Archives:
Usability

Focused mostly on web and technology and how to make them easier to use and intuit.

Touch Gesture Reference Guide

Well, this looks quite nice.

The Touch Gesture Reference Guide is a unique set of resources for software designers and developers working on touch-based user interfaces.

The guide contains: 1) an overview of the core gestures used for most touch commands 2) how to utilize these gestures to support major user actions 3) visual representations of each gesture to use in design documentation and deliverables 4) an outline of how popular software platforms support core touch gestures.

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Friday, April 23rd, 2010 at 3:34 pm
Also published in Interaction design, Interface design, Software & technology | comments (0)



Feedback Army [Website Feedback Service]

Uses Mechanical Turk: “Simple, cheap usability testing for your website. Start a usability test for your web project in two minutes. Submit questions about your site and receive up to ten responses from our reviewers. The cost is $7.” (Thanks Waxy!)

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Also published in Web design & dev | Comments Off



The Design State

“Design State is a weblog about government web design and its attendant subtopics: accessibility, usability, and web standards. In addition to these nuts and bolts, Design State will also focus on higher level issues and project challenges that affect government and public-sector web design.”

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Also published in Accessibility, Web design & dev | Comments Off



Third Annual World Usability Day: Sat 10 Nov 2007

“Events at the St. Louis Science Center will focus on usability in healthcare. The advances of technology may have ushered in a new era of convenience, but sometimes along with it comes a new era of frustration. From alarm clocks to zippers, things are becoming more sophisticated but also harder to use for the average person.

To address the balance between ‘new and improved’ and ‘easy to operate,’ a relatively new group of professionals aims to show the St. Louis community how life can become a bit easier on Nov. 10 at the Saint Louis Science Center. Making life a little easier is the goal of the local celebration of the third annual World Usability Day, an initiative that is focused on the benefits of usability engineering and user-centered design. Created by the Usability Professionals’ Association, World Usability Day includes special events across the globe — including here in St. Louis.

With healthcare products as this year’s theme, the celebration and demonstrations at the Science Center will focus on how the average person can better deal with the myriad of complications that come with, navigating health insurance claims, nutrition, prescriptions and supplements, and other products and processes associated with healthcare.”

It all happens Saturday, November 10 from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the St. Louis Science Center, 5050 Oakland Ave. St. Louis, MO 63110.

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 10:49 am
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SWFAddress: Deep linking for Flash

“SWFAddress is a small script that sits on top of SWFObject and provides deep linking for Flash websites and applications. In other words it enables the Back, Forward and Reload buttons of the browser and creates unique URLs with page titles that can be sent over email or IM. SWFAddress uses the ExternalInterface functionality introduced in Flash Player 8 and comes with a technique that enables search engine indexing for deep Flash links.” (Thanks jonnymac!)

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Also published in Movies & motion | Comments Off



Attach icons to anything with CSS

“Thanks to CSS selectors it’s possible to attach icons to anything you want just by adding an attribute of your choosing to your HTML. Want a popup icon? try <a href=’#’ icon=’popup’> how about a magnifier? <a href=’#’ icon=’mag’>. You can even add them automatically for file types. Here’s how.”

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 7:01 am
Also published in Web design & dev | Comments Off



Creating User Friendly 404 Pages

“We understand what 404 means: Page Not Found. But the average internet user has no idea what 404 means or what to do about it. To them, it’s yet another unintelligible error message from the computer. Most 404 pages are unvarnished geek-speak. Consider the default 404 page under IIS…”

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 6:19 am
Also published in Web design & dev | Comments Off



Transitioning from User Experience to Product Management: Part 1

“Increasingly, many UX professionals feel that they have the experience and insight to wield more authority and make a larger impact on the products they help to build. Product management is garnering more interest from interaction designers (IxDs), information architects (IAs), and UX designers looking to increase their influence and ensure user-centered product development. Becoming a product manager is a logical move for many UX practitioners, as it requires many of the same skills, traits, and competencies involved in crafting a user experience.”

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 8:15 am
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dgray_xplane’s photos / Tags / stlux

A Flickr set of XPLANE founder Dave Gray’s sketches tagged with “stlux” — visual notes from the 2006 St Louis User Experience conference.

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 6:43 am
Also published in XPLANE news | Comments Off



The ultimate webdesign usability checklist

“I noticed that I, and fellow webdesigners, keep making the same usability mistakes over and over. This checklist with 88 questions is a must read for every webdesigner who cares about usability.”

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 6:58 am
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Kronos video

Sample visual
Check out this video we made for Kronos to help celebrate International Women's Day, 2011. Learn more in this xBlog post or jump over to YouTube and watch it there.

Azure poster

Sample visual
XPLANE | Dachis Group developed a A vibrant, engaging poster showing how Microsoft Azure enables developers to run applications and store data on Microsoft servers. The poster recently took top honors in the American Business Awards.

Tweets & Flickrs