You do not need to read Norwegian to enjoy the Bad Usability Calendar 2007. Designed to be a constant reminder of why usability matters, the calendar uses a different, bad, design for each month of the year.
NetLife Research has been doing these calendars for three years. They ask for suggestions from the usability community each year, since who knows better what awful things designers have done. This year, they decided to add exaggerated AJAX use, navigation overload, and a topic map that will drop your jaws!
Each month violates a specific design heuristic, so the calendar is also educational for those who are not familiar with UI heuristics. You can download the calendar as a PDF file to share or print out and hang on your wall.
Labels: bad calendar, NetLife Research, usability
¶ 0 Comments Links to this postNow, Sarah has done the same service for accessibility in her book Access by Design: A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers.
She is also a blogger at InformIT's Web Design Guide blog. In this week's post, she talks about how and how not to use ALT text with images to improve accessibility.
Writing Alternate Text for Images
I suggest you subscribe to the feed for Sarah's blog and gain her wisdom.
Labels: accessibility, images, InformIT, Sarah Horton
¶ 0 Comments Links to this postMost importantly, Harris states, is how increasing screen resolution has negatively affected people's ability to quickly "hit" a target with a mouse cursor.
Using text with an icon is more usable because the target is larger. Making toolbars more compact - multiple rows in floating rectangles - makes the distance from cursor to icon shorter and, therefore, faster.
As evidence of how design changes work, Harris provides examples from the redesign of Office 2007.
Labels: accessibility, click target, Fitts law, Jensen Harris
¶ 0 Comments Links to this postColor is always an issue in usable and accessible design. Pabini Gabriel-Petit provides an extremely useful guide to choosing combinations of color and backgrounds in his article Applying Color Theory to Digital Displays for UX Matters.
With numerous examples, he shows clearly the issue of contrast and its affect on readability. Since this is the third in a series, you might want to check on the first two installments, as well.
Labels: accessibility, color, usability
¶ 0 Comments Links to this postAn interesting look at the reactions of people in a user forum when someone asks them to review a Flash-based Web site.Nightmares in Usability
Labels: design, Flash, standards, web2.0
¶ 0 Comments Links to this postOkay, this is an ad for one of Jakob's workshops - Fast, Cheap, and Good Usability Methods: Yes, You Can Have It All (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) - but his point is worth remembering: "The sooner you complete a usability test, the higher its impact on the design process."
Labels: design, methods, Nielsen, usability
¶ 0 Comments Links to this postAs a former online Help developer, and a current usability specialist, I always argue that most online Help is ignored because it simply does not answer the questions users have. Help developer Mike Hughes had an aha! moment during a usability test of a Help system. He describes it in this article - User Assistance in the Role of Domain Expert at UXMatters.
Labels: documentation, Help, technical writer
¶ 0 Comments Links to this postCraig Cook came to Web design from graphic arts and admits you have to change the way you think about design when working on the Web in a great article - How to Grok Web Standards - at A List Apart.
Labels: design, standards
¶ 0 Comments Links to this post