accessibility

User Centred design

by Clinton April 6th, 2011 | Design, usability | No Comments »

User-centred design is the ability to design with the user’s positive experience at the heart of all design processes. It is the aim of user-centred deign to create easy to use and learn interfaces to allow the user to undertake the tasks they need to. It relates to any interface whether it be web, mobile or application.

User-centred design is a straightforward concept and process and yet there are more websites out there than not that do not achieve its aims and offer the end user a poor experience. As with many simple concepts there are some basic but powerful rules.

1. identify who your users are and what they want

Technology can be complicated so people need displays that are free of clutter, otherwise they canâ€™t see what options they have.
Identify all of your users and what they want to do with the system
“Average users” don’t exist, research your audience and define the different user profiles or personas
Define the core user journeys and mark them out so users can easily identify the paths to complete their goals

Research your audience to identify the most important goals and prioritise these

“Good design is about making decisions and trade-offs”

2. undertake usability testing to identify problems with your design

set up tests with your users with defined tasks and watch and record what they do, how long it takes and how satisfied with the process they are.

3. Put off writing code for as long as possible

undertake iterative design
and test until you get the process right
this will be the right design

“You do not need a lot of design options“

If you undertake user-centred design you will end up at the right design and not the one your client thinks looks best. After all what is their knowledge of what design can work best for their client?

If budget and time is an issue then the second best option is to make use of an expert review. This is when a usability expert examines the design and compares it against a recognised set of design principles.

This article has been created with reference to the usability specialists at www.userfocus.co.uk

Morae is an industry recognised software application for facilitating usability testing.

If you would like to understand how usability testing and user-centred design can improve your website and your business goals then contact us now.

Guide to search engine optimisation

by Clinton March 28th, 2011 | Building an online brand, Online marketing, SEO, accessibility | No Comments »

Here are the top 5 factors for successful web sites in 2007:

Note:

This article is four years old but all of these factors still hold true with regard to getting good search rankings in Google.

Success factor #1: Accessibility

Accessibility is not only good for business it is a legal requirement and necessary for search engines to be able to effectively spider and index your website. Often web developers use technology that actively impedes search engines and prevents them from accessing all of a website’s pages. The first rule of search engine optimisation is to allow a search engine to access all of your web pages.

A key secondary consideration is to ensure the HTML code of your web pages does not contain errors that prevent search engines from indexing your site.

Search engines like HTML, it allows them to assess the content of your site and determine what the content is about. If you use Flash or graphical images to portray your core text messages, it will be invisible to search engines. Ensure your core content and messages are in HTML.

Success factor #2: Site and information architecture

Site architecture is essential not only for search engines but also for your audience. A search engine needs to be able to find their way around a site effectively as do site visitors. Ensure you have a core logical HTML navigation and do not use Flash or javascript as the only method of accessing your web pages.

You also need to ensure you have a coherent website based around a common theme. Increasingly the most important search engines use a technique called latent semantic indexing in their ranking algorithms. This is to determine not only the content of the individual page but also the context of the site that is sitting within. Search engines will give higher rankings to a page that is within a website that is relevant to that page.

Success factor #3: The right keywords

Once you have ensured that a search engine can access your site and visit all of your pages you need to make sure that they know what those pages are about. This is where you need to focus upon your key phrases and ensure you find which phrases your audience are using to find websites such as yours that meet their needs.

Once you have these key phrases, ensure you place them effectively throughout your site on the most appropriate pages for those terms.

The choice and use of your key words is a crucial element in determining whether your search engine optimisation campaign will be a success. Also think about supporting key words that go with the main key phrase for that page and use them liberally within the content

Success factor #4: Content

The search engines are looking for the most appropriate pages they can find to match the search terms of their users. In order to do this they are looking for quality content. You should be aiming to create unique quality content that separates your site from your competitors.

Write about relevant topics that you know about and try and keep adding to the content on a regular basis. Google likes sites which are kept fresh with new content and also sites that are regularly updated with relevant content.

Success factor #5: Inbound links

Links are one of the key factors that determine the success of a search engine optimisation campaign, but are one of the least understood. Links are crucial, especially in a competitive marketplace, but it is not about sheer weight of numbers. RELEVANCY is far more important than numbers. Get good quality links from quality relevant sites on a regular basis and you will do far batter than buying a large number of non-relevant links.

The more targeted the link i.e. the more relevant, the more it will improve your search engine rankings for that phrase. That’s why we are creating several sector link building communities to help build quality links for sites.

So, What do you want to do now?

Contact us to help you improve your search engine results, or
find out more about working with an ethical search engine optimisation company.

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Design vs. Standardisation

by admin March 8th, 2011 | Design, Visual communications, print design | No Comments »

The shrinking of the planet and expansion of the virtual world to a degree where users can live a second or third life by a few simple mouse clicks, businesses can boom and collapse in a span of time that was previously unimaginable, new professions have arisen, remote access has taken communication to new heights, revolutions are triggered, governments are overthrown, society has a new definition - this is the magic of the world wide web.

Defined as:

A network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies.

The internet age gave practitioners of design a new playground - where ideas could take a digital shape, colour schemes changed from CMYK to hexadecimal, there was room for motion, music and interaction. Designers, who previously relied on printing firms to bring their concepts to life, could surpass that; for the internet allowed them to publish information with some basic knowledge of programming languages. Websites became â€˜fancyâ€™, viral campaigns were animated, a whole new world of iconography unveiled itself and more- but is this good enough?

Approximately 7 billion humans inhabit the planet, of which almost 2 billion (and increasing) people are connected to the internet, this further opens the door to a variation of computer systems/devices used, individual limitations, user preferences, ease in accessibility and the big issue of â€˜speedâ€™. Users want information exchange to be fast, faster than ever before.

