Users, Usability, & Accessibility

In my last post, I asked how much more effective my prototype would have been if we had started with the “compelling story” and went from there? The problem from the start was failing to recognize who my user group consisted of. We assumed that since we were working on an application prototype, our users were a fictional (and generic) set of people who would eventually be our customers. The end result was a feature rich application that didn’t solve any single business problem.

In reality, the people performing the demonstration were the real users. Developing features to help them tell their story (and win the company more business) should have been our only goal.

Around the time I realized this, I also discovered two developments in user interface design - Usability and Accessibility.

Usability

I got turned on to Jared Spool through a presentation titled “Scent, Search, and the Pursuit of User Happiness”. I’ve been a big fan of his and the work being done at User Interface Engineering (UIE) ever since. Through UIE articles and podcasts, I’ve learned a lot about putting the user (and their goals) at the center of any development process. Their research has made my work better.

Accessibility

Around the same time, I discovered a presentation by Douglas Bowman (I think from the same Web Design World 2005 conference) titled “Create Beautiful Interfaces With CSS”. In this presentation he relayed a story about redesigning the Wired.com. The layout was table-less and used CSS for layout.

What made this story so powerful for me was when he described an email he received, praising the redesign. The sender ended the email with, “by the way, I’m blind”. It turns out that table based layouts play havoc with screen readers and other assistive technologies. I’ve been a big proponent of standards based layouts and CSS since hearing this.

It still amazes me how many commerce web sites are still table based. How much money is lost per year because people have difficulty accessing online services?

More astonishing is the number of charity and non-profit sites that have yet to update their layouts for accessibility.

Discussion

What people, resources, or practices have made an impact in your day to day work?

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