[webdev] Web Design Update: September 9, 2011

Fri Sep 9 06:17:51 CDT 2011

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 10, Issue 11, September 9, 2011.

An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web
design and development.

++ISSUE 11 CONTENTS.

SECTION ONE: New references.
What's new at the Web Design Reference site?
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/
New links in these categories:

01: ACCESSIBILITY.
02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.
03: EVALUATION & TESTING.
04: EVENTS.
05: MISCELLANEOUS.
06: NAVIGATION.
07: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
08: USABILITY.

SECTION TWO:
09: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Understanding the Purpose of an Image Using alt Text
By Dan Stringe.
"A quick tutorial on how to provide alt text for different sorts of
images in such a way that people using assistive technologies will be
able to understand the purpose of the image..."
http://www.nomensa.com/blog/2011/understanding-the-purpose-of-an-image-using-alt-text/

Aim For the Stars: Pragmatism and Transcripts
By Derek Featherstone.
"I was interviewed by Paul Boag for the Boagworld.com podcast that
just went live (Season 2, episode 6, Aug 31, 2011). Paul asked me
quite a few questions. In the resulting episode, he mentions that he
felt a bit of pressure as I asked him some pretty blunt questions
about his practice with providing audio transcripts for his
podcast..."
http://simplyaccessible.com/article/pragmatism-transcripts/

Media Accessibility User Requirements
Editor's Draft By Judy Brewer, John Foliot, Geoff Freed, Silvia
Pfeiffer, and Janina Sajka.
"This document aggregates the requirements of an accessibility user
that the W3C HTML5 Accessibility Task Force has collected with respect
to audio and video on the Web..."
http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/media-a11y-reqs/

WCAG Myths
By W3C Wiki.
"Myth No. 1: Use of Color on a Page is Bad: FALSE. It is good to use
color on a web page, and it is encouraged. It adds vibrancy, and can
make pages easier to understand. Use of different color backgrounds
can also separate areas to make them standout as different from each
other..."
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/WCAG_Myths

Resources for Mobile Accessibility Guidelines
By Henny Swan.
"Anyone looking for a definitive set of mobile accessibility
guidelines will be a little disappointed if they’ve ended up here
because the bad news is that there aren’t any publicly available ones.
I’m involved in writing some and am aware of other organisations doing
the same but until these are published all we have are generic
resources and a few platform specific resources. I often get asked
what’s out there so I thought the next best thing would be to keep an
updated list of resources. Hopefully the list below will be of some
use and if you have any resources you’d like to add leave a comment
and I’ll update the list..."
http://www.iheni.com/mobile-accessibility-guidelines/

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Take Advantage of the CSS background-size Property
By Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis.
"Front-end developer Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis, owner of
W3Conversions, takes you through a variety of innovative uses for the
new CSS3 background-size property. More control than you've ever had
before..."
http://www.netmagazine.com/node/1368

Resizing: Fixed, Fluid, or Responsive Layouts
By Jason Beaird.
"This article is from Jason Beairdís The Principles of Beautiful Web
Design book (the second edition of which is out now)."
http://designfestival.com/resizing-fixed-fluid-or-responsive-layouts/

Don't Style Headings Using HTML5 Sections
By Nicole Sullivan.
Styling headings is either a deceptively complex problem, or maybe the
design of CSS made it appear complex when it need not have done..."
http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2011/09/06/style-headings-using-html5-sections/

+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Do You Make These 4 Mistakes When Carrying Out a Usability Review?
By David Travis.
"When properly carried out, usability reviews are a very efficient way
of finding the usability bloopers in an interface. But there are four
common mistakes made by novice reviewers: failing to take the user's
perspective; using only a single reviewer, rather than collating the
results from a team; using a generic set of usability principles
rather than technology-specific guidelines; and lacking the experience
to judge which problems are important."
http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/4_mistakes_when_carrying_out_a_usability_review.html

A Guide to Conducting Contextual Inquiry User Research
By Pooja Chinnapattan.
"...Most systems, products, and customer interface designs are
complex. Getting it right will make a huge difference to the customer
experience, brand reputation, and ultimately to a company's success.
Just as Don Normans book on Living with complexity discusses,
complexity can be 'tamed' by understanding the total system, and the
best solutions are those that are designed with all aspects fitting
perfectly together."
http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-usability/contextual-inquiry.shtml

