User-centric GUI Design Explained to All

Again with the slash­dot­ting. But this is a con­tin­u­a­tion of a topic from last week, and here is some links to a few good arti­cles. Enjoy, and I swear, no more slash­dot links for at least a month.

Browsers as test platforms

There is an inter­est­ing arti­cle from accross the pond about how to use browsers to develop and debug html struc­ture, javascript, CSS etc. Read it and dis­cuss below.

Accessible Links

Some guide­lines for acces­si­ble hyper­links that I emailed to some­one awhile ago…

1. Most impor­tant, make sure the actual link is descrip­tive (not just the sur­round­ing text). Users of screen read­ers can tab through links and the screen reader reads only the linked con­tent. If the link reads “Click Here” or “Down­load Now.”
2. If a graphic is really nec­es­sary and used for a linked item, be sure that is has an appro­pri­ate alt tags
3. Con­sider use of the title attribute if needed for doc­u­ments with long titles or doc­u­ments offered in mul­ti­ple formats
4. When pos­si­ble, avoid the use of pop-up win­dows. If nec­es­sary, be sure to inform the user that by click­ing on the link they will be leav­ing the site
5. Add a ‘Skip Nav­i­ga­tion’ link at the top of a page to allow users to skip to the con­tent of the page (alter­nately, con­sider a ‘Skip Con­tent’ link if needed to access nav­i­ga­tion easily)
6. If nec­es­sary, add the tabindex func­tion to hyper­links to spec­ify the order that they tabbed to
7. If links are on the same line, be sure to use a separator

Oth­ers?

Are Usability & Security Opposites in Computing?

Not that Slash­dot needs the traf­fic, but they are dis­cussing some­thing that might be of inter­est to this crowd. “Instinct tells us that com­puter secu­rity and com­puter usabil­ity are inversely pro­por­tional to each other…However, there have been plenty of cases where both com­puter secu­rity and com­puter usabil­ity went hand in hand with each other and actu­ally improved together.” They then, with­out irony, link to a pdf white paper.

Firefox is here!

I’ve used Fire­fox as my pri­mary browser for devel­op­ment for the past year and it has per­formed great. I highly rec­om­mend it for you and your orga­ni­za­tion. From mozilla.org:

The wait is over. Fire­fox 1.0 empow­ers you to browse faster, more safely and more effi­ciently than with any other browser. Join more than 8 mil­lion oth­ers and make the switch today � Fire­fox imports your Favorites, set­tings and other infor­ma­tion, so you have noth­ing to lose.

For profit, or not for profit

Hav­ing attended SXSW Inter­ac­tive and the IDEAS con­fer­ence this year, it was inter­est­ing to com­pare how the profit world and the non-profit/government world push design and usabil­ity for­ward. The profit world seems to be moti­vated by profit and mar­ket share, they gov­ern­ment world by Sec­tion 508. Both have had their suc­cesses (wired.com, Library of Con­gress — Amer­i­can Mem­o­ries) with mod­ern usable design. But which side is doing bet­ter and why? Do you have a bet­ter user expe­ri­ence on a com­mer­cial site, or a gov­ern­ment site?

Online Portfolios

I’m not yet super informed on elec­tronic port­fo­lios, but I had a few thoughts that I wanted to throw out and hope­fully get some feed­back. If you’re at all new to port­fo­lios you may be ask­ing your­self, “So how exactly is an online port­fo­lio dif­fer­ent from a reg­u­lar old web­site?” My impres­sion is that in some ways they are not dif­fer­ent at all– but there are (or at least can be) some key dif­fer­ences. A good primer is this arti­cle titled The Elec­tronic Port­fo­lio Boom: What’s it All About?

Briefly, my under­stand­ing is that a web­site is gen­er­ally more flex­i­ble and gives the port­fo­lio devel­oper more con­trol over lay­out (not always a good thing in the hands of an ama­teur). Online port­fo­lios gen­er­ally have a set frame­work for con­tent, occa­sion­ally a cou­ple of tem­plates to choose from and some even allow stu­dents to cor­re­late work they’ve done with a set of learn­ing standards.

One way of set­ting up an online port­fo­lio that has been dis­cussed is to use an open source blog or other CMS piece of soft­ware. Here is an exam­ple of a ePort­fo­lio about port­fo­lios done using Word­Press, a great arti­cle from Stopde­sign and some inter­est­ing thoughts from the ERADC, ePort­fo­lios and weblogs: one vision for ePort­fo­lio devel­op­ment.

As far as using a spe­cific port­fo­lio soft­ware, I’d love to hear what options peo­ple know of. One to check out is the Open Source Port­fo­lio Ini­tia­tive a well devel­oped effort of a lot of uni­ver­si­ties that seems to be fairly full featured.

All of those resources noted, I think there are big ques­tions to con­sider about sus­tain­abil­ity and effec­tive­ness of port­fo­lios for any group before too much time is invested in devel­op­ing any kind of com­pre­hen­sive long-term system.