February 2009

UPA Accessibility Evaluation Certificate at Access U

by Paul Sherman on February 23, 2009 · 2 comments

I’m pleased to post about a little project that I have been helping with. The Usability Professionals’ Association is partnering with Knowbility, a non-profit US-based group that advocates for accessible technologies, to offer a “certificate” in web accessibility evaluation for user experience professionals.

Knowbility offers twice-per-year training in designing, building and evaluating web sites for accessibility. This year, Knowbility and UPA arrived at an agreement to essentially co-brand part of the training. UPA members (and non-members, for that matter) have the option to attend Knowbility’s Access U (at very reasonable prices) and request a UPA accessibility evaluation certificate for only an extra 150.00 USD. The course content for the accessibility evaluation certificate is unique to the certificate track, so it’s more than just “pay 150 for a piece of paper.”

Whitney Quesenbery (former UPA President) and Sharron Rush of Knowbility have been instrumental in getting this partnership off the ground and ensuring that the certificate traininig is extremely high quality. The advisory board is a “who’s who” of accessibility experts (I’ll post a link to the advisory board a bit later, just can’t find it now).

As a UPA board member – and current Director of Training – I’m very hopeful that this partnership will offer UPA members (and user experience practitioners as a whole) with high quality, low cost training opportunities.

I’ll be there this year taking the courses.

Here’s a blockquote blurb from Knowbility:

John Slatin Access U – May 11-13 2009
Join Knowbility at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas
Monday May 11th and Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
(with post-conference sessions on May 13th)

General Conference Registration is open. Class registration will open soon.

If you believe that the web should empower ALL people, if you need information about how to meet state and federal accessibility mandates, if you are a commercial web developer who wants to understand emerging best business practices of accessibility for the web, John Slatin Access U is the place to be in May.

What’s new at John Slatin Access U in 2009?
In addition to two-days of the best hands-on accessibility classes, you will hear keynote presentations, attend a captioned and audio described movie, participate in communities of practice sessions where you can share experiences, and meet hundreds of others who share your passion for accessible IT. From absolute beginners to advanced practitioners you can customize your learning to meet your specific needs. Some new options in 2009 include:

  • Usability Track with Certificate

Created for usability professionals who know how to test for usability and want to learn to test for accessibility. We are pleased to offer a set of classes to build the skills and knowledge you need to help your clients meet mandates and to help you conduct usability tests that include people with disabilities. Specific Courses with several electives are delivered within the two day basic conference period and an additional certificate fee applies.

  • Molly Holzschlag Track – HTML/CSS/Accessible Design Intensive

Spend three days with Molly Holzschlag learning HTML/XHTML and CSS for accessibility, SEO, and superior web site performance. If you have solid experience in CSS and need only the more advanced techniques, sign on for Day 3 as a post-conference only.

  • Post Conferences:

Derek Featherstone: Breaking New Ground: Designing for Accessibility in Emerging Technologies

Molly Holzschlag: Advanced CSS techniques

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File Under “Ouch, My Eyes…”

by Paul Sherman on February 22, 2009 · 5 comments

in Everything Else

Every once in a while I come across a site that is so poorly designed I don’t even bother analyzing it, I just stand back and point to it in mute wonder.

DFI’s product page is such a site. Hey DFI: good motherboards. Bad site.

Enjoy.

DFI Product Portal

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Bad OS: Don’t Let Apps Steal Focus

by Paul Sherman on February 13, 2009 · 0 comments

in Everything Else

After being focus-stolen for the bazillionth time yesterday, I twittered my frustration, which went something like:

“Look, major operating system purveyors, it’s simple: if I start an application, then start a second app and begin working in it, then *don’t* let the first application steal focus when its ready to be used. Or even worse, when it has a splash screen to show off.”

@rickcecil on Twitter agreed, so I took that as some measure of validation.

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Design and Process Links Galore

by Paul Sherman on February 12, 2009 · 0 comments

in Design

Hat tip to Ghost in the Pixel’s Uday Gajender for putting together this well organized resource page. Nicely done.

