Usertesting can be one of those expensive and time consuming aspects of any website project. Though it is clear to us working on the site’s design and development how vital actual testing is - it is yet an entirely different matter to convince your client to spend time and money on it, especially if - like me - you tend to have clients who are individuals or smaller companies or organisations.
That was until a gorilla came along introducing a new alternative which looks very promising ;-)
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Today I received the disc with some absolutely stunning photos of Nick, just love them (and this man!) - I had to show them here :-) Tom has been rediscovering his love and passion for photography and taken some amazing photos. Nick became one of his recent subjects and the result is amazing. I particularly like Tom’s signature shot with the goggles. Thank you, Tom :-)
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Having just received an email from Helen Kennedy from INMD it was good to hear that Channel 4 reported on the issues facing intellectually disabled users online. I’m very glad that this is getting some media exposure - and to support this issue - I’d like to show it here.
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‘Scaffolding’ - my 2 wonderful paintings from Mags :-) → continue reading…
today is the last day of the INMD workshop - on the program for today is more usertesting and an afternoon of talk from selected experts. I will try to keep notes as we go along today as I am not sure whether I will have time to write this up afterwards. → continue reading…
yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting Andy Clarke and attending his workshop “Transcending CSS: Styling For A Beautiful Web”. It was a great day with quite a few ‘lightbulb moments’ for me.
It was great to listen to such clear and to-the-point explanations and I finally clicked with relative positioning ;-) Andy presented a beautiful demo site inspired by Billy Bragg and talked about a lot of wonderful techniques. It was inspiring to hear Andy’s take on the different issues and I was glad to find my own opinions were very much along the same lines…
Hopefully, if time allows, I will soon try to write a post about some of the things I’ve learnt. For now - I can’t wait to implement a few CSS techniques and start by creating a new and cleaner CSS for this site here :)
THANKS, Andy :)
having missed it the last 2 years - I’m on time this year to join the united efforts of “CSS naked day” :)
What happened to the design?
To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the
Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.
javascript… the superior geek’s land… as many times before, I again feel I need to face another challenge in coding… as with handcoding - before facing it I thought my visual mind would not be able to handle the code - I feel this is even more so the case with Javascript. → continue reading…
[part of the INMD project]
PROJECT PAGE: PingPong game for ID players
OUTLINE: This game is intended for the ID group with the most severe intellectual disability.
It is therefore intended to be played with assistance, at least for the start of the game. It can be played by 1 person alone - or be played as a 2 player game, each player taking charge of 1 side of the game (left/right black bar and their corresponding half of the screen/projection). → continue reading…
Today was the day #2 of the Inclusive New Media Design workshops - and it was a very interesting day as I learnt about people with ID (Intellectual Disablility) and their perspective on every day life as well as their use of the internet. I’m hoping there will be some reference material going up on the INMD site over the next few days which will be good to read.
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Today was the first day of the Inclusive New Media Design workshops - to quote the site:
Inclusive New Media Design is a research project which aims to identify the best ways to encourage web designers and developers to build websites accessible to people with intellectual disabilities.
just summing up a few points which should by now be standard practice (WCAG 1.0 discussion points from Simon Evans):
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Usually, I don’t really comment much on the debates happening online though I do follow them with interest. The reason for not writing much in my own blog here is partly because I don’t consider myself a ‘proper’ blogger (don’t think I am very good at writing - much more of a visual person) and partly as I simply do not have the time. This issue of accessibility however does really get to me - and I find some of the attitudes out there quite shocking - and really sad - so I felt I needed to draw attention to this.
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Today is blog action day for the environment - running a bit late I still wanted to join in and air my grievances on the amount of paper we waste whereas the digital environment would make most of it entirely unnecessary.
Working in education - the amount of bureaucracy involved seems to grow at a steady pace throughout the years. As a student - where you would fill in about 3 medium length forms a few years ago - you now have to work your way through seemlingly endless numbers of forms. As a tutor - you are bombarded with endless sheets of paper: meeting notes and minutes, schemes of work for your lesson, lesson plans, project briefs, observations, assessments…. and the list goes on….
Though the purpose or necessity of these is worth debating in itself - the issue bothering me most here is the endless amount of paper used… surely a lot of these formalities can be taken care of digitally?
Since taking over the running of my current courses I have been preparing all paperwork as editable PDFs for everyone in my team to use. We use the PDFs for all documentation required, keep numerous digital copies of everything needed and save whole archive folder loads of paper. Apart from cutting down on paperwaste - there are other clear advantages of using digital files - such as easily being able to edit the information, easy and fast distribution, efficient backup and so on…
So I am all for a paper-free office environment :)
just came across this icon - the great Firefox devouring the evil IE. It really made me smile… what a nice thought…
It looks like it’s quite old and unfortunately I have no idea who created this graphic. But I liked to so much I had to display it here - doesn’t this just show what you as webdesigner wish could happen…?
Wouldn’t it be great to send out a nice little fox to kill the monster which has been causing havoc with any nicely coded site…? Never having to confront that horrid blue ‘e’ again… no more hacks, ever… well, we can dream…
If anyone knows who created it - please do let me know, I would be happy to give credit where credit is due :)
Even though the weather doesn’t seem to be on our side - I hope you are enjoying the show ;)
Please let us know what you think - we welcome any feedback, comments … or anything else you’d like to say :)
Even though I had planned to start working with my wonderful ‘eyedea’ team once our site was finished and ready to be launched - our reputation seems to have done wonders and we have had put our own site on the backburner for now in order to do work for our clients. I am very happy to say that we have a number of great projects in development at the moment and that our team work is working out even better than expected ;)
With all the interest in our work - web design as well as online training - we decided to put our site online, even though only the ‘eyelearn’ courses’ section is done (if yet to be expanded). So feel free to have a look - we welcome any feedback and comments ;)
eyedea.eu
as much as I hate filling in forms and other pointless bureaucracy ” this survey aims to find out more about us ” - people in webdesign. The added bonus is that it’s setup by the lovely people from ALA and so it was straight to the point, clearly presented and very quickly done ;)
We’re still young as an industry and with the debates going around on qualifications “do we really need formal qualifications?” and gender “well, what about us geeky web girls?” it will be interesting to see the results.
so go on, answer a few questions - it will only take a few minutes….. you know you want to ;)
Just read the most brilliant news ;) about Molly Holzschlag joining the IE team….
By the looks of it - there might be hope yet. It is great to see such as strong CSS advocate joining Microsoft - and taking away all excuses for slow take up of proper css support…. ;)
» Working together for a better web
Here’s wishing Molly good luck - and us all an easier ride in the future ;)
Have a look at the following sites and make some notes on the strength and weaknesses of the design. Focus on the following topics:
- first impression
- layout
- colour scheme
- typography
- target audience
Make sure to note your first impressions down immediately - feel free to comment on each others posts - let’s get talking → continue reading…
