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Designing User-Centric Web SitesOctober 2

I’ve been noodling on how best to present a coherent vision of user-centric website and web service design and think I came up with at least a basic model that will serve my purposes. It’s made up of identity, friends or contacts, services, activities and notifications.

To get concrete, let’s take The Future of Web Apps (London) site. The site’s pretty hot from a purely aesthetic perspective, but from an interactive or social point of view, it’s lacking. This is something that can be remedied, though, with a revised conceptual model and the adoption of a few forward-facing technologies (not all of which are completely baked just yet) but many of which are already becoming the de-facto foundations for decentralized social applications.

The Problem

The fundamental problem with the FOWA site, like most sites today, is that it is site-centric, rather than user-centric, and this has a profound effect on how the site is designed, the features it offers, and what people’s expectations for the site might be.

On the one hand, the site has an obligation to be informative, providing the basic event details: dates and location, schedule, speakers, how to book tickets, etc. On the other hand, and in support of the organizers’ desire to promote and improve engagement before, during and after the event, the site could do so much more to connect attendees and act as a digital scrapbook of

The Future Of Web Apps In An Integrated WorldSeptember 30

It is said that you are more likely to leave your wallet behind than your cellphone when leaving the house. Most people are within 15 feet of their phone at any time, even when they are sleeping. One person in seven has been dumped by phone and the incidence of firing by phone is growing.

The phone is so omnipresent it is becoming set to take over as the task-oriented access point for the Web, while the PC, the TV, and other large screen access points will continue to be the choice for video streaming, browsing, and other activities involving heavy graphics or complicated interfaces. It is unlikely that the phone will take over as the online word processor any time soon.

Moving functionality onto the phone: spending

If you are more likely to have your phone with you than your purse, it starts to make sense for the phone to take over some of the functions that you need all the time. It is no surprise that payment is moving on to the phone.

Take your credit card, for example. What is a credit card, really, but a bunch of information held in a form that is awkward to replicate? In effect, it’s an account number combined with an ID. Any modern cellphone has more storage capacity than a hundred credit cards require, so why not move it onto the phone and have it with you the whole time?

However, managing your finances on your phone with a full-scale accountin

How To Solve A Problem Like The BrowserSeptember 18

The internet would never have become the phenomenon it is today without the web browser; the simplicity of the browser concept allowed the Web to grow rapidly. Developers just had to write basic text documents using a simple markup language (HTML) and the browser took care of everything. As websites became web applications developers still did not have to deal with the complex task of building client applications in the traditional sense: make it work in a browser and anyone can access it without having to install any new software, no matter what device (or OS) they are using.

While the browser makes life easy in many ways for developers it also throws up certain challenges. Major software companies such as Microsoft, Adobe and Google are now trying to address these challenges, albeit in different ways. This article will focus primarily on the option of building desktop applications, what the key drivers and considerations are, and how this may affect the future of the web browser.

What are the Challenges?

The recent launch of Google’s web browser is the latest shakeup in the browser wars that have raged for over a decade. Of course, competition has been good for the evolution of the Web, by bringing us new technologies such as CSS and Ajax and driving adoption of web standards, but there has been some negatives.

The inconsistencies between browsers have always been a major headache for developers. What works in one browser doesn’t always

Silverback : Usability Testing Software For The MacSeptember 16

A New Type of Gorilla is Born

Clearleft is comprised of skilled professionals who have a passion for the processes used to create usable websites. It was that passion that led to the birth of Silverback, a usability testing application for the Mac. Usability testing is something that is often overlooked for an array of different reasons:

  • The cost and time is perceived as too high, and therefore left out of the scope of projects.
  • Not enough staff to administer and process the tests.
  • Lack of the proper equipment or tools.

So, assuming you don’t have thousands of dollars, usability experts, and testing labs at your disposal, what are you to do? Enter Silverback.

What is Silverback?

Simply put, Silverback is beautifully simple usability testing software that utilizes your Mac’s built-in iSight webcam and microphone. With its simplicity and its affordable price point ($49.95), Silverback allows anyone to perform usability testing with little or no budget. The best part about Silverback is that it comes ready-to-use right out of the box. There are no large configuration files or settings, it just works. Jonathan Christopher of Monday by Noon says it best when he states:

My fa

Accessibility In Suit And TieSeptember 10

The gap between the high-end standards-aware freelance developer with the freedom to choose and the corporate web worker is a wide one, and it doesn’t look as if it’s likely to narrow any time soon. But, just as not every start-up employee skateboards from meeting to meeting coding Django on her iPhone, not every business suit uses FrontPage to juggle his marquee tags. There are many corporate developers who do care about cross-browser compatibility, semantic code and accessibility.

So this article is for the suits who care: if you can’t use cutting-edge tools, technologies or techniques, what can you do to ensure that you’re doing all you can for all of your users? My tried-and-tested method is:

  1. Get buy-in from the top
  2. Some accessibility is better than none
  3. Educate your content providers

Get Buy-In From the Top

The last major redesign project I was involved with was successful from an accessibility point-of-view because we had buy-in from the board. Having convinced the top brass of the need for accessibility we wrote a “constitution” for the new site that says all content must be accessible to people with disabilities, and where this clashes with aesthetics or organizational convenience, it trumps them. If you read it, you’ll see that I’ve sneaked in some accessibility-related rules under a different guise.

The