There’s no need to register and this even is open to all!

Location:
MIT Stata Center, Building 32
Kirsch Auditorium-32-123 and Student Street reception area

Special Thanks to Susan MacPhee for giving us the heads-up on this great event!

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

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.

Google Webmaster Guidelines

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.”

The product of four years of development, Alpha is an engine for answers. Its ambition is to delve into “all the knowledge in the world,” Wolfram says, to find and calculate information. Though Alpha’s interface evokes Google ― whose co-founder Sergey Brin once spent a summer interning for Wolfram ― it’s more like the anti-Google.

Type in a query for a statistic, a profile of a country or company, the average airspeed of a sparrow ― and instead of a series of results that may or may not provide the answer you’re looking for, you get a mini dossier on the subject compiled in real time that, ideally, nails the exact thing you want to know. It’s like having a squad of Cambridge mathematicians and CIA analysts inside your browser.

Type in “Pluto” and Alpha calculates the dwarf planet’s distance from Earth at that very instant. Bang out a series of letters like “ACTCGTC” and Alpha recognizes it as genetic code and tells you what strand of DNA that particular gene lives on and what we know about it. Wolfram has licensed ― or created ― a whole library of databases and massaged them so the information is pliable. (To date, they include Wikipedia, the US Census, and “about nine-tenths of what you’d see on the main shelves of a reference library,” he says.) Combined with the near-­magical abilities of Mathematica, Alpha is a powerful computational engine that can effortlessly answer queries that no one has asked of a search engine before.

Consider a question like “How many Nobel Prize winners were born under a full moon?” Google would find the answer only if someone had previously gone through the whole list, matched the birthplace of each laureate with a table of lunar phases, and posted the results. Wolfram says his engine would have no problem doing this on the fly. “Alpha makes it easy for the typical person to answer anything quantitatively,” he asserts.

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″ 

IE 6, released in 2001, is the scourge of web programmers, user-experience designers and technical-support staff alike. The browser is stacked with quirks that cause web pages to render differently from all other browsers, and special considerations must be taken by web builders to accommodate users running IE 6.

Most wish the browser would just go away, eliminating the need to continue supporting it. Numbers vary from country to country, but somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the web’s worldwide users are still running IE 6 — some because they simply don’t know any better, some because they are stuck with whatever software their companies install on their machines. Finn.no notes that 17 percent of its users are running IE 6. Numbers like that are currently too large for web builders to ignore.

More fun, here’s a site that “is all about the campaign to rid the WWW of Internet Explorer 6 that has devastated web developers and held back the evolution of everything that blocks the tubes for far too long. This can not go on any longer! Off with its head!”

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?