Visicog

I love, and get inspired, when projects push the envelope of user experience. Case in point: the MSNBC Spectra News Reader. Its a very impressive representation of newsfeeds from MSNBC- colorful, three dimensional, vibrant, exciting. I think I could come up with a whole tag cloud to describe it. However, in the blogosphere there is a bunch of comments about how “its pretty” but they dont think its very usable.

Honestly, most of the time when I hear the term “usability” I cringe, because “poor usability” in the popular vernacular often seems to be a synonym for “it offends my taste”, but with airs of authority. If you take a strict look at the term, I don’t think you can easily say that something suffers from poor usability, because it is an umbrella term covering several different areas of interaction.

So, I think that this news reader is so compelling to me, that I want to give it a fair shake in terms of evaluating it. As an experiment, I will be trying to use it every day for the next 7 days, and I’ll keep a journal of my experience with it (by the way, journals can be a great way to perform long-term usability evaluations with participants, as sometimes you can’t be around to evaluate someone for the full lifespan of a task). At the end of it all, I’ll let you know about my feelings about the application and it’s “usability”.

Written by
Spring 2008 Student
Kamlesh Devjani

From the beginning of time, mankind has relied on the back and forward buttons of the browser to navigate through the series of tubes we call the Internet. And due to his unfaithful memory, man has developed a strong attachment to bookmarks.

Both features were surprisingly unavailable in most ‘first generation’ AJAX / Web 2.0 / Rich Internet Applications.

Websites on the Internet work very differently than the desktop applications most users are used to. When a user selects an option / destination, the screen is refreshed, leading to a new webpage. Web browsers allow users the ability to navigate back and forward between the webpages, as well as allow them to bookmark any particular webpage. The key difference between older (poorer?) internet applications and the Rich Internet Applications is that the webpage is no longer refreshed, so the application seems much more responsive and feels a lot like a desktop application.

In many ways this development makes web applications more intuitive, which results in a more pleasant user experience. But because the user is only interacting with a single webpage, the back/forward buttons and bookmarks have no value. Even worse, they can result in unexpected and frustrating results. For example, if you are browsing an e-commerce website that sells books. You search and finally locate a book you are interested in and then go on browsing another section of the website to find out its return policy. You can no longer ‘go back’ to the book’s webpage. Click the back button will take you to the webpage that you visited before getting to the e-commerce site. Perhaps it takes you back to a Google search results page- from where you will most likely go on to a competitor’s website! In such an AJAX-driven website, you would not be able to bookmark any particular page/product either.

A solution for this serious usability issue has existed since 2005- Really Simple History (RSH). The solution really is simple! The issue of tackled by implemented this small JavaScript library file within your existing AJAX application. As JavaScript is responsible for manipulating the webpage in AJAX applications, a small JavaScript cache is created which stores the current user’s history. And as the back / forward buttons are clicked, the script is activated and webpage is refreshed appropriately.

To add bookmarking functionality, the script monitors all screen changes, and modifies the current URL’s anchor value (in the browser window) accordingly. For example, while browsing the e-commerce website mentioned above, the first URL you see in your browser might be www.cheapbooks.com#homepage. As you browse to a book that you like, the URL might be displayed as www.cheapbooks.com#item38392, although the webpage was never changed.

There have been many other ‘history libraries’ developed since RSH first went into production, but many do not address all the usability issues that RSH covers. RSH was further developed in 2007 to fix several bugs and support the latest browser versions of including IE7, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. More information can be found on the official website.

While perusing the above slideshow from Slideshare, I was struck by slides 47-52, which encourages involving the client in recording findings during a testing session.

I really liked the idea of getting clients directly involved with the recording of observations. Good clients are experts on their product and/or system, and will be able to provide compelling insight.

Written by
Spring 2008 Student
Meira Gottlieb

Rich internet applications (RIA) can create unique accessibility issues. This is because of deficiencies in today’s markup. These deficiencies render RIAs unusable by people who use assistive technologies (AT) or who rely on keyboard navigation. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative’s (WAI) Protocols and Formats working group (PFWG) plans to address these deficiencies. Until now, the W3C WAI has discouraged the use of JavaScript but with the continued explosion of Web 2.0 technologies and the growing popularity of widgets, and using RIAs to update the page without having reload the entire page, has brought the issue of how to address this growing problem to a head.

There is a gap between RIAs and assistive technologies, creating an accessibility gap for persons with disabilities. A number of W3C initiatives underway address this problem using a declarative markup approach. JavaScript needs accessibility architecture to write to such that a solution can be mapped to the accessibility frameworks on the native platform by the user agent. Creating a standardized markup is the goal. In short, WAI-ARIA will be used to fix the dynamic accessibility of scripted Web content, in particular the use of JavaScript with (X)HTML markup.

At this time, the primary effort in the W3C WAI Protocols and Formats working group is to focus on extensions to HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.X and according to their website that plan to implement this by extending the host language to include W3C ARIA with a migration path to HTML 5. This will require the creation of new hybrid DTDs that incorporate the extensions. This work will be in the Accessible Rich Internet Applications [WAI-ARIA] specification. WAI-ARIA will constitute extensions to fill most of the gaps needed to support accessibility API infrastructures and dynamic (X)HTML content.

In conclusion, bridging the gap between RIAs and assistive technologies has a long way to go. Only by standardizing the technology and having that standardized markup supported and implemented can those with disabilities hope to gain access to these new developments on the web.

In the third week of the course, we talked about eliminating barriers to entry for websites, and looked at how drop.io makes it so that users don’t have to set up an account before taking advantage of their services.

This past week I had a great experience purchasing a new AC adapter for my cell phone, and the packaging also very effectively reduced any barriers to my purchasing the adapter.

First, it’s clearly labeled that it is not only for Nokia phones, but for “All Models”. Really? No arcane product codes? Sounds simple enough. And to prove it, the packaging allows and encourages this claim by letting the adapters hang out the back, so that you can try plugging in your phone.

Before ever opening the packaging I knew it was the right one for my phone. There was nothing else on the shelf that could compare to this kind of purchasing assurance.

If you are a student of my class, you’ll know that I heartily endorse taking an iterative approach to creating a site, as you can then continually tweak the site’s design to accommodate the behaviors of users in the real world. Of course there is nothing unique about using an iterative approach for designing things, it can help you create a better product no matter what your type of product or business  goal is, be it usabilty, performance, beauty, or even apparently gas efficiency.

An article on the Top 10 Early Contenders for the Automotive X Prize on the Popular Mechanics site lists a high school class who seems to be doing remarkably well on the challenge. They’re taking an iterative approach to the situation.

“I think a lot of teams are missing the point,” Hauger says. “You can spend oodles of time to model this stuff, or you can just go build the thing, put it on the road, and make modifications from there to the finish line.”