usability

Archive for the 'usability' Category

New W3C markup validator

Monday, August 6th, 2007

A couple of days ago, W3C has released a new version of a html markup validator (0.80). 8 months after the last release and a lot of work with 2 beta versions, W3C has presented a new “revamped” markup validator. They describe it as a “major milestone in the development of the validator”, that besides various functional improvements finally includes a major visual overhaul. Since the beginning, the W3C pages besides being accessible were having a really bad design, but the new markup validator is already a good change.

The usability of the validator has been greatly improved – one of the new “features” that i liked is the icon status which represents the status of the validated content – green when the markup is valid and red when it is not. This way it is easy to see which documents are valid, when you have a couple of them validating.
It is remarkable that the new markup validator works in resolutions until 640×480, in which it while having a small horizontal scrollbar, it is still represents everything on the screen.
The colors have been altered from straight #0f0 and #f00 to much smother #669900 and #1f2126 respectively, though i have to add that may be the color for the red is not a “web safe” one, and should be reconsidered for the newer version.

The functional changes, every regular user should notice in the next couple of days, while validating – for example for the XHTML 1.0 strict doctype the <html> tag started requiring “xmlns” attribute, and so on. This small things should affect the results of a lot of the already validated content, but it is for better – because it will help web designers to improve and to perfect their html and xhtml code.

Overall the changes are for better and W3C markup validator team have done a good job improving the most useful instrument from W3C.

Posted in standards, usability, xhtml/css | No Comments »

Jakob Nielsen on sitemaps in 2000

Thursday, May 24th, 2007

Today, while browsing an old book called “Designing Web Usability”, written by Jakob Nielsen in the far 2000 (some 7 years ago), i have found a reference to the idea of distributing site content to the search engines in the form of the. On the page 238 there is small subtitle “Integrating Sites and Search Engines”, where he discusses the idea of integrating sites more closely with search engines. The problem for its implementation was considered at the time of writing – the agreement of a standardized method for encoding the user’s query terms. Right now we know, that the Search Engines can agree on the way of crawling the websites, but at the same time we know, that they use a lot of own “meta-extensions” to the crawling, like Google’s “no-follow” or Yahoo’s “no-content” for example. While user’s query terms are really far away from being interpreted by the sites (at the moment of writing it seems that only Yahoo pays attention to the meta content tag), the search engines have already done the first step into the direction of a better cooperation with website administrators and into the assuring of a better quality and better search results content.

Interesting, is that recently the governments of Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia announced they would use Sitemaps on their web sites. Of course it is quite a publicity stunt with a support for Google in the first place (creators of the sitemap protocol), but at the same time it is a quite a recognition of the Sitemap protocol. First Yahoo, then Microsoft and Ask.com has recognized it, and now we have some “enterprises” from the public sector coming for its support. Way to go, Jakob, i am looking for your next book =O)

Posted in accessibility, google, search engines, standards, usability | No Comments »

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

Microsoft has finally release the final version (1.0) of the infamous Internet Explorer Developer Tooolbar, which ~~works exactly~~ copies the functionality of the Web Developer Toolbar extension for Firefox. After 2 years of development, the first (1.0) version has arrived and is available for every web developer. Microsoft has promised to release a couple of free tools for web developers, and as a matter of a fact, i consider they are doing nice job (even when copying efforts of others) of fulfilling their promise.

Developer Toolbar simplifies a lot of functions for web developers, such as selectively disables some of the Internet Explorer functionalities, validates the content of xHTML and CSS, DOM handling, window resolution resizing, between others. My favorite and most useful functionality for Internet Explorer 6.0 is a ruler – for measuring size and distance of the xHTML elements. Having a lot of bugs, IE6 needs this functionality desperately, especially for the pages, with a lot of content. The other very useful functionality of this toolbar is the object id outlining – when editing CSS it is extremely useful to be able to consult the name of the specific object or objects, without digging into the HTML code.

If you don’t have, then get it as soon as you can, and if you are a beta user, then it is a time to upgrade, since it should bring some of the bug fixes.

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar 1.0 download

Posted in browsers, standards, usability | No Comments »

Factuplus 2006

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

Factuplus 2006 is the worst piece of software i have ever seen in my entire life. Really. Seeing a popular in Portugal program in a year 2007 which has a look and feel of a 1989-1993 program makes you feel – “i want my money back”. Paying 180 euros for such a shameful software makes me feel guilty; next time i will definitely chose a different software.

