SU: Make Design Usable & Accessible

Make Touch screen applications Accessibile and Usable

2009-04-06T17:28:00.004-04:00

Google Labs have have created Speech Enabled Eyes-Free Android Applications, which makes touch screens accessible for visually challenged. You can find API here to Create applications for Android for visually challenged. The Eyes-Free Android Project is also home to the Text-To-Speech (TTS) Library for Android. Its the challenge again for Apple Iphone & Windows 7 and we can see more innovation in this space. Here is the youtube channel for "Eyes-Free Android"

First product to check Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

2009-04-05T09:39:00.029-04:00

Now you can check website Accessibility compliance with WCAG 2.0. Deque World Space is the first product to support WCAG 2.0 (Web content accessibility guidelines).

You can generate accessibility reports for your website for free in Deque.com. To get the report, provide an URL or attach the file or paste your code - you will get the report instantly. You have option to check accessbility compliances as per the section 508 and WCAG 2.0 guidelines.
Another efficient feature in the enterprise version of Deque World space is "Spidering". World Space spider's a single page or an entire website based on the link depth (up to 25 level) you specify for the site. Parallely World Space does analysis of the spidered page and generates the summary report with three graphs as shown here. The graph will represent Extent, instensity and the Nature of the problem in your website. Reports can be generated in various format.

Apart from the consolidated Graph report, you can also have the detailed report and developers report. Detailed reports talks about the each and every violation of section 508 and wcag 2.0. Along with every finding, you can see a link called fix - that links to the view & the design mode of the html page. Worldspace helps you to Remidiate through a efficient wizard approach.

You can also find the WCAG 2.0 analysis of your HTML page or file or code here.

Register for worldspace webinar and enjoy the only tool which supports wcag 2.0 guidelines.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - WCAG 2.0

2009-03-05T11:04:00.009-05:00

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 has defines how to make Web content more accessible to people with disabilities. It is an upgraded version of WCAG 1.0. WCAG 2.0 guidelines helps resolving various disabilities, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, and neurological disabilities.

Wcag 2.0 & Technologies

WCAG 2.0 is designed to apply to a broad range of technologies including Javascript/Ajax, Flash, PDF.

Four Principles of WCAG 2.0

Principle 1: Perceivable

Perceivable - Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.

Principle 2: Operable

User interface components and navigation must be operable

Principle 3: Understandable

Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable.

Principle 4: Robust

Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

Tool for wcag 2.0: www.deque.com

Usability is No Longer Enough

2008-11-10T18:11:00.000-05:00

The next wave of the information age is about designing for persuasion, emotion, and trust (PET design™).

You still need good usability if people can't find something they can't be persuaded by it but soon usability will no longer be the key differentiator it has been. It's often not enough to design a website that is easy to navigate, understand, and transact on. Just because people can do something doesn't ensure that they will.

The future of design is about creating engagement and commitment to meet measurable business goals. Whether your site is e-commerce, informational, or transactional, you must motivate people to make decisions that lead to conversion. This could be getting people to: * buy a product * sign-up for a newsletter * donate to a cause * ask their doctor about a drug * vote for a candidate * invest in your company

The interactive online environment offers far more opportunities to influence decision making than traditional advertising or marketing channels. Yet understanding people's subtle emotional triggers requires a rigorous set of new techniques, the results of which can even conflict with classic usability best practices.

How NOT to conduct a usability test

2008-11-10T18:05:00.002-05:00

Funny video I saw on You tube of Charlie Chaplin. They test some product with Charlie on a new product. This is really funny - but how not to test a product.

Bill Gates at World Usability Day

2008-11-10T18:04:00.001-05:00

Blogger posting from iPhone

2008-07-12T08:22:00.003-04:00

Continuing the same post from the top. Means - I couldn't able to go to last line of this text area. Because the scrollbar is missing. The blogging in blogger with iPhone is annoying. This is the summary of this blogpost - just write a small feed with iPhone without an image.

(I wanted to add this line in bottom of this blog post. Couldn't able to scroll) To add a bulleted list to blogger in iPhone, add an html tag as we do coding in a notepad.

