June 2009 Usability Update

June 2009 Update: USEFUL TOOLS and Websites >>>

Here's some new articles and Web 2.0 sites you may find useful:

Web 2.0 Social Networks - Viral loops distilled

Looking for multi-touch demos and an Open Source SDK?

Want some practical tips on dealing with color blindness?

Easy online forms using Ajax



Want To Make Your Web Forms More Usable?

Upcoming 1 Hour Webinar - July 23rd, 2009- $129
With the convergence of Windows and the Web is upon us we have the opportunity to dramatically improve Web Form Usability with Ajax and make significant gains in user efficiency and lower training and support costs. Learn how to deliver the best of the web and the best of the desktop experience when it comes to interactive web-based forms.
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2 Day Immersion Seminars

Designing For Usability
We will show you how to adopt a user-centric perspective, apply a proven process for identifying true user requirements, develop and validate conceptual models, and create designs that are highly usable.
> San Francisco, Sept 1-2, 2009
> Chicago, Sept 29-30
> Toronto, Sept 15-16

Advanced UI Design for GUI and Web 2.0
Learn the techniques that Google Maps, Gmail, Flickr and a variety of new AJAX and Rich Internet applications have used to legitimize moving beyond HTML to deliver interactive, usable applications that deliver a best of the web and best of the desktop user experience.
> San Francisco, Sept 1-2, 2009
> Chicago, Oct 1-2
> Toronto, Sept 17-18
> Rome, Italy Nov 11-13 (3 Days)

Usability Master Class - Europe (1 day class) 
> Vienna, Austria October 16th, 2009
> London, UK October 19th, 2009
> Copenhagen, Denmark October 20th

Enterprise Mashups and collaboration that works...

I'll be speaking next week at a new conference here in the US. It's called Jboye and is focused on delivering practical enterprise solutions for collaboration and knowledge management in a vendor neutral environment. I've been speaking for 3 years at the sister conference in Aarhus, Denmark and have found it to be very focused, useful and insightful. Even if you can't make it this year, I'd put in on your list for next year and I'll keep things updated on my experience this year at the conference.

In the meantime, you may want to check out these enterprise solutions that seem to be getting traction:

Jackbe - Enterprise mashup solution. Sweetspot is a mashup layer that connects your web services in a secure, scalable framework. 

Backbase - Enterprise Web 2.0 portal solution that actually delivers an easy to modify user experience.

zAgile - Open source Enterprise Semantic Wiki's - Has the potential to actually create usable knowledge across the enterprise.

Useful Web 2.0 Sites / Improving Form Usability

Here's a few tools and Web 2.0 sites you may find useful:

Web 2.0 Travel site - Driven by User Generated Content:
http://www.uptake.com

Trying to create a cross-device Mobile Phone Application?
http://www.phonegap.com

Want to test your Website on hundreds of browser combinations?
http://browsershots.org/


Want To Make Your Web Forms More Usable?

Upcoming 1 Hour Webinar - May 14th, 2009- $129
With the convergence of Windows and the Web is upon us we have the opportunity to dramatically improve Web Form Usability with Ajax and make significant gains in user efficiency and lower training and support costs. Learn how to deliver the best of the web and the best of the desktop experience when it comes to interactive web-based forms.
> http://www.classicsys.com/css06/cfm/webinar.cfm?courseid=11

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

A little New Year's humor on taking the one-click, one-button approach a bit too far.

Danish Design, Corporate Wikis and Enterprise Usability

I just returned from my third year of speaking on Usability at the Jboye08 conference in Aarhus Denmark.  With each annual visit, I enjoy meeting up with old colleagues and getting a different perspective on software design issues than I normally see at the conferences in the USA.   Something about surrounding yourself in the simple, yet elegant style of Danish design for a week is both refreshing and inspiring. We were able to hear from the co-inventor of the Web (Robert Cailliau) and his perspective on the innovations that occurred at CERN in Switzerland and the subsequent nurturing of innovation to bring it to mainstream reality. Several speakers representing global companies in Europe shared actual real world examples of true enterprise Wikis and Social Networks that are actually working and taking hold across the enterprise.   I was able to share some specific Usability insight on improving Form Usability and Advanced UI Desgin that was well received by the conference participants.  Heading home through my connection in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, I was reminded of the great signage making it one of the most usable international airline hubs …and of course those clever men’s bathrooms with the ‘Fly in the toilet ’ to take advantage of men’s natural instinct to aim for a target and thus improve user performance of this necessary biological goal. 

Google Chrome Browser Targets Key Web 2.0 Usability Issues

The release of the new Google Chrome browser may provide a big boost in usability for those embracing advanced Web application design.  Our early take on the browser highlights a few key things to consider:


Designed for web applications, not web pages
This has been a thorny issue for several of our clients deploying high volume transactional applications on the web.  Things are great at 8am but as the day progresses the browser cannot seem to manage the DOM model and the browser gets unstable after several hours.  Try it yourself with a large Gmail account and you'll see how things get dicey as your day progresses.   


Each tab is a separate process
This will go a long way to create a more stable enterprise platform for web applications. Just the fact that one URL can no longer crash all other open pages (tabs) will be a huge win in the enterprise. 


Using Google Gears leverages the desktop
Now you get a great infrastructure (Google Gears) to manage client-side persistent data without having to create your own framework.  This is bundled with robust garbage collection / memory management to deliver speedy desktop performance. 


Go ahead...try it out and let us know how it performs with your robust Web 2.0 applications!  


We'll be discussing this and much more at this week's Advanced UI and Web 2.0 application design seminar in San Francisco. 

Has this GMAIL Outage Proven It Has Become An Essential Web Utility?

My Gmail account has been down this afternoon. We made the switch to use GMAIL web services as the primary funnel for all our emails due to the superior spam filters and improved AJAX  (Desktop) experience. Now...it's down we have no access to emails. I'm seeing several panic posts around the blogosphere as this seems to be a widespread outage. Essentially GMAIL has become an essential utility for us like power, water, etc....however in this case we don't have a backup...