This key question of “What Goes Where?” is the focus of usability testing. YouTube offered insight to their extensive usability process in the redesign of their “Watch” page (the page you see when viewing an actual video). Youtube’s user research revealed some important findings about the desires of their target audience.

MIT is lucky to have Usability services available to the community for free, and this is a great asset for both existing websites as well as new websites. The members of the MIT Usability Group are colleagues aiming to foster usability practices within the Information Technology community at MIT. The team is composed of human factors professionals, usability experts, accessibility specialists, information architects, and user interface designers. Definitely a great asset to the MIT Community!

More information on YouTube’s Usability Testing
More information on MIT’s Usability Group

Joly provides a nice, light-weight introductory questions to consider about your audience, publication, and your business before making any decisions. This is a great article to begin framing your thoughts of greening your publications and then talking to some of the great on-campus resources available for making your publication webby!

Definitely an article to check out!

Source: Joly, Karine. June 2009. University Business. “2010: Print to Web Odyssey? A five-step plan for assessing and negotiating the transition from print to web publications”

It’s important to see what browsers people are viewing your sites on! Read more of the article here:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137358/IE_tumbles_Firefox_regains_market_share_mojo

Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.

One of the most visible changes that Firefox 3.5 will enable for Web developers comes by way of support for CSS Web Fonts.

“When you think about it, Web designers have had to play with the same ten fonts that they could reliably ensure were on everyone’s computer,” Beltzner said.

Beltzner explained that the way fonts have worked in the past is that a Web developer specified a particular font that needed to be resident on a user’s computer. If that font wasn’t present the user would get a default font. With CSS Web Fonts that model changes and developers can now specify any font they want by providing a reference to where the font is available.

“You can just say ‘use my handwriting font, here’s the font and it’s a 20kb file,’” Beltzner said. “So when the browser hits the page, we pull down the file and render the page in that font. When you leave the page, we dispose of the font.”

KIDO’Z is a pretty nifty Adobe AIR-powered desktop browser app that gives kids a safe and fun environment to play games, watch videos and/or visit pre-approved websites. When you first install the AIR app as a parent, you can configure the age and gender of your offspring as well as your location and preferred language (there are 17 available).

What’s nice is that all these settings are taken into account at a content level, so KIDO’Z automatically caters the media it think is most suited for your kid(s) at first launch. As a parent you get password-protected access to an admin panel where you can add more or restrict access to certain content, set limited time frames for usage, and so on.

All content only shows up when a KIDO’Z team member approved the content beforehand, and to add more layers of security all scripts, file downloads, pop-ups and any other attempts that could lead to content which has not been approved, are thoroughly blocked.

To use the app, kids won’t need to know how to read or write since obviously the whole UI is quite visual of nature, and very colorful to boot. The main menu of the KIDO’Z browser currently consists of three categories: games, videos and websites. All media can be opened and viewed inside the app’s interface, and in fact kids can only leave the KIDO’Z environment by exiting the browser altogether. CEO Gai Havkin tells me the tool will later be extended to a closed network of communication tools, including e-mail and instant messaging features (see last screenshot), making it more of a social experience but without the security and privacy hazards of existing services.

Topic: Web Apps: The Collision of Design and Business

Speaker: Jared Spool, UIE

Time: 12:00p–1:00p

Location: 46-3001

Who has the best practices for web app design and what do they do to make world-class applications? Jared will share the latest research in the techniques and methodologies that can make a huge difference.

Thousands of sites have the same web app: the e-commerce checkout process. They all do essentially the same thing: exchange the site’s products for the customer’s money, simultaneously arranging for delivery and payment. Yet, every single one is different and despite their prevalence, frequently hard to use and frustrating. Why is this?

Creating easy-to-use and delightful applications, such as checkout, while meeting the needs of the organization is one of the most difficult challenges designers face. While many sites struggle, some design teams have learned how to do this especially well.

In this presentation, Jared will share UIE’s latest research on designing successful web-based applications. He’ll describe the techniques and methodologies used by the best designers and the common traps they’ve learned to avoid.

Open to: the general public

Cost: Free

Sponsor(s): WebPub

For more information, contact:
Lisa C. Mayer
617-452-4225
webpub-owner@mit.edu

This event is categorized as: personal development, interest clubs/groups

Web design guru Scott Jehl from Boston’s The Filament Group discussed “Access-Oriented Web Design: Building highly-interactive web apps that work for everyone” at our April 2009 WebPub presentation.  Scott specializes in website design and development, is a member of the jQuery and jQuery UI design teams, and runs WriteMaps, an application for planning websites. We learned a great deal about access oriented web design, and Scott has graciously provided us with his presentation slides from the session.

Not much information on the people that created Ajaxload, but heck it’s cool and free:

I think they forgot one final instruction where you have to say “Presto change-0″ 

It seems complaints about CS 4 have been pretty widespread and there have also been reports of horrible driver issues (slowness, etc.) with Photoshop CS 4.  If you’re thinking about upgrading, maybe wait a bit for Adobe to iron out the problems.

And if you’re running Adobe Reader 9, you might want to take a look at http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/24/0032201 about a patch for the vulnerability that allows an attacker to take control of your machine…

I’m just full of good news today, aren’t I?