unraveled

November 2006 Archive

New paper: Accessible and Usable Web Design

Preface

This is the seventh and final installment of my graduate school work: my final thesis report, Accessible and Usable Web Design. For a background on my graduate work, please read the preface of the first installment, the interaction design process.

Abstract

The application of the accessibility and usability principles helps to ensure more accessible and usable Web sites. Accessibility and usability are typically addressed separately, but several recent studies have studied the convergence of these topics. This study aims to further explore the relationships between these two concepts through direct observation of both disabled and non-disabled users. A website was created which complied with both accessibility and usability guidelines. This website was then tested with both disabled and non-disabled users in order to identify accessibility and usability problems that are outside the scope the guidelines. The resulting data suggested several recommendations for creating more accessible and usable websites. Additionally, this study develops a framework for creating accessible and usable websites.

The full 62-page report is available as a PDF from the Articles & Papers section of my professional site.

Postscript

Since I submitted this report, many articles on the relationship between accessibility and usability have been published - most recently the excellent Working with Others: Accessibility and User Research by Maurizio Boscarol. Even with all the attention this topic has been given, it’s still a relatively new concept for many web designers, so it’s important to continue researching this complex relationship, especially as websites become more complex and interactive.

All installments in this series:

  1. The interaction design process
  2. A review of DataTiles
  3. Designing a cashpoint
  4. Culture and web design
  5. Serco: an independent usability consultancy
  6. An evaluation of exhibit design at the London Science Museum
  7. Thesis report: Accessible and Usable Web Design

Now with tags

I recently tagged every entry on unraveled, which means that you can now browse my archives by labels or “tags”. This is probably much more useful for me than for you, but useful none the less.

A note on tag clouds

You’ll probably notice that I didn’t use a tag cloud. I was initially considering a tag cloud, but the more I seriously thought about it, the less useful it seemed.

While they’re relatively easy to implement using Movable Type and interesting as an information visualization technique, they’re crap for scanning, which is primarily what people will be doing here. This is evident on the mothership of tagging, del.icio.us. You can view tags alphabetically or by size (popularity). Alphabetic order is typically great for scanning items in a list, but not when they’re different sizes and listed left to right. Tag popularity is also useful, and at least when viewing by size the tags are more readable, but then the aspects that make a cloud useful for information visualization are lost.

What made the most sense to me is a vertical list (not a cloud) sorted alphabetically and by popularity. Next, I shaved off the tags that most readers are not likely to be looking for — i.e. most of them — and made them available in a separate, easy to access list. Because I’ve created a separate list for popular tags, the relative size of each tag becomes mostly irrelevant, so there wasn’t a need for different font sizes.

Tag clouds certainly have their place among visualization techniques, but they aren’t the best choice for unraveled, or, as I suspect, most other blogs.

New article: card sorting

The November issue of STC Intercom magazine focuses on usability, and I’m happy to announce my featured article, Card Sorting: An Inexpensive and Practical Usability Technique.

If you’re designing a system to organize content, you can either come up with your own labeling system — which may or may not be shared by others — or you can talk to the actual users of the system and learn how they perceive its content. There are many methods of gathering this user data, but they can often be both time-consuming and costly. Fortunately, there’s hope: one method that is generally inexpensive, quick, and easy is card sorting.

If you’re an STC member you can download the article from Intercom Online. Alternatively, you can download the article from the new Articles & Papers section of my professional site.

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