August 2002 Archive

There’s No Place Like Home

I’m finally back from vacation. I’m anxious to catch up and get the blog rolling again, but first I have a hundred (literally) things to do. Vacations and moving don’t mix very well.

Becoming a Usability Professional

About a year ago, I decided that usability/human factors was what I really wanted to do. At the time, I was finishing up my B.S. Information Technology and realizing that programming definitely wasn’t something I wanted to do. The economy was on it’s way down, so I knew that the best way to get into the field was to get an education in HCI - a master’s degree. I took the GRE, gathered my letters of recommendation and applied to several schools. A few months later, I decided to accept the offer from University College London.

I was on the brink submitting my work resignation when I decided that grad school was too much money on top of my current academic debt. I didn’t want to be paying off school loans until I’m 40. I withdrew from the master’s program a few days later.

The university was very understanding and gave me the opportunity to attend next year, but since my girlfriend just moved across the country to be with me, it will be just as difficult to go next year.

Since I decided not to go to grad school, I’ve been thinking about other ways to gain experience in usability/human factors:

My weblog. While it doesn’t qualify as real experience, it keeps me sharp by compelling me to read a lot about usability and write about usability outside of work. It’s also enabled me to join a great community of other user experience professionals.
Freelance discount usability reviews. Unraveled Usability has been brewing for over eight months now. I think it’s about time I opened for business. Details to come within the next month.
A usability certification, such as HFI’s Certified Usability Analyst. See previous post.
Work more usability into my current job, which seems increasingly difficult due to poor management and lack of process within our department. Simple heuristic reviews of websites are the most usability I get to do now.

To summarize, I really want to do more usability, but I lack real world experience. Grad school is a fading possibility. Finding a usability internship is like finding a pin in a haystack, especially in the current economic climate. I have various ideas on gaining additional experience, now it’s just a matter of execution.

free_culture (Lawrence Lessig’s OSCON Keynote)

Thanks to random($foo), Lawrence Lessig’s great and inspiring O’Reilly Open Source Convention keynote (~8MB; requires Flash) is now available to all, the way it should be. It’s about 30 minutes long, so if you don’t have the time…

Creativity and Innovation always builds on the past.
The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it.
Free societies enable the future by limiting the past.
Ours is less and less a free society

What have you done about it?

If you can’t fight for your freedom, you don’t deserve it.

Fight for your freedom. Support the EFF.

Certified Usability Analyst - Is It Worth It?

I just received an email from Human Factors International promoting their 3-day touring seminar, The Science and Art of Effective Web Design. It’s part of a series of courses that can be taken in order to become a Certified Usability Analyst.

The seminar looks like it contains great information, but is it worth the steep cost? I’m also wondering if their certification is as useful as they claim. Is a Certified Usability Analyst as recognized as a Microsoft Certified Professional?

CSS-Discuss Archive

Have a CSS question? If you’re not already subscribed to css-discuss, there’s a good chance that you’ll find your answer in the css-discuss archive.

(via Guide to Ease)

Usability Applied to Life

Chad Lundgren of Zen Haiku explains how he applies Jakob Nielsen’s usability heuristics to his life:

You might accuse me of being obsessed with usability. You might be right. At any rate, here are ways I apply usability heuristics to my life, most with the heuristic listed.

Default Text Sizing vs. CSS Text Sizing

Peter Van Dijck: “What’s wrong with default text sizes anyway?”

XHTML 2.0 is Reality

I heard about XHTML 2.0 a few days ago, but like many Web developers, I was skeptical about how long it would take the major browsers to implement it.

Not any more. Sjoerd Visscher has developed a working XHTML 2.0 page that works fine in IE6, Opera 6 and Mozilla. SaWEET!

(via dive into mark)

To Flash or Not To Flash

A few days ago, Jeffrey Zeldman linked to the Davidson Bicycles website, noting that Textura Design used valid XHTML 1.0 styled with CSS2. It’s great that they used standards and all, but why did they use Flash for the top navigation? I can understand using Flash if it contained an animation or dynamic content but it doesn’t; it only contains simple text and graphics. I have heard of Flash being used instead of text/graphics because it reduces the page download time, but how big could the difference be for a design like this?

