No mice or keyboards. No controllers at all for that matter. Voice, gesture and object recognition – the future of interaction design sure looks exciting!

I just visited the website for the magazine Interfaces and they have the same navigation items listed at the top as they have down the side. The kicker though is that they have labeled the side navigation “Primary navigation”. Do you really need to label it and is “Primary navigation” the most user friendly title you’ve heard? I didn’t go past the homepage.

I recently became a casualty of that lovely three letter acronym the GFC – http://tinyurl.com/c38e9c. So this is a call out for anyone in need of design and usability services to get in touch. I’m ultimately looking for a full time position in Melbourne but any contract or freelance work in the meantime would be of interest.

me: we are being recorded by this that and the other.
(married) user: ok
me: so what websites do you regularly use
user: like most men I search for porn
me: ah…ok…are there any sites you dislike
user: I hate all the flashing ads and the popup windows…

If you ever need an example of the ROI of usability then this is a great case study:

http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button

This is a good video illustrating the problem with requirements documents:

Another problem with the process outlined in the video would be the lack of design involvement! :)

Jeff Croft recently wrote an article on what he calls the new layers of web development in which he makes the following key point:

“In short, I’m suggesting that the (X)HTML templates used for a website in today’s modern world are much more closely related to presentation than they are to content.”

This point is in reference to the 3 layers commonly used to describe web standards:

1. structure or content
2. presentation
3. behavior

It’s a thought provoking read. In short though I’m not convinced that structure and content are the same. Content has structure and an interface has structure and (X)HTML code crosses both these areas. Jeff is suggesting that if (X)HTML is structure, that this structure is more for presentation than content. I agree that would be the case for a lot of web applications but not necessarily content sites. Even web applications have content that has structure (think headings, sub-headings, bullets etc).

Google ranking to be affected by users?!

Clicktale is a nice product that creates a video type screencast of actual users on your website. I’ve used it for a client’s website before and think it’s a great tool. It gives you a good sense of how users interactive with a site and a reasonable understanding of their intent (better than log files would do yet not as good as user sessions would).

Anyway, having access to a wide variety of their customer sites has allowed them to do an interesting study into website scrolling behaviors and what they term scroll reach and visitor attention. It’s makes interesting reading.

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For large sites, and even small ones, having a fully standards compliant website may seem a Utopian dream, especially in Agile development environments where elements of an overall interface are approached piecemeal. So it’s fair to think why bother trying at all? Well you don’t have to be fully compliant to enjoy the benefits that web standards offers. Getting close to full compliance will still mean you enjoy the majority of business benefits they offer. So I’ve put together an overview of how the design, development and testing disciplines can incrementally work towards web standards.

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