How can design cater to such a diverse audience, and the plethora of preferences and requirements? The solution is standardisation. Designers may argue that this limits their creative freedom, but for any given problem - the first step in creating a solution is identifying the audience, and continuing the solution seeking progress with the target audience as a prime consideration.

Maybe the challenge is to be creative within the premises of the basic guidelines of standardisation. Standardisation itself is changing, and with it the premises within which sit the established guidelines. Can designers not identify a new playground whilst conforming to the standards?

- Manjul Rathee

vebra estate agency software integration

by admin July 20th, 2010 | Design, bespoke development | No Comments »

If you are an estate agency looking forÂ a highly experienced web development and design company to help make your website fly, then look no further. We are specialists in working with the leading estate agency software vebra and integrating it effectively into websites.

Rather than stick with the frame based “out of the box” vebra solution, you can keep all of the functionality that vebra provides but provide a much more engaging experience for your web visitors by making your properties look much better and providing a much more seamless search experience.

vebra and web marketing

One of the key failings of the “out of the box” approach of using the vebra content is that all of the content is presented in a single frame in your website. This is disastrous for search engine optimisation and pretty appalling for usability. Google does not like frames and cannot index all of the results, what’s more it restricts the user from bookmarking properties and other sites cannot link effectively.

There is an alternative though, and that is to free vebra from the constraints that come with it. Instead of using the data as vebra provide it to your website it is much better to use the feed instead. This frees the web developer to use this data as just that and not compromise the look of how it is presented. It also means you have an individual page per property which can be well indexed under all of those niche phrases that your prospective customers love…

We’d love to chat to you if you are using the vebra estate agency software and want to get more out of it and get more leads from your website.

Mobile web design and development

by admin July 20th, 2010 | Design, accessibility, mobile web | No Comments »

With smartphones becoming more prevalent with larger screen resolutions and more of a “desktop feel” to the browsing experience, it really is a good time to look at creating a mobile version of your website.

Designing websites for mobile phones

However, there are still a few things to bear in mind. Even with the increased bandwidth of 3G it is not universal, especially on the move. And typically, browsing will be more restricted to the core elements on a given website. That is why the best mobile web experiences offer a variant of their website optimised for the web. This should include thinking about:

reducing file sizes
removing unnecessary code such as Javascript
thinking carefully about video type if targeting iPhone (no Flash)
what is visible on a reduced physical screen size

Just because a 4 inch screen may have 800 pixels across doesn’t mean that text is legible when designed for that screen resolution. Key things to think about when designing for a mobile phone web interface include:

as a first step, create different web templates based upon modified CSS and XHTML to provide a simpler interface for mobile web browsing
identify the key things that users will come to the website for and dedicate most resources and screen space to this aspect
understand what browsers your audiences will be using and use a “browser sniffer” to identify the browser and deliver the appropriate web templates
and remember, even though you have optimised for a smaller handheld device, the user is king, give them the option to view the standard site on their phone with an obvious link

There are a number of technical and design specific issues as well around web design for mobile devices and if you’re interested about those, we’d be happy to have a chat and see how we can help.

Javascript menus and best practice

by admin June 29th, 2010 | Design, accessibility | No Comments »

This is a post based upon my findings on how to use javascript menus and in particular drop down menus in an accessible way. It is not meant to be a “how to” for developers nor is it definitive, it is more a comment on the accessibility argument and how to move the conversation forward.

The principle argument about drop downs fall into two camps, the designersÂ who are often for them because they are a good way of using space and making the layout “tidy”; and the usability types who are against them because they can be confusing, dysfunctional when there are tiered levels and hard to use for mobility impared users.

However the great usability guru himself (or luddite as others may prefer to call him…) Jakob Nielsen actually approves of drop down menus albeit in a specific format. In his article Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well he supports large drop down boxes whilst still cautioning against regular javascript dropdowns.

Example 1 of a mega drop down navigation box

Mega drop downs have the following characteristics which make them better:

all secondary and subsequent navigation items are visible, there is no hovering and then trying to “catch” the tertiary level in the next pop up navigation box
it allows greater structure for the layout, better use of typography, space and even graphics
all navigation items are visible at once
they can be used as drop downs or activated from side bars as “mega fly-outs”

Example 2 of a mega drop down navigation box

Why mega drop downs are better than regular drop downs:

for bigger sites you need to scroll which hides the initial options
mega drop downs support easy and obvious grouping
you have a richer typography to help the user
you can use imagery such as icons or pictures to support your navigation

Points to bear in mind with mega drop downs:

speed is important, so ensure the interface elements display quickly
allow some latency (e.g. 0.5 seconds)Â after moving from a nav item to allow the user to move to the sub nav without activating a neighbouring top level nav item if it passes over it on the way to a sub nav item.
keep it simple, just because you can put anything in a mega drop down doesn’t mean you should

Remember to code with screen readers and assistive technology in mind. There can be issues for people using mobile devices or people using screen magnifiers as the enlarged part of the menu may appear to be the only part of the menu. One way to help is to have strong visual signals for menu borders so people can follow them when they are enlarged.

And remember the standard rules of accessibility, don’t make clickable items too small, or too gimmicky.

Options for improving accessibility

See more from Jakob Nielsen to understand the finer details of mega drop down accessibility

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Displaying posts with the tag "accessibility"

User Centred design

1. identify who your users are and what they want

“Good design is about making decisions and trade-offs”

2. undertake usability testing to identify problems with your design

3. Put off writing code for as long as possible

“You do not need a lot of design options“

If you would like to understand how usability testing and user-centred design can improve your website and your business goals then contact us now.

Guide to search engine optimisation