Original post – 11.13.2006
Today is World Usability Day. A day set aside for design and development guru’s to embrace their united objective to drive technology and create a better world for all citizens everywhere. http://www.worldusabilityday.org/ All those that work in IT, Marketing, Product Development, Multimedia and Internet design should pause for a moment and pat yourself on the back for making the web a better place. Sites on the Internet are impoving thanks to years of grass roots methodology freaks driving home the concept of building easier, faster and smarter applications online. User Centric design is the key element in implementing a successful web application and accessibility is now playing a key role in today’s Internet development plans. Check out these sites to help in our crusade for building a better web.
www.usability.com and www.useit.com are great places to start for creating a better Internet. Eyetrack 3 provides research on web user’s eyes-tracking patterns across a web page. Jakob Neilson’s site provides a excellent heat map on the F-Shape pattern that they have seen with web users. Useit.com also provides good info on size limits to build pages to allow desired load times with various connection speeds. These days, your web site must be accessibile for all the different type of people that use the web, you can even get sued now for not making your site accessible. The JFly site offers info on understanding how to design for color blind users. Vision Austrailia has discussions, links and resources for low vision users. Usability.com provides resources for creating accessible data tables. The Interaction Designer’s coffee break provides a weekly view on issues and design thoughts and contains a great article on navigation blindness of users. There are a ton of blogs out there for focusing on web development. Robert’s Talk gives some good javascript libraries and rants on about accessiblity. If you are wanting to see if your web pages meet the standards, access webxact.
In Web Development, the goal is to know your user and design your site to provide easy to access answers to what they want to accomplish. How you get there is the fun part.