During Factuplus 2006 installation, you notice, that you cannot switch to any other task in windows, and while windows is meant to be a multi-tasking operating system, it annoys hell out of me, when something is blocking my access to other software. The dialogs that Factuplus 2006 installation is using are from Windows 3.11 and i am not kidding and not exaggerating it, thanks God that software itself is using Windows 95 dialogs. =O) The activation procedure is annoying as well as one has to register twice on the Sage’s site, besides that when you call them for the first time to get the activation code, they redirect you to the register procedure, asking to call them about 30 minutes later after that. (more…)

Posted in accessibility, usability | 5 Comments »

Portuguese banks research

Monday, January 29th, 2007

Almost one year later, after the original Portwatch research, i have decided to do one more research, this time dedicated to the standard compliance (and not compliance) of the portuguese banks.
I am expecting to be able to conduct a new research dedicated to the principal portuguese municipalities later this year, just to be able to compare if there is any progress, but i also wish to compare other “industries” and governmental authorities, so i am going to include them all into Portwatch or whatever name this project will shape into in the nearest future.

I have visited websites of 9 biggest portuguese banks, to compare their standards compliance, to test their sites in 3 major browsers – Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera, and to know if there is at least one bank who cares about their customers with special needs. The banks i have chosen to test are: Banif, Barclays, BES, BPI, CGD, Deutsche Bank, Millenium BCP, Montepio and Totta, as the others only make part of these ones, or their impact is really insignificant for 99% of the portuguese bank customers.
(more…)

Posted in accessibility, standards, usability, xhtml/css | 1 Comment »

Microsoft.com redesign

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

About one month ago, Microsoft has redesigned their home page, to make it more usable, to allow people a better search on their page, etc… “The new page incorporates months of research, testing, customer feedback, and refinements.” – are the (marketing) words published by them selfs promoting a “well done” work to the believers.

As it is written by the webmaster in about the new Microsoft home page, it took them about 6 month to redesign it. If it is true, then it is a very typical corporate product of not-understanding how to get things done. Has anyone expected a better visual and usable work from Microsoft ? Not me, that for sure, as i have never seen any visual presentational work, worth remembering. They are making me understand the whole meaning of the word wrapper in the worst sense possible when i look at their new home page, they are not using mouse hover status when going over the menus, creating a half second delay when passing over it, using so many types of the blue that i have even lost its count, writing a copyright above the footer – with no disrespect to disabled people, but someone, who designed this page was blind, deaf and actually testing www.google.com ?

From the web standards point of view, going “forward” to using invalid HTML 4.0 Transitional (sweet old 1995 or 1996) is such a typical waste of potential. Who are the developers ? Guys, either you are new to whole that web thing, or your bosses are nuts, and if it is so, ignore them and make some good changes to that page, for your own sake. An interesting meta tag “DCSext.wt_target” is revealing users browser and platform – Microsoft most probably has already forgotten the money they have paid, for wrong handling Opera by MSN a couple of years ago, when they were sending script with errors to disable access for people using this browser. No, everything seems to be ok when visiting this page with Opera, but it is not a good signal when i see such information as there are so many plugins to change the user agent identification string.

Not everything is bad, as the design has become more clean, more usable, no table-based design ( congratulations, it is a big step forward to the current state of the web), though i still do not understand why “developers” and “it professionals” are two different categories. I think that the most people are expecting something extraordinary when it is about some big companies like Microsoft, Apple or Google, that’s why any other result is not acceptable, because being able to choose between the very best developers and usability specialists available they could have done much better work.

Fazit: guys and girls, if it took you 6 month to redesign one page, then forget about redesigning the complete site, you will not it end until the end of this century. =O)

Posted in design, standards, usability | No Comments »

Portwatch Austria

Monday, April 10th, 2006

About 1 month later then expected, here are the results of the research… First of all – seeing Austrian’s pages after the Spanish is not the most pleasant thing which can be done. Having set my expectations extremly high for the Austrian’s municipalities i was quite disappointed with the most of them, though at least one of the pages was quite up to the expectations.

Frames in Austria are as good as dead (and its a good thing) – the only site to use them is Burgenland, which represents about 11.1%.
The same number of sites (1 – 11.1%) is using a table-less design and its not much, i have to say
Carinthia’s site is the only one which does not use any doctype at all, and its pretty much against the vast majority (88.9%) of the rest of Austria
Only 1 site (11.1%) has a valid HTML, and its too few. Too few, to be considered something as a tendention in the governmental sites
2 sites (22.2%) have a valid css and once again it is a very low numbers, for such an advanced country as an Austria
The screen resolution 1024×768 is something, that should not be required at the governmental sites, and the percentage 44.4% is way to high, thinking about the number of the users with a laptop
Just a couple of sites have a fav icon which represents about 44.4%
Just a three sites (33.3%) have some other language(english) integrated, and though the number i expected was much higher, its not that bad as it seems from the first sight
Web acessability has a relatively small percentage (about 33.3%), though i have to say, that i was very positively surprised with Vienna’s implementation of the priority 2 of the WCAG

The max percentage for the municipality in Austria is about 91.6%, which is very close to the maximum percentage, which one of the finest Spain municipalities has obtained (96.7%). The minimum of the 10.9% is again lower then the spanish(15.8%) but again higher then the portuguese(0%).

As the Portwatch own page is still under construction, i have joined the final result with the Portwatch page.

Posted in browsers, standards, usability, xhtml/css | No Comments »

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