Am writing this blog post from iPhone. Trying following features:

Bold - when I pressed bold from the above tool menu in edit mode, it added the span tag with bold style attribute On touch of return key outside the span tag, I can use the next style item.

Italics - works same way as bold. On touch of italics icon, blogger gaveinline style as style = fontstyle: italic. the

Adding URL - on touch of a URL link icon gives a modal window and the url can be entered like this Suggest Usability

Spell check - works as similar to working in a computer. Shows a red underlined bold text for spelling mistakes. On click on those red text shows a callout with spelling options. I selected one among the options. Red text turns to green. I had to go to a editable mode for other manual check. It is also easy to learn.

Adding images - adding image in blogger through an iPhone is really a hectic. Choose file option is disabled. Adding an image path from web add it to the top of the page. I could not able to move it to anywhere on the page.

How to create Sign up forms?

2008-05-31T14:35:00.009-04:00

Signup forms is to create a permanent relationship between user and site.

Other experts articles on how to create sign up forms:

Problems with sign up forms by Luke Wroblewski, which was recently published on A List Apart:http://www.alistapart.com/articles/signupforms
Jared Spool on Sign up forms: UIE:http://www.uie.com/articles/account_design_mistakes/http://www.uie.com/articles/account_design_mistakes_part2/and
Adaptive Path:http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/reports/signup/
and from Bokardo:http://bokardo.com/archives/designing-for-the-social-web-the-usage-lifecycle/

Video of Google Factory Tour of Search including announcement of Google Health

2008-05-21T15:09:00.001-04:00

CFP: ICT, Society and Human Beings 2008

2008-04-27T11:50:00.002-04:00

-- CALL FOR PAPERS - Deadline for submissions (last call): 12 May 2008
--

IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ICT, SOCIETY AND HUMAN BEINGS 2008
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 22 to 24 July 2008
(http://www.ict-conf.org/)
part of the IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems
(MCCSIS 2008)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 22 to 27 July 2008
(http://www.mccsis.org)

* Keynote Speakers
Professor Margaret Tan, Deputy Director, Singapore Internet Research Centre, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Professor Simone Fischer Hübner, Karlstad university, Sweden

* Conference background and goals
The effects of ICT on humans comes in focus in the conference but also the interaction between ICT – Individual – Society. Interaction and Effects - both are important. Changes in behaviour, perspectives, values, competencies, human and psychological aspects, feelings are all of interest. Computer Science and IT related disciplines work more and more together with various behavioural sciences: Cognitive effects and changes, Motivational and emotional changes, Organisational and institutional changes, Societal changes, Value changes and new lifestyles, experiences from Child psychology and Development psychology. In general all types of research strategies are encouraged and especially cross disciplinary and multidisciplinary studies. Case studies, broader empirical field studies, theoretical analyses, cross cultural studies, scenarios, ethnographic studies, epistemological analyses.

* Format of the Conference
The conference will comprise of invited talks and oral presentations. The proceedings of the conference will be published in the form of a book and CD-ROM with ISBN, and will be available also in the IADIS Digital Library (accessible on-line). The best paper authors will be invited to
publish extended versions of their papers in the IADIS Journal on Computer Science and Information Systems (ISSN: 1646-3692).

* Types of submissions
Full and Short Papers, Reflection Papers, Posters/Demonstrations, Tutorials, Panels
and Doctoral Consortium. All submissions are subject to a blind refereeing process.

* Topics related to ICT, Society and Human Beings: are of interest. These include, but are not limited to the following areas and topics:

- Globalization and ICT (Main area)
- Globalization processes
- Glocalization processes
- Values, norms
- Labour market (outsourcing,integration, mobility)
- Universal access
- Virtual worlds
- Global villages
- Rethinking economical and social theories
- Human capital theory
- Sustainability, Democracy
- Global catastrophes
- Vulnerability

- Life role and ICT (Main area)
- Citizen’s role
- Professional role
- Leadership role
- Private role
- Virtual roles
- Home of the future
- Mobile life
- Role conflicts

- Desirable goals (Main area)
- Integration
- Humanization
- Reducing poverty
- Bridging the digital gap
- Freedom of expression
- Democratization
- E-cooperation
- Peace
- Sustainability
- Wellbeing Health
- Human welfare
- Quality of life

- Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) (Main area)
- ICT applications and systems contributing to desirable goals (see
track below)

- Life environment and ICT (Main area)
- Psychosocial environment
- Work environment/Work place:
- Work content – Work tasks
- Organizational structure
- Decision support systems
- Human-human communication
- Power structure-formal and informal
- Leadership
- Career patterns
- Influence/participation
- Working hours and salary/compensation
- Work pace/work load Physical and ergonomic conditions
- Learning and knowledge growth
- Home Environment
- Public Environment
- Private Environment
- Virtual Environment
- Virtual (on-line) communities
- Organisational Design and Management
- Psychosocial work environment

- Effects on humans (Main area)
- Analyses of impact as well as technology contributing to desirable
human qualities
- Psychosocial impact
- Life styles
- Human needs (meaningfulness, belonging, autonomy, confidence)
- Happiness and fun
- Wellbeing and health
- Dependency
- Identity
- Integrity
- Trust – security – privacy
- Addictiveness (games)
- Availability
- Motivation
- Human memory
- Cybersickness
- Stress (over- and understimulation)
- Workload
- Fatigue
- Love and Relationship
- Skills and competencies:
- Creativity
- Problem solving
- Social competence

- Perspectives (Main area)
- Social and psychosocial
- Cross-cultural
- Theoretical
- Gender
- Class
- Rural – urban
- Multimodal
- Economic
- Ethical

- Actions for reaching the Good Information Society (Main area)
- Individual level
- Communities ( physical and virtual) level
- Governmental level
- International level
- Civil society and social change communities
- Design of societal systems - rethinking

* Important Dates:
- Submission deadline (last call): 12 May 2008
- Notification to Authors: 30 May 2008
- Final Camera-Ready Submission and Early Registration: Until 13 June 2008
- Late Registration: After 13 June 2008
- Conference: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 22 to 24 July 2008

* Conference Location
The conference will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

* Secretariat
IADIS Secretariat - IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ICT, SOCIETY AND
HUMAN BEINGS 2008
Rua Sao Sebastiao da Pedreira, 100, 3
1050-209 Lisbon, Portugal
E-mail: secretariat@ict-conf.org
Web site: http://www.ict-conf.org/

* Program Committee
ICT, Society and Human Beings 2008 Conference Program Chair:
Gunilla Bradley, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

General MCCSIS Conference Co-Chairs:
Piet Kommers, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Pedro Isaías, Universidade Aberta (Portuguese Open University),
Portugal
Nian-Shing Chen, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan

Committee Members: *
* for committee list please refer to http://www.ict-conf.org/committees.asp

Marissa Mayer at Google Press Day Paris

2008-04-27T09:33:00.001-04:00

better late than never :)

Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products and User Experience, gives an A-Z of search explaining how Google is working to ensure all its users get access to fast, relevant results, at Google Press Day in Paris on June 19, 2007.

14 Website Usability Guidelines from ISEDB

2008-04-26T23:31:00.000-04:00

Sites that are designed to sell products and/or services must go the extra mile to enhance the visitor's engagement with the website. Shopping cart abandonment (shoppers abandoning their carts before deciding to pay for the "items" they've added to their cart) can result in a significant loss in potential sales. But much of that can be reduced when the shopping process is streamlined and geared for shopper satisfaction. more...

Donald A. Norman, 2006 Benjamin Franklin Medal

2008-04-25T08:19:00.001-04:00

Don Norman is the author or co-author of fourteen books, including the seminal The Design of Everyday Things, and his recently released The Design of Future Things.

Dr. Norman is cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, an executive consulting firm that helps companies produce human-centered products and services, Professor at Northwestern University, Prof. Emeritus of the University of California, San Diego, and co-director of Northwestern’s Segal Design Institute; founded by Crate & Barrel creators Gordon and Carole Segal. He has been Vice President of Apple Computer and an executive at Hewlett Packard. He was President of the Learning Systems division of UNext, an early, online education company.

