New Standards to Help Screen Readers Navigate Web Forms: Techniques to Improve Usability for All
Introduction Web 2.0 entices web authors with dynamic capabilities, but these advances in performance and functionality have proven a barrier to a growing contingent of users. Many interactive web elements, including forms with dynamic updates and error validation, can be disorienting to users and inaccessible to blind people who use a screen reader to access […] [Read More]
Role Reversal: Testing for Ease of Learning and Recall
When testing a software package, include traditional roles found in a pyramidal training model but also a reversed, "train the trainer" round. [Read More]
Stepping In: An Outsider’s Guide to Crossing the Digital Divide
"Bridging the Global Digital Divide" teams are looking at new interaction technologies and design practices for users whose lives could be transformed by advances in computing and communication. [Read More]
Model-driven Inquiry: A Streamlined Approach to Data Collection
Contextual design models can be developed through exploratory modeling, providing a potentially useful framework to guide and speed up the later modeling activities. [Read More]
Help! Where Is It When You Need It?
Provide form instructions on a separate web page and place a “Help” link at the beginning to help users who prefer or require “up front” instructions to complete the form. [Read More]
Information Graphics: An Eclectic Celebration
Guidebooks on effective visual communication are frequently published for those who have not been exposed to information design and visualization, often obscuring similar publications of decades past. [Read More]
User Interview Techniques: Guidelines for Obtaining Better Results
An interview technique review worksheet emphasizes continual improvement and provides an easy way for team members to evaluate a user research interview session. [Read More]
The View from Here: Raising the Floor
Raising the Floor is creating an open source set of tools to create free public access features built directly into information infrastructure, facilitating affordable assistive technologies. [Read More]
Deal Them Again: Card Sorting Revisited (Book Review)
A whole book on card sorting? This book is replete with solid advice, clearly written and illustrated, and well supported by case studies and examples. [Read More]
The Classy Classic: Designing the User Interface (Book Review)
This updated edition of a text about designing user-interfaces is testament to the evolution of these and other related topics the past two decades. [Read More]
Editor’s Note: A Gourmet Meal of Content, Context, and Analysis Awaits You
The worldwide economy is suffering greatly. Consequently, many corporate, government, educational, and organizational budgets have become diminished. That situation always affects new product development and, with it, the decisions to undertake a variety of usability and user-experience activities—from ethnographic observations, contextual and task analyses, to usability tests, remote testing, and many other usability evaluation and […] [Read More]
What’s News: Hey Good Lookin’
The marketing campaign for TriSpecs™ is focused on user experience as the key selling feature, however the website itself is not a great model of usability. [Read More]
Rubes Cartoon: We Fetched It
Cartoons from the wild and twisted world of Leigh Rubin, syndicated cartoonist. [Read More]
