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Usability Update: USEFUL TOOLS and Websites >>>

Here’s some new articles and Web 2.0 sites you may find useful:

Web 2.0 Social Networks – Viral loops distilled

Looking for multi-touch demos and an Open Source SDK?

Want some practical tips on dealing with color blindness?

Easy online forms using Ajax

Want To Make Your Web Forms More Usable?

Upcoming 1 Hour Webinar – Dec 16th, 2016- $129
With the convergence of Windows and the Web is upon us we have the opportunity to dramatically improve Web Form Usability with Ajax and make significant gains in user efficiency and lower training and support costs. Learn how to deliver the best of the web and the best of the desktop experience when it comes to interactive web-based forms.

I’ll be speaking next week at a new conference here in the US. It’s called Jboye and is focused on delivering practical enterprise solutions for collaboration and knowledge management in a vendor neutral environment. I’ve been speaking for 3 years at the sister conference in Aarhus, Denmark and have found it to be very focused, useful and insightful. Even if you can’t make it this year, I’d put in on your list for next year and I’ll keep things updated on my experience this year at the conference.

Here’s a few tools and Web 2.0 sites you may find useful: Web 2.0 Travel site – Driven by User Generated Content:
http://www.uptake.com Trying to create a cross-device Mobile Phone Application?
http://www.phonegap.com Want to test your Website on hundreds of browser combinations?
http://browsershots.org/ Want To Make Your Web Forms More Usable?

A little New Year’s humor on taking the one-click, one-button approach a bit too far.

I just returned from my third year of speaking on Usability at the Jboye08 conference in Aarhus Denmark.  With each annual visit, I enjoy meeting up with old colleagues and getting a different perspective on software design issues than I normally see at the conferences in the USA.   Something about surrounding yourself in the simple, yet elegant style of Danish design for a week is both refreshing and inspiring. We were able to hear from the co-inventor of the Web (Robert Cailliau) and his perspective on the innovations that occurred at CERN in Switzerland and the subsequent nurturing of innovation to bring it to mainstream reality. Several speakers representing global companies in Europe shared actual real world examples of true enterprise Wikis and Social Networks that are actually working and taking hold across the enterprise.   I was able to share some specific Usability insight on improving Form Usabilityand Advanced UI Desgin that was well received by the conference participants.  Heading home through my connection in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, I was reminded of the great signage making it one of the most usable international airline hubs …and of course those clever men’s bathrooms with the ‘Fly in the toilet ’ to take advantage of men’s natural instinct to aim for a target and thus improve user performance of this necessary biological goal.

The release of the new Google Chrome browser may provide a big boost in usability for those embracing advanced Web application design.  Our early take on the browser highlights a few key things to consider:

Designed for web applications, not web pages
This has been a thorny issue for several of our clients deploying high volume transactional applications on the web.  Things are great at 8am but as the day progresses the browser cannot seem to manage the DOM model and the browser gets unstable after several hours.  Try it yourself with a large Gmail account and you’ll see how things get dicey as your day progresses.

Each tab is a separate process
This will go a long way to create a more stable enterprise platform for web applications. Just the fact that one URL can no longer crash all other open pages (tabs) will be a huge win in the enterprise.

Using Google Gears leverages the desktop
Now you get a great infrastructure (Google Gears) to manage client-side persistent data without having to create your own framework.  This is bundled with robust garbage collection / memory management to deliver speedy desktop performance.

Go ahead…try it out and let us know how it performs with your robust Web 2.0 applications!

My Gmail account has been down this afternoon. We made the switch to use GMAIL web services as the primary funnel for all our emails due to the superior spam filters and improved AJAX  (Desktop) experience. Now…it’s down we have no access to emails. I’m seeing several panic posts around the blogosphere as this seems to be a widespread outage. Essentially GMAIL has become an essential utility for us like power, water, etc….however in this case we don’t have a backup…

Information and feature overload is reducing user productivity and effectiveness. Here’s my latest article from our research at Classic System Solutions, Inc.  I discuss the popular complex navigation patterns and techniques aimed at creating a more usable experience.

Here’s a few tools we find useful on projects to help promote
and ensure usability:

Color Challenged Developers?
Here’s a great tool to help your team select color a combination with aesthetic appeal and good usability.
Check out > ColorSchemer Studio 

Need fast, interactive prototypes?
Develop fast interactive prototypes and generate a word doc for the boss and html prototypes for the users. The latest release can simulate AJAX interactions.
Check out > Axure Rapid Prototyper

Spending too much time copying that whiteboard user interface design?
This purpose built software cleans the glare and yellow from the photos you take of your whiteboard meeting notes and outputs an easy to read copy (better than those copy whiteboards!).
Check out > Whiteboard Photo

Here’s an updated Ajax charting library to bring your static charts to life without causing excessive screen refresh issues.
ComponentArt Charting Gallery

Ever since Google Finance released their Flash based interactive stock charts, the bar has been raised on how to provide more useful ‘Why” information vs. the traditional “Drilldown” to see more data approach.