Archive for the 'Usability / IA' Category

Usability Introduction – Baltics

Thank you to all those people who attended the session today in Tallinn, and I look forward to meeting people from Vilnius and Riga! Thanks also go to the guys at Best Marketing, who have made me very welcome. I promised lots of links to go with the presentation, so here they are…

Is accessibility actually usability?

An article of mine translated into Bulgarian.A couple of days ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the first seminiar on usability in Bulgaria. A great thanks to the people at .net and Lucrat in Bulgaria, it was a great event with great hosts. It was also great to see & meet Peter Merholz,…

Home links verses logos

The facebook menu with logo, home, and other links. Facebook appears to be testing (with a far greater audience than I could), the current state of web conventions. A few years ago, few regular people knew that the logo on a website would link back to the homepage. Anecdotally, I have noticed more people using logos for that purpose in usability testing, but it’s very difficult to know what proportion of the general population that is.

dConstruct 2008 notes

dConstruct banner.
My journey to d.construct was a long one, I hadn’t even checked which talks were when, so I was very thankful for the schedule built into your name tag! I took quite a few notes for general use, but please to refer to the originals where possible:

Keynote:

Email IA for the overloaded

A multitude of small postboxes in rows, all with little locks.For those who get a large volume of email, you probably know the pain of trying to balance reading, sorting, and acting on that email. After several years of battle, I’ve settled on a particular filtering method that will probably work for anyone that receives email from several internal teams, and many project lists. Do you need IA for email?

Accessibility findings vs recommendations

This article on newspaper site accessibility dropped into my inbox, from the author hoping to get some coverage from accessibility related sites. Whilst the aim is good (testing sites to increase the awareness of accessibility), I wouldn’t be happy with the recommendations.

Usability myths and professionals

A recent post by a local authority web officer was fairly frustrating for me, as it perpetuates several myths in usability, as well as calling into question my motives. The last part is about usability advice (from me) published on the localdirect.gov.uk site.

IA and accessibility

If your interest was peaked by mention of addressing accessibility issues at the Information Architecture (IA) stage when reading my .Net article, there is finally some further reading on it.

CMS editable Flash

The Defacto-CMS website carousel widget.With all the fuss over AJAX and Flash accessibility you get, I thought it might be worth outlining the process we used to create a Flash/AJAX widget and highlight one of the advantages you get with this method. It also means that the use of Flash has no impact on your Search Engine Optimisation.

@media 2007

I’m just back from @media, and thought I’d post up brief notes (such as they are) for my own reference and anyone else’s gain. Obviously, I will only comment on the presentations I saw, and it’s all from my own particular perspective.

Jesse James Garrett – Beyond AJAX

Jesse James Garrett presents the keynote on Beyond AJAX.I…