Archive for the ‘User Experience’ Category

After coming up with a quick bit of code yesterday for the longdesc comment that Ruth left, I had another idea. I decided to try the the idea using the title attribute on images. Before launching on my idea, I decided to find out if the idea was valid by W3 standards.

I just received this comment today by Ruth and when I read it, I thought, yeah, why not. “longdesc” as the name says provides a longer description to supplement the alt attribute of an image. When I first thought about the problem, my first inclination was to provide a hidden div that held the long description which became visible whenever the image it corresponded to was interacted with. The solution seemed intriguing but I had another thought toying with me at the back of my mind.

I had my first child usability testing today for a project I am currently working on. I chose paper prototyping for this phase as I wanted to figure out the issues with the interface before the programming team started working on it with all the holes in full glory. All I needed - post-its, regular A4 paper, a pair of scissors and glue. For all the business savvy readers out there, here’s a cheap and quick way to test your interface. An added incentive, it’s incredibly easy to do!

14 days and counting - Firefox 3 has managed to surprise me on more than a few levels. When I first downloaded it, I assumed it was just going to be another of those updates you can hardly notice the changes that has taken place. Now, this is not a personal affront to those who work on making this enigmatic browser more secure than ever, but then as an interaction designer, I usually am more into how the browser works with users.

The first time you write a plugin, however simple it is, a sense of accomplishment takes over. It might last a couple hours, but those hours are precious as walking on the moon. As a person who recently got addicted to jQuery, the library has certainly lived up to its reputation in helping cutting lines of codes. Without further ado, here’s my first jQuery plugin – a stylesheet switcher.

There would be times you would want to offer your users an indication of the current form element they are on. A simple, non intrusive manner for this would be as simple as changing the background of the element using CSS. Users who are using their keyboard to move through the form elements would also benefit from this as this provides a more obvious cursor position.