Posts Tagged ‘user testing’

Best approaches towards a mobile Intranet

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Jakob Neilsen has just announced his 10 best-designed Intranets for 2010, and as always it’s a goldmine of information and advice. I haven’t yet forked out for the full report, but the summary alone offers plenty to think about.

One particular point that will raise eyebrows is the continued advocacy of separate sites for mobile devices. There is an ongoing debate about the pros and cons of such an approach, brought to the fore by Neilsen’s post last February comparing Mobile Web 2009 with Desktop Web 1998, and concluding that a separate site is best. Many of us were not convinced, and as Henny Swan argued at the time:

It also hints at repeating the mistakes of desktop web design circa 1998 where we thought the answer was to design for one browser, use proprietary technology, build text only websites for disabled users…the list goes on. So let’s not make that same mistake and instead fast forward to one of the principles of good web design that dug us out of the dark hole of 1998: progressive enhancement.

Henny Swan: Progressive Enhancement for mobile

Henny described how a ‘one site fits all’ approach can be achieved using media queries, and it’s certainly a far more attractive solution than designing and maintaining separate sites.

But this all relates to websites in general, rather than specifically to Intranets, and I was interested to look closer at the suggestion of a separate mobile Intranet.

iPhone on staff log-in page

Intranet on the move?

More about mobile Intranets, and why a separate site may be justified

Google Browser Size and thinking beyond the fold

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

Yesterday, the Google Code Blog announced Google Browser Size. It’s a handy little tool which allows you to take a contour visualisation of common browser sizes and overlay it onto your own sites, to easily spot which areas people can see without needing to scroll. So for example, here’s my site with the overlay applied:

Browser sizes

Browser sizes as an overlay

More about Google Browser Size, and why scrolling isn’t actually all that bad

6 years on, Accessify Forum needs YOU!

Thursday, August 6th, 2009
Accessify Forum

Accessify Forum

Today the Accessify Forum celebrates its sixth birthday. In that time we’ve seen over 60,000 posts, and membership currently stands at about 9,000. For a forum dedicated to web accessibility, I think that’s pretty good.

Perhaps the most endearing aspect of the forum is the wonderful debates we’ve seen over the years. As I wrote back in March, web accessibility relies upon discussion and debate to develop. There are often blurred lines between right and wrong, and real-world accessibility is far from binary. Only through honest debate can we arrive at anything close to the best answer to the questions that the subject poses.

More about the forum and why it needs you

Event review – Accessibility breakfast @ User Vision Edinburgh, 15th June 2009

Monday, June 15th, 2009

I’ve just come back from a very interesting breakfast event at the local office of User Experience consultants User Vision. Led by accessibility consultant Mark Palmer, the session looked at issues around testing with disabled users, and presented some of the surprising results from such testing.
More about the breakfast event