February 2006

Remote usability testing

“Remote usability testing is an appealing technique of conducting interface evaluations where participants remain in their own environment (office or home) and, using screen sharing software or even remote control applications, usability experts can observe them like they would be in a laboratory.”

published in Usability | February 11, 2006

January 2006

Check date in javascript

“When asking for a date in forms is a good idea validate it using Javascript in order to avoid users insert invalid days, months of years. The most powerful method to accomplish this task is using the date objects and functions provided by javascript.”

published in Scripting | January 31, 2006

Accessible colors

“W3C in his Web Accessibility Initiative has suggested an algorithm that can evaluate color visibility by combining color brightness and color difference in order to find poor visibility between text and background colors. However the application of the formula can yield to unexpected results.”

published in Accessibility | January 11, 2006

December 2005

How many users makes a good usability test?

“Jacob Nielsen argue that five users are enough to conduct usability tests. On the other hand Christine Perfetti and Lori Landesman claims that hundred people are not sufficient to discover all usability problems... So how many users are needed to conduct a usability test?”

published in Usability | December 29, 2005

Task Oriented Design

“Task oriented design can be used to deploy interfaces based on users workflow, users roles and users computer proficiency in order to provide a more profitable interaction between people and system.”

published in User centered design | December 16, 2005

November 2005

Multicolored Links

“Using CSS attribute selectors, span, classes and :hover pseudo-classes some special effects to links can be applied in order to render them with multiple colors.”

published in CSS | November 24, 2005

Underlined Links

“Most usability practitioners and experts agree that links had to be underlined (but there are exceptions!) in order to satisfy user expectations about their inborn functionality. However the default style provided by internet browser introduce ambiguities in some characters visualization. CSS can be used to fill in this lacuna taking advantage of elements's border property.”

published in CSS | November 16, 2005

Configuring a VNC server

“VNC from Real VNC is a small tool that make possible control a remote PC (server) using a a little application (client) on another computer everywhere in a network or Internet. This tutorial will explain how configure your Linux machine in order to set up a VNC server and start it at boot time as a service.”

published in Linux tutorials | November 10, 2005

WUD 2005: Survey on the UCD integration in the industry

“A web survey, conducted by Giorgio Venturi and Jimmy Troost between the end of 2003 and the first half of 2004, investigate how user centered design is integrated into the business model of european enterprises. Result collected and analyzed from the answers points out that UCD is mostly employed in big companies, but with a relatively low ratio: usability practitioners represent less than one percent of all company employees.”

published in User centered design | November 04, 2005