He serves on many advisory boards, such as Chicago’s Institute of Design and Encyclopedia Britannica. He is a fellow of many organizations, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer & Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute (Philadelphia), honorary degrees from the University of Padova (Italy) and the Technical University of Delft (the Netherlands), the “Lifetime Achievement Award” from SIGCHI, the professional organization for Computer-Human Interaction, the Mental Health award for contributions to Business from Psychology Today, and the Taylor Award for outstanding contribution to the field of Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology from the American Psychological Association.

Blog on photoshop express

2008-03-27T17:08:00.005-04:00

Adobe has launched the online version of photoshop express for free. There is no download required for photoshop express unless if you have lower version of flash player. Flash 9 works fine with express. At present this version of online photoshop express won't replace the photoshop application. In future, adobe might move the features one by one.

Our experience: In the high speed connection, uploading of photos took time. Otherwise they have cool features in online photoshop express.

Do a test drive: https://www.photoshop.com/express/index.html?bypass&wf=testdrive

FAQ: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=74&catid=684&threadid=1344716&enterthread=y

Learn features available in online Photoshop Express: To learn these techniques, visit http://www.photoshopexpresstechniques.com/

Crop & Rotate—Turn it, straighten it, crop out the background.
Auto Correct—Automatic, one-click, optimal lighting and contrast adjustment.
Exposure—Change the brightness of the photo.
Red-Eye Removal—Removes red eyes caused by some camera flashes.
Touchup—Remove scratches and other imperfections.
Saturation—Ramp up the colors to blinding brightness, dampen them down to black and white, or anywhere in between.
White Balance—Ever notice how people look different inside an office with the ugly fluorescent tubes, as opposed to outside on a bright sunny day? Adjust the white balance and you change the type of lighting in the photo.
Highlight—The brightest parts of a photo are the highlights. This control lets you brighten or darken just the brightest part of the photo, without affecting the darker parts (we call those the shadows).
Fill Light—If you take a shot facing into the sun, your subject can end up too dark due to the camera’s automatic exposure adjustment. Fill Light brightens the dark area without overbrightening the background.
Sharpen—It’s like putting in your contacts. Suddenly everything comes more into focus.
Soft Focus—It’s like taking your contacts out. Soft Focus creates a subtle blur for artistic effect.
Hue—This one changes all the colors in a photo at once.
Black & White—Control how the colors are converted when you change a photo to black and white.
Tint—Imagine instead of black and white, you want red and white, or pale brown and white for that old Western look.
Sketch—Makes any photo look like you drew it yourself.
Distort—Stretch, twist, bulge specific areas of your photos.

Pattern Library for Interaction Design

2008-03-06T22:22:00.004-05:00

While creating a complicated form or multi-step Indicators or want to know different type of form validation or visual framework, its always interesting when we look at the pattern libraries used. Below are the list of website which has some nice collection of interaction patterns. For each pattern - get the answer on what?, when to use it?, why and how?

Designing Interfaces - http://designinginterfaces.com/

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library - http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/index.php

Welie - http://www.welie.com

UI Patterns - http://ui-patterns.com/

Interaction Design Pattern Library for Games - http://www.helpyouplay.com/

Mobile User Interface Design Patterns http://patterns.littlespringsdesign.com/~newlsdpatterns/index.php/Main_Page
This site is a wiki, with few patterns for handheld devices

Web Patterns - A UC Berkeley Resources for Building User Interfaces
http://groups.ischool.berkeley.edu/ui_designpatterns/webpatterns2/webpatterns/home.php

Show-Hide Sections

2007-12-14T16:45:00.000-05:00

Expand All modules & Collapse all modules: These interactions are useful while we have more widget based sections in a single page.

Complext Data-table design

2007-12-12T14:10:00.000-05:00

In this table structure, data is stacked. Even without grid structure design, data is not clustered. By having first look, the data looks confusing. With in seconds its very simple in mapping with the label and the data. Look at the screenshot below, mapping is done a nicer way. Label "Quantity" is bold, even the quantity in numbers is maintained bold. High & Low attributes under the label "Intra day" is stacked and this is also very easy while reading. This screenshot is from one of the stock exchange website. This forms look simple to design, but its not.

