come up with new style product and a new style advert, their site is likely to be rebranded, too. Oh dear.
Leaping to my laptop I looked at their homepage - it's greatly different. Their main landing pages: different. Then I went deeper into the site, to some of their several thousand product and information pages. Very similar. Phew!
This pleases me on a couple of counts - firstly I don't have to take the page from my portfolio, and that the structure, template layouts, palettes for colours and the other CSS systems tricks I'd put into place were still there.
I can only hope the makeover was easy and therefore cheap for the new design team.
The most pleasing thing of all? My name and site still there in the boilerplate in the css files
CSS templates by Dan Eastwell www.thoughtballoon.co.uk
Is it that wrong to have a little pride in your work?
Posted by Dan Eastwell
Techcrunch has said that News Corp is 'in talks' with LinkedIn with a view to buy the business networking site.
This follows a series of buy-outs an acquisitions of large quantities of equity in other networking and persnonal information aggregation sites.
The list includes:
Should I be concerned that a series of major corporations have access to my data? Well, it's not as if it's otherwise inaccessible, it would just be impracticable to gather individuals' information from all their publically available internet presences, and then be certain it's actually all the same person's information.
What sinister schemes could be carried out with the knowledge that I like listening to Blur?
What could be gained from knowing I graduated from the University of Essex? (Information that's available not only on my LinkedIn profile, but the 'about' page of this site.)
Even so, I'm still going to be careful about what I post on these sites, despite the fact I was perfectly prepared to pass on data about 'practically anything' when I was under they impression they were run by five geeks in a backroom.
Even without corporate ownership, I'll consider using algorithmical mnemonics for remembering answers to security questions.
Or will I..?
Posted by Dan Eastwell
or why I won't, until the money runs out...
Jeffrey Zeldman maintains his position as the spokesman for the progenitors of web design and web development in the latest issue of A List Apart by stating that even in this late stage of the web, that web design is poorly understood.
Read more...Posted by Dan Eastwell
It seems that either Ajaxian's RSS feed or google reader has been hacked.
Have a look at these screen dumps of my google reader, showing what should be this article on URI comparison functions from ajaxian:
Posted by Dan Eastwell
This interesting article covering UK government proposals to make WCAG AA standard mandatory for .gov.uk websites corresponds to my earlier qualms concerning making government websites AA complient.
I'm now coming round to the opinion that at least government websites should cover AA compatibility.
Having worked on fairly non-compliant, inaccessible websites, or websites where 'buy the book' accessibility is adhered to ('it validates so it must be accessible'), I think it's worth going through a minimal level of accessibility on any site (does it work with a keyboard only, for example).
What Bruce Lawson's WaSP article highlighted are a couple of main points:
What this means practially is that if a rogue unencoded ampersand can invalidate a page of code, then letting non-expert staff add raw HTML into managed content systems can mean running the risk of losing a site it's .gov.uk domain name.
A positive side effect of this possible legislation might well be a great rise in the use of WYSIWYM content adding tools, rather that allowing staff to add their own code (not least, from a business point of view, as WYSIWYG and HTML-editable CMSs risk breaking site branding).
This may well be an article in itself, but one of my main bugbears is that admin systems for building and maintaining sites by non-technical staff needs to be as, if not more, usable and accessible as the main site itself.
Generally admin systems are, at worst, an afterthought, or at best, an unusable off-the-shelf system. Adding, updating and deleting content on a website necessarily requires a much larger site that the site itself (in terms of page templates). They require just as much user experience design, just as much accessibility design and just as much care and attention.
Hopefully this recommendation, if it ever becomes law, will provide the kick up the backside necessary to site commissioners, and site design and build agencies to push for the time needed to build usable and accessible administration systems as thoroughly thought through as their main sites.
Posted by Dan Eastwell
Quick thought: when reading an aggregated feed within Google Reader, you get so accustomed to reading a stream of blog posts from, say, Boing Boing that it can be fairly confusing to start reading a post from read/write web
An idea for google might be to add an image fetched from the feed's site and add it to the top of the post. An icon like that might help identify subconsciously what you're reading.
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