Test Everything You Got, Regardless of its Polish or Fidelity
By Jeff Gothelf.
"...Getting whatever is available on testing day in front of your
users will provide feedback on the experience. The depth, focus and
relevance of that feedback will largely be dependent on the fidelity
of the designs shown. While the range of feedback is broad, knowing
what to expect and ensuring that your organization gets customers into
the product design conversation is worth showing them whatever you
have ready when testing day rolls on."
http://blog.usabilla.com/test-everything-you-got-regardless-of-its-polish-or-fidelity/

+04: EVENTS.

Frontend 2011
October 10-12, 2011.
Oslo, Norway
http://www.frontend2011.com/

User Interface 16 Conference
November 7-9, 2011.
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
http://uiconf.com

An Event Apart Atlanta
February 6-8, 2012.
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.
http://aneventapart.com/2012/atlanta/

South By SouthWest Interactive
March 9-13, 2012.
Austin, Texas, U.S.A.
http://sxsw.com/interactive

2012 International Conference on Data Engineering and Internet
Technology (DEIT 2012)
March 20-22, 2012.
Jakarta, Indonesia
http://www.irast.net/conferences/DEIT/2012/

Educause Midwest Regional Conference
March 26-28, 2012.
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
http://www.educause.edu/MWRC12

+05: MISCELLANEOUS.

Accessibility Post Web 2.0 (Video)
By Michael Cooper.
Michael Cooper's a11yMTL conference presentation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuTe3MyKr7o

Being Human is Good Business
By Kristin Smaby.
"Customers aren't shy about shouting their experiences-good and bad-to
the world via Twitter and Facebook. When you see customer service as a
cost center, you risk treating customers as a liability. Yet,
customers are a valuable resource: their feedback is integral to
shaping your product and building your brand. Customer service, by
definition, is about serving people; it should be genuine,
personalized, and compassionate-or, simply put, human."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/being-human-is-good-business/

Marry Your Clients
By Shane Pearlman.
"Do you consistently work to stay engaged, or do you get comfortable
with clients? With new projects, it's easy to make the extra effort.
The longer you work together, the easier it becomes to feel satisfied
with the status quo, while giving your best energy to the shiny new
client. Rather than pretend this won't happen, prepare for it and
create a strategy to combat it. Shane Pearlman shows us how."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/marry-your-clients/

+06: NAVIGATION.

Block Level Links and Accessibility
By Roger Johansson.
"One of the news in HTML5 is that links are now allowed to contain
block level elements. In HTML 4, only inline elements are allowed.
Linking block level elements such as headings and paragraphs can be
useful, but there are some things to be aware of in order to avoid
reducing the usability and accessibility of such links to screen
reader users..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201109/block_level_links_and_accessibility/

Screen Readers, ARIA Roles and HTML5 Support
By Leonie Watson.
Several screen readers now support ARIA landmark roles. Some screen
readers such as NVDA and Jaws are also improving support for HTML5
elements. This means that it’s important to put your ARIA roles in the
right place..."
http://tink.co.uk/2011/09/screen-readers-aria-roles-html5-support/

+07: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Your Questions 18 (HTML5)
By Richard Clark.
"The clinic is getting busy with more HTML5 ailments. This week, we'll
discuss name-value pairs, e-commerce with HTML5, lightboxes and modal
windows, why we need new elements, and optional subtitles."
http://html5doctor.com/your-questions-18/

Anatomy of a HTML5 Mobile App
By Fling.
"Over the past year I’ve been pretty hard on HTML5 Mobile Apps. The
general perception is that HTML5 will provide companies with a
scalable and flexible cross-platform mobile app strategy. While I
firmly believe in the principle of web technologies as a platform on
mobile devices, we just aren’t there yet. I worry that people
underestimate the amount of effort that is involved before they get
started down the path of HTML5 for mobile..."
http://pinchzoom.com/posts/anatomy-of-a-html5-mobile-app/

+08: USABILITY.