Sorting Data in a table

2007-12-10T15:50:00.000-05:00

This screenshot is from batch mates. Its a nice way of showing the sorting and alphabetical listing. These types of interactions will be useful in New Yahoo mail, where all the contents are shown in a single page without pagination.

Avoid RadioButtons - New interaction in Digg Submit page.

2007-12-07T05:52:00.000-05:00

Digg has come up with the new interactions on submit link page. In the previous design, the radio button were used to choose a topic.

In the latest version, radio button has replaced with Text Highlighter. It is good, but has bug.

Behaviours:

User can click directly on topics.

Even in previous version of topic selection, user can click on topics. HTML has option of linking Radio button and topic next to it by providing "label for" attribute. By which instead of clicking over radio button, user can click on topic to select the option. Mostly advance user know about it. With my experience I can say that 80% click only on radio button even by providing "label for". By having this label for and ID activated in HTML, we can say that radio button is accessbility fixed. For example, check the submit page(below screenshot) in digg, you can click on image to choose the media.

On mouse over the row highlights with blue background with a border top and bottom. This is controlled via css. But surprisingly in Internet explorer, this widget looks plane, you can see that in 2nd screenshot.

On click of the category, the color of the cateogory changes blue. In Internet explorer, topic turns to Bold and you have click one more time ouside the widget to get the background color for the topics.

Text highlighter is nice and easy to use in this .

Text Highlighter is controlled via css & javascript. This interaction wont work, If javascript disabled in browsers setting.

Firefox - Text highlighter looks neat and color variances are also properly used.

Internet Explorer: In IE the page looks disturbed and above explained styles are disappeared. This is a bad coding from DIGG development team.

SIMS 141 - Yahoo! Search

2007-12-01T14:44:00.000-05:00

Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business. The World Wide Web brings much of the world's knowledge into the reach of nearly everyone with a computer and an internet connection. The availability of huge quantities of information at our fingertips is transforming government, business, and many other aspects of society. Topics include search advertising and auctions, search and privacy, search ranking, internationalization, anti-spam efforts, local search, peer-to-peer search, and search of blogs and online communities. The Instructor, Dr. Marti Hearst, is an associate professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, with an affiliate appointment in the Computer Science Division.

Designing Invisible Interfaces

2007-11-29T19:06:00.000-05:00

Designing Invisible Interfaces - An Approach to User Experience for Software No One Wants to Use

Most interface designers assume that users actually want to use their software. But what if focusing on the software is the last thing a user should do? Pathfinder Development introduces the concept of designing "Invisible Interfaces" for this type of user, and illustrates our point with examples from a recent project for health care providers

Need Interaction Designer in Bangalore

2007-11-24T12:42:00.000-05:00

Muthu is looking for a Interaction designer with 3-5 years of experience. Contact Muthu at muthuonlinegmaildotcom

Rajesh,

If you know any good interaction designers with 3-5 years experience can you please ask them to mail their resumes to me. The opening is for a fortune 100 product MNC - (Multi National Company) Bangalore with established usability practices.

thanks
muthu

Example of Paper Prototype in Mobile Computing

2007-11-16T13:20:00.000-05:00

Nice example of paper prototype use in mobile computing, I don't understand the language, but its good.

An application for your PDA to meet new people at the University.
Benito, Luca, Francesco, Silvia

3 More Jobs Posted

2007-11-15T00:11:00.000-05:00

-- More Jobs --

Pecha Kucha Night - Washington DC

2007-11-13T20:40:00.000-05:00

Pecha Kucha Night started in Tokyo, Japan in February 2003 by Klein Dytham architecture as a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. This forum has
spread to over 80 cities across the world.

Please join us for the launch of Pecha Kucha Night in Washington DC, Sponsored by Smith Group

Thursday, November 15, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM

The International Square Center
1850 K Street, NW Suite 250 - Atrium Terrace

RSVP by November 12 : rsvp[at]capitolpechakucha[dot]org

Network and draw inspiration :
10 presenters x 20 images x 20 seconds
For more information - www.pecha-kucha.org
info[at]capitolpechakucha[dot]org

Lets meet at DC event :-). If you are coming by train, get down at Farragut West/North metro station. Give me a call if you have any questions: 202-352-4159