You’ll find a lot of literature and best practices when searching for answers on what goes beneath the fold of your website, so Google came to the rescue and just released the Google Browser Size, a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google, which you can customize to see how does this measurements fit you own website, pretty much as I did for the above screenshot.
Thankfully I’m working on the redesign of my own website for a couple of days otherwise much of what goes in here would go unnoticed
Today it’s the World Usability Day, this year’s theme is ‘Designing for a Sustainable World’, a theme that’s particular personal to me, not only refering to the usability factor, but also to this year’s topic! As founder of SHiFT – Social and Human Ideas for Tecnology, I personally recommend that all that agree with me that a lot need to be done to improve the way we experience and design technology to please read and sign the World Usability Day Charter:
Human error is a misnomer. Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy-to-use as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, government, communication, entertainment, work, and other areas, we must agree to develop technologies in a way that serves people first.
Technology should enhance our lives, not add to our stress or cause danger through poor design or poor quality. It is our duty to ensure that this technology is effective, efficient, satisfying and reliable, and that it is usable by all people. This is particularly important for people with disabilities, because technology can enhance their lives, letting them fully participate in work, social and civic experiences. Human error is a misnomer. Technology should be developed knowing that human beings have certain limitations. Human error will occur if technology is not both easy-to-use and easy-to-understand. We need to reduce human error that results from bad design. We believe a united, coordinated effort is needed to develop reliable, easy-to- use technology to serve people in all aspects of their lives, including education, health, government, privacy, communications, work and entertainment. We must put people at the center of design, beginning with their needs and wants, and resulting in technology that benefits all of us. Therefore, we, the undersigned, agree to work together to design technology that helps human beings truly realize their potential, so that we can create a better world for ourselves and future generations.
We agree to observe World Usability Day each year, to provide a single worldwide day of events around the world that brings together communities of professional, industrial, educational, citizen and governmental groups for our common objective: to ensure that technology helps people live to their full potential and helps create a better world for all citizens everywhere.
Article 1: Education
Wired and wireless schools are appearing everywhere. Students around the world benefit from low-cost, easy-to-use, reliable computing, Internet access, and telecommunication. Educational technology must be not only affordable and available, but must be usable by teachers, students and parents.
Article 2: Health
Healthcare must be available to everyone around the world. Medical technology can improve health, but it must be easy-to-use: error in this arena is costly. Because we are what we eat, we need healthier food supplies that will improve the well being of people everywhere. Technology that produces better food for all must be built on research that keeps the whole person in mind.
Article 3: Government
Governments around the globe seek to use new technology to better serve their citizens and increase participation in the civic experience. Citizens can pay taxes and take care of business online in many countries in the world; this same capability should be available to all, eliminating the digital divide that separates rich from poor or isolates social groups. Voting systems must ensure trust and confidence in elections. Technology that supports civic engagement must give all citizens equal access and opportunity, and must be easy to use and easy to understand by all citizens, including those with disabilities of any kind.
Article 4: Communication
People need to connect with each other. We have more means than ever to communicate: phones, Internet, messaging and the printed medium. Technology that facilitates communication between people must be intuitive to use. It should have instructions that are easy to understand, and knobs, dials and buttons that do not require constant tuning.
Article 5: Privacy and Security
As the use of technology grows, so do concerns about new forms of e-commerce, e-government and e-communication. We must build in appropriate safeguards to ensure that our interaction is secure, that children and others are protected, and that our systems are trustworthy.
Article 6: Entertainment
Entertainment is not just for our spare time. People use entertainment for many reasons throughout their daily lives. The world of entertainment has embraced technology to give us photos, movies, music and games in new ways and on new devices. But, even amusement benefits from usability! Incomprehensible remote controls, confusing instructions and blinking VCR clocks speak to the need for improvement in our media. Usable entertainment systems will make the experience less tiring and frustrating.
On November 19th, the EU governments will meet in Malmo to sign a Ministerial Declaration that will define the key priorities for e-government strategy in Europe for the next years.
A group of Web 2.0 enthusiasts launched an open collaborative effort to build an Open Declaration on European Public Services, which calls on European governments to embrace the values of transparency, participation and empowerment and so improve public services. The European Commission and the Swedish Presidency of the EU have accepted that we present the declaration in the official program of the Ministerial Conference.
We now need to collect thousands of endorsements in order to convince governments to fully embrace these values.
If you share the values of the Open Declaration, please add your name in this form. Together we can make a difference!
If you agree, you may sign it and then join the Facebook Group to start spreading the word.
The proposition relies on separation between visual and input areas, introducing ‘con10nuum’, a window manager that works as a pipeline manager for windows, where the input area besides an enlarged multitouch pad actually allows both hands & fingers to work simultaneous as different input devices.
One of the positive aspects that I liked on this was the introduction of a pre-defined language for interaction, pretty much like the ones we have on mac’s today, where same actions can be invoked in different apps by using the same keyboard combinations.
I’m wondering, when are we finally going to ditch the 46yo Mouse!
Seems that great design is all about creating a bond between shape, product and end-users!
Coca-cola is one of the most renowned brands all over the world, but isn’t prune to the fact that it’s user base seems to be increasingly moving away from it’s core business: the carbonate sodas! Their response comes in the form of the new Coke’s Freestyle fountain machine:
I’m sure that in a near future we’ll probably find machines like this pretty much everywhere and not just for drinks. But I’m delighted with the overall ideas that went behind this project:
The fountain features a vast array of beverage choices, apparently more than a hundred, which means CUSTOMIZATION! It allows local merchants to tailor the selection of drinks to fit the peculiar tastes and wishes of their customers.
It’s set to use a new, smaller syrup packaging. Coke has one of the biggest, if not the biggest supply chain in the word, therefore savings at this level are good for everyone on this planet, plus less space means a lot more variety in the machines!
As every other 21 century machine, it needs to be connected! The new fountain features an onboard computer allowing for seamless and remote monitoring, it’s the dream come true for all marketeers and supply chain managers, the perfect tool for data mining customers behaviors.
In a world about to see the end of mass production and the return of customized, local goods, it’s very interesting to see Coke joining the ranks of other companies aiming to simplify our user experience but still get a high quality service and product by redefining the way we interact with these machines.
Oh well, I’ll probably need for a while to be able to test one back here in Europe, but I confess I’m eager to test one…
We’re all under flooded and overwhelmed by advertisement, so everyone of us have developed different ways to address the problem, some called the ad-blindness, others advertising counter measures, some more conscious others not so much, but in the end they all resume to forms of ignoring advertising…
At this point I need to say that it has worked rather well for me, nevertheless yesterday I was caught by surprise with a campaign by Apple on NYTimes. Strangely the AD was pretty normal, no fancy graphics, no key images, just the same two guys they’ve been running for a while. What caught my attention was how somehow their behavior didn’t make sense, until I finally noticed that the campaign was run over multiple AD tiles on one same webpage!
Although the quality, immersion and interaction is completely different I managed to record a small video from it, just to be able to mention it here:
Back, while, when I was still working at SAPO I realized that stupidly running regular advertisements is much simpler and require less work than to actually plan and deliver a successful campaign, it’s not the same to say that the more money you spend, the more results you’d get (that’s yet another problem!), in a sense that if a company really need to put out their message, and especially in this times of financial burdens it requires to be a step ahead and in this case by being ingenious and deeply smart!
Just arrived my '#Rework' by Jason Fried & David Hansson, first impression: looks very promissing! Or could just be my corporate exposure! [pedrocustodio]
I'm Pedro Custódio. I'm a Webdeveloper and UserExperience Advocate, I'm organizer of 