Update: (3:16 PM EST) Byron, Senior Web Developer of Textura Design, writes:

We use Flash for the top navigation because it’s zoomable (for the visually impaired) and to combine all the text and graphics in one small file 16K per file, for the 2nd-level. By using Flash, we can compress each component of the banner individually maximizing quality v. file size and it’s much easier to manage than 7 buttons and a collage of jpegs. Additionally, our next rev will include accessible Flash features. I use Opera to navigate the site without flash and it’s annoying, but works. Opera hides the tag completely, so you can’t put a “flash goes here.”

Thanks for the explanation, Byron. I suspected it had something to do with the file size but overlooked Flash’s zoomable feature (right click on Flash - Zoom In). However, as we described in detail before, text can be made resizable, but it’s a painful process.

The real question: do Flash’s zoomability and accessibility features currently outweigh CSS/XHTML and images? Does “it depend” or is it more cut and dry?

I Have a Life

Curt Cloninger vs. The Cult of “Turn Off Your Computer”:

Personally, I’d rather live in an online world populated by committed PEOPLE who perhaps take things a bit too seriously at times, than in an online playpen with a bunch of anonymous/pseudonymous cynics perpetually advising me to turn off my computer and get a life.

(via v-2)

A Short Story About Font-Sizing

In the beginning, Joshua sized fonts using pixels.
Now the fonts were small and unsizable, the weblog was not accessible and the Spirit of Zeldman was hovering over the weblog.
Then Joshua said, “Let fonts be sized with ems” and it was so. Joshua saw that accessible fonts were good.
Then Joshua heard the voice of Zeldman saying, “..if you try to force ems to deliver undersized text, what looks elegant on your monitor could be mousetype on ours. If you commit this act in the name of accessibility, you’re kidding yourself.”
Joshua agreed with Zeldman; he was delivering smaller text and when it was resized in IE on the PC, it was tiny indeed.
So Joshua said, “Let fonts be sized with pixels… again” and it was so. Joshua was annoyed that IE on the PC couldn’t resize pixel-sized fonts like it should, but still believed he was doing the best thing.
Then Joshua heard the voice of some wise-ass named Jack saying, “my eyes really hurt i cannot resize the text ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch.”
Joshua was at a quandary: he could either size fonts with pixels, realizing that many visitors wouldn’t be able to resize fonts, or size text with ems, knowing that text may look like mousetype on some browsers.
Then Joshua remembered Zeldman’s entry saying, “Alternately, client and aesthetics permitting, you can design all your sites using only normal or oversized type set with ems. No CSS widgets required, no legibility problems even in IE/Win.”
Joshua knew an oversized type set was the only way, sighed, and said, “Let fonts be sized with ems.” and it was so.
Then Joshua looked at his website, knew the text was accessible albeit kind of large, but it was very good.

Update (December 13, 2002): I’ve since switched to using percentages for the base font-size because there’s a smaller chance that they’ll cause mousetype in IE/Win. I’m using a base font-size of 100%. If you also decide to use percentages, I recommend sizing them no lower than 85% to avoid mousetype.

Don’t Link to Us! links to sites that attempt to impose substantial restrictions on other sites that link to them. The Linking Policy for Don’t Link to Us! precludes us from requesting permission to link to a site, and compels us to link directly to the targeted page (i.e., a “deep link”) rather than to a site’s home page.

Unrelated to the content of the site, notice Don’t Link to Us!’s use of the non-standard CSS property, writing-mode, which controls the writing direction for a block of content.

CSS Haiku

James McNally is having a haiku contest for Eric Meyer’s recent CSS book. I entered.

simple web design:
html for structure
css for style

Update: (6:12 pm EST) Added colon after design.
Update: (September 16, 2002) I won.

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