And Whitney Quesenbery of WQUsability tweeted this UX toolkit-slash-process map, which I’m dutifully blogging here. Credit where it’s due: the page indicates that the toolkit was created by Bas Leurs, Peter Conradie, Joel Laumans, and Rosalieke Verboom of Rotterdam University.

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“Open Here”

by Paul Sherman on February 12, 2009 · 2 comments

in Design

Another example of how even tiny bits of bad design have real-world effects. I picked this one deliberately because it seems so small, yet affects the work satisfaction of about a half-dozen people and causes momentary consternation to countless hundreds every day.

Here’s the situation: this is a countertop drink fridge at a restaurant in the Portland Oregon airport. It sits to the (customers’) right of the register, roughly perpendicular to the leading edge of the counter. Customers are supposed to self-service and grab their own drinks while being rung up.

The frame of the door is uniform on all four sides; there is no flange, handle, or pull attached to the outward facing part of the frame. To open the cooler door, the customer is supposed to wrap her fingers around the side of the door frame, fit her fingers into the cut-out section of the door, and pull the door outward. However, this door is hinged to the right, i.e., at the edge CLOSEST to the customer. It opens from the LEFT.

The assistant to the regional manager of this store told me that they added the “Open Here” sticker because people were constantly struggling with the cooler, knocking over the drinks inside, and in some cases almost pulling the cooler off the counter.

Why?

With no distinguishing features (read: affordance) on the face of the door to indicate how it opens, what invariably happens is that the customer attempts to wrap their fingers around the edge of the frame on the right side and open the door from the hinged side. The cooler is light, and because most people are used to using a bit of force when opening a cooler with a magnetic latch, the cooler gets tugged around the top of the counter as people struggle to open it.

The staff became so tired of dealing with this, they decided to add an after-the-fact design modification. Hence the sticker.

Does it work? The person I talked to offered a qualified “most of the time.”

Again, a tiny example. But how many times do we see this type of thing in our daily lives? More often than we remember, I would venture to guess.

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Latest Preso: Usability For Strategic User Experience

by Paul Sherman on February 9, 2009 · 7 comments

in Everything Else

I just got back from the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego CA, where I was asked to do a talk on advanced topics in user experience.

My presentation covered strategic user experience, the barriers to a unified user experience and how to create the organizational conditions that facilitate a unified user experience across modalities and channels. I think the talk was received well. My standard measure for whether a talk goes over is whether people who have no stake in telling me I did well in fact tell me that I did well. A number of people did.

Enjoy and feel free to comment back to me on the presentation.

Usability For Strategic User Experience ::? Paul Sherman

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Great UX Resource…But Where’s The Organizational Stuff?

by Paul Sherman on February 7, 2009 · 2 comments

in Everything Else

John Rhodes of Webword passed on a link to a nice pile of user experience resources and links hosted at the U. of Minnesota-Duluth. Link is here and below.

It’s a well organized and comprehensive set of links about UX. But I noticed one thing about it: there’s virtually nothing on how to *organize* user experience teams for success, and how to configure product design and development processes. There’s a bit about ROI, yes…but as John says – and I agree – I am less and less convinced that ROI makes a bit of difference to the decision-makers and leaders in the adjoining functional disciplines (e.g. product management, project management, development, QA, marketing) who both fund us and compete with us for resources.

I’m not slagging on the UMND’s resource. It’s a fine one. It just brought home to me yet again the fact that the real hard work lays in actually getting user experience properly understood, situated and funded. I just don’t hear many people talking about these issues – except for my collaborators John Rhodes and Dan Szuc (we’re running our tutorial on the subject at UPA2009 again this year), and a few other like-minded people.

There’s definitely a market need out there for this type of information. One I intend to fill. No, it’s not as sexy as the latest interaction design acronym (cough, natural user interfaces anyone?). But getting the organizational stuff right is what enables interaction designers to have the opportunity to actually do the sexy new stuff.

And while I’m up here on my little soapbox, I’m really starting to see a need for a unified and strategic approach to user experience. So many companies excel in one aspect of the total user experience but fall down on the job in another. I just did a presentation about this topic to the Online Marketing Summit attendees this week. I’ll blog about it later this week.

I guess you just have to have a passion about strategic UX to really keep thinking about it all the time.

Web Design References ::? University of Minnesota-Duluth

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