Why Web Sites With Poor Usability Are Still Being Developed
By Justin Mifsud.
"...the objective of this post is to highlight the main issues that
can contribute towards the development of web sites with poor
usability. The list of problems is by no means exhaustive and the
order in which they are being presented here is subjective. For
instance you might argue that time is more of a limiting factor than
money and you can be right too. The aim of this post is ultimately one
of creating awareness, so that you understand the main reasons why web
sites with poor usability are still being developed and, more
importantly, get an insight of how you can avoid facing the same
mistakes."
http://usabilitygeek.com/why-web-sites-with-poor-usability-are-still-being-developed/

Designing Naturally With Gestalt in Mind
By John Sorflaten.
"...The Gestalt research showed that the mind seeks to see 'wholeness'
or the 'Gestalt'..."
http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/sep11.asp#research

Feature Bloat and Usability
By Jacob Creech.
"...What that means is that we may not have all the features of our
competitors, but what we do, we do well. This follows on nicely from
the Scrum development principles that we adhere to at IntuitionHQ -
it's better to have 80% of the features 100% complete, than 100% of
the features 80% complete. It's better to have a product that does
what it does extremely well, than a product that does a whole range of
things to mediocre standard..."
http://www.intuitionhq.com/blog/2011/09/feature-bloat-and-usability/

Adaptive Web Design
By Aaron Gustafson.
Chapter 1 of Aaron's new book can be downloaded.
http://easy-readers.net/

How Responsive Web Design becomes Responsive Web Publishing
By Chris Palmieri.
"The last few years have been a good time to be a web designer. After
a decade of making do with the aging technologies, methods and
assumptions that gave birth to mainstream web publishing, designers
are starting to trade the tiresome challenge of controlling the user
experience for a few more interesting ones."
http://aqworks.com/en/blog/2011/09/05/how-responsive-web-design-becomes-responsive-web-publishing/

10 Things to Know about Completion Rates View More Blog Posts
By Jeff Sauro.
"1. Completion rates are the fundamental usability metric: A binary
measure of pass and fail (coded as 1 or 0) provides a simple metric of
success. If users cannot complete a task, not much else matters with
respect to usability or utility..."
http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/completion-rates.php

A Brief Look at Screen Resolutions
By Jason Beaird.
"In comparison to the fixed-versus-fluid debate, the argument about
designing for particular screen resolutions has been quite tame these
past few years. When designers say that a site is designed, or
optimized, for a particular screen resolution, they're actually
talking about the resolution of the viewer's monitor. In the past, the
screen resolution debate was focused on whether our designs should
still accommodate monitor resolutions of 800x600 without displaying a
horizontal scrollbar..."
http://designfestival.com/a-brief-look-at-screen-resolutions/

Does Context Really Matter for Mobile Design?
By Small Surfaces.
"Pick up most books about building web sites or products for mobile
and you'll hear a common refrain extolling you to pay attention to the
mobile context. Usually this means paying attention to the fact that
people using mobile phones are likely to be on the go, have limited
attention, and slow Internet connections. This may have been true in
the past, but data suggests that this behavior is changing: 93% of
smartphone owners use their smartphones while at home, 62% of people
use their mobile phone while watching television, 69% use mobile while
shopping, 39% of smartphone owners use their devices in the bathroom."
http://smallsurfaces.com/2011/09/does-context-really-matter-for-mobile-design/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+09: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

Accessibility Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/accessibility.html

Association Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/associations.html

Book Listings.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/books.html

Cascading Style Sheets Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/css.html

Color Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/color.html

Dreamweaver Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/dreamweaver.html

Evaluation & Testing Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/testing.html

Event Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/events.html

Flash Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/flash.html

Information Architecture Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/architecture.html

JavaScript Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/javascript.html

Miscellaneous Web Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/misc.html

Navigation Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/navigation.html

PHP Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/php.html

Sites & Blogs Listing.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/sites.html

Standards, Guidelines & Pattern Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/standards.html

Tool Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/tools.html

Typography Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/type.html

Usability Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/usability.html

XML Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/xml.html

[Section two ends.]

++END NOTES.

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+ SIGN OFF.

Until next time,

Laura L. Carlson
Information Technology Systems and Services
University of Minnesota Duluth
Duluth, MN U.S.A. 55812-3009
mailto:lcarlson at d.umn.edu

[Issue ends.]