John Rhodes of Webword found this fantastic lightbulb joke from Szuc & Gaffney: Q: How many usability people does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. They’re too busy complaining about the door knob. Check out these other suggestions by Matthew Oliphant, Ryan, Chris McEvoy, Jared Spool. Q: How many usability people does […]
An online petition is being circulated to all Internet users for the purpose of collecting signatures showing support for Google to make its word verification scheme accessible to the blind and visually impaired.
I just signed up for the request to make Google more accessible. (I’m number 2759 on the list), and you can sign it too.
Google posted a very interesting study with regards to web standards. As new browsers get better and better support for web standards, our awareness is raised to make sure web applications also support the future browsers (such as Internet Explorer 7. How do developers use HTML? – 20/Jan/2006 As part of our work with the […]
Trend: Live search will gradually replace traditional search in web applications. As mainstream programs such as Windows Vista matures up to release, and live search is deeply integrated, we can expect more web pages implementing live search. Apple’s Spotlight and MSN Desktop Search uses the same Live search paradigm that we’ll probably see a lot […]
Very interesting read from a user interface point-of-view. I stumbled upon a walkthrough of Windows Vista. An interesting perspective here is that the search field has gotten a prominent position on the Start menu itself. From BentUser – Windows XP and Vista Side-by-Side (via MadMan’s LinksMatic: Windows XP vs Vista): The start menu has evolved […]
How would you test a webpage in IE 6 when IE 7 is released? Here’s a simple way that does not require multiple machines or complicated setups of multiple operating systems.
More numbers show up that back up my claim that 25% of your users are disabled. (“disabled” to me is physical as for instance a visual impairment, and technological as using a small screen or wireless device).
I had a chat today with a former employe of Danish Center for Accessibility, and he pointed me to Tiresias, an organisation that has collected statistics from Europe. I was told Tiresias is known for it’s conservative estimates and high credibility.
Technorati is for blogs what Google is for the rest of the web: The #1 place to go when searching for a topic of interest. One of its most powerful features is the ability to use tags – the so called Technorati Tags. Technorati Tags are small linked words situated somewhere inside your post (in […]
Via Del.icio.us popular list I found this quote from an IBM Linux commercial
Collecting data is only the first step toward wisdom
but sharing data is the first step toward community
Did you know that up to 25% of all visitors on your website have some kind of accessibility problem. Some of your users may be blind, deaf, dyslectic, has learning disabilities or motoric disabilities such as schlerosis, parkinson’s disease, etc. A so-called functional disability.
But how about users with a technical disability: Wireless devices, slow internet connections, old browsers, feed readers, etc. These should be considered as well, as there are probably more people with technological disability than functional disability.
To follow up on Thomas’ post from yesterday about how to improve usability on out-of-the-box wordpress blog, we decided to prioritize the 23 20 point list that we’ll work on. (Three items are already done since we started the list).
We prioritize improvements so that we get the low hanging fruit done right away.
Many blogs today use common blogging software like WordPress or Movable Type. Tools like these are very easy to set up and you will probably get your blog up and running with the default design within 10-15 minutes. This speed comes at a price though… Very bad usability. Help us fix the birth defects.
We just started using MeasureMap and have added it to this blog after Jared Spool recommended it in a comment. Recently I have looked for better ways to display incoming links (referring URLs), Google Analytics can but it’s a tedious process. The WordPress Dashboard can only show some of the incoming links. I must say […]
In the previous “Mullet-style blog layout and complete archive page” we had a look on the Mullet-style blog page that makes more content available on the fronpage, and also argued for replacing monthly archives with a single archive page.Danish “brugervenligeblogs.dk” pointed me to a research document from July 2005: Blog Mainstream Market Penetration Likely Limited […]
Do you use Firefox? Accidentally I discovered this keyboard shortcut. CTRL + SHIFT + double-click on some text. The text dissapears! It seems to work on ordinary text, no links. I searched Google, I looked in LeslieFranke firefox cheatsheet. Couldn’t find anything on it. Is this a bug or a feature? Last month, Justaddwater users […]
Show a bunch of test users a webpage for 50 milliseconds and they have already made up their mind whether or not the page is good. Put this into context and you can see how important it is to have a good looking front page that appeal to its audience. A new Canadian study shows how important it is.
Usability work is often related to user experience, and both concepts have a remarkable recognition among usability professionals, among other web consultants, among our clients and in corporate management. I would like to go beyond the words “User Experience” and give a clear, concise, simple definition that’s easy to remember, that everybody can understand. I […]
How do you build a system that can deliver and update content to 100,000 people simultaneously? Via Ajaxian.com I saw this article from MacRumors on what traffic they got when Steve Jobs delivered his keynote on MacWorld a few days ago.
Also in this post: Ajaxinfo (the guys behind AJAX usability metrics), AJAX ROI faceoff, where a traditional webapp is compared to an AJAX webapp. For the visually oriented, there is a video comparing the two applications.
I like Wordpress Dashboard. The name suggests that it’s an overview of whats relevant to your blog. What’s happening. What’s popular. Who comments. What important updates are available. The Dashboard should work like in a car. The most important and relevant information should be visible at a glance. Lets have a brief look at the dashboard.
I suggest you only take a brief look to judge for your self whether you think the main objectives of the Dashboard page are met.
Click on the screenshot above for and look for 5 seconds only. Then ask yourself what you could remember from the page. Yup you just tried a 5 second usability test.
Better late then never… In the spirit of sharing here is our statistics for December 2005. We have as usual filtered out our own hits, so these numbers should show only “real” readers. Enjoy :) RSS/Atom We still get about a quarter of our hits from news feed readers (RSS, Atom, etc.). The issue with […]
I usually use an English version of Windows. But from time to time I find my self stuck with a Danish Windows. Besides the obvious language differences in the GUI, I find it a major problem that all the keyboard shortcuts have changed. But what if there where an easy solution to this life long problem? Maybe this is it…
Blog frontpage that increases user experience and improves findability of content. The key is the mullet. The idea is to have a long tail of many older entries that represent previous content.
We use Google Analytics as a stat tool on justaddwater.dk, and we’re overall satisfied with it. Unfortunately, one crucial feature is hidden and very hard to find. Here is how you find referring URLs and not only the referring websites.
Hi and welcome back in 2006. As you might have noticed, we’ve been a little lacy over the holidays – but not to worry… We’ll be back in force ;) During the Christmas holiday we have canceled the automatic bookmark-posting-engine since it unfortunately seemed more like spam than like the good quality content we had […]
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