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Insight, Information and Inspiration on women's careers, business, technology and the Industry.
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With the growing popularity of handheld devices, you should constantly be checking to see what mobile users are seeing when they look up your site. One way is to type the URL into your wireless device, but how do you test on devices you don’t have? Or what if you’re not a mobile user? Now you can use mobile device simulators on your computer to see what mobile users with different handheld devices are seeing.
For a quick and easy look, you can try the pocket device simulator from G-site. This site lets you type in any URL and see what mobile users might see. It displays the page in a generic handheld device.
| For example, here’s a screen cap of yesterday’s Webgrrls Wisdom blog using G-site: |
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Sites like G-site meet many people’s needs. However, they don’t take host files and other local settings into account. To test your site on specific types of devices or to play with more advanced options, you might want to install applications from the different mobile device creators.
| Microsoft allows you to download emulators that can be used with or without Visual Studio. Here’s a glance at the same Webgrrls blog post using the Microsoft Mobile Emulator: |
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BlackBerry also provides its own mobile simulators for BlackBerry devices for you to download, and the Palm Developer Network provides free access to mobile simulators for Palm devices as well.
You can no longer afford to hope for the best when it comes to mobile devices. You should find out what your customers are seeing and then seek out ways to make the user experience on mobile devices simpler and easier to use.
I often talk on the subject of website usability and the importance of designing your web pages with your user in mind.
In the blink of an eye, web surfers make their judgments…they instantly judge your website’s “visual appeal.” If your website is appealing they will look further, if it is appealing and easy to navigate and read…you will have the chance to build trust with your reader and only then can you influence them to take the action that you want …whether it is to click on your ad, call you for a consultation, or just simply come back.
Here are some tools that will help you evaluate and analyze how users use your site so you can improve your website’s design and usabilty.
 ClickTale records your visitors’ every action as they browse your website and allows you to watch movies to understand visitor behavior and gain valuable insights and improve your website’s usability.
Price: You can track 100 page visits/week (~400 page visits/month) for free. If you need to track more pages, check out clicktale website for price plans.
 ClickHeat is a visual heatmap of clicks of your website pages, showing you hot and cold click zones. The hot zones tell you the most clicked on areas on the page and the cold zones tell you which areas on the page are being ignored.
This is an open source software that equires Javascript on the client side to track clicks, PHP and GD library (image library that should be installed with your PHP) on the server to log clicks and generate the heatmap.
Price: FREE
 Clickdensity is another great tool that offers different kinds of reports based on your user behavior on your website:
- Heat maps reports show the most clicked areas on the page
- Hover maps reports show you the statistics on your users hovering over the links but not clicking on them.
- A/B Tests allow you to change page elements to test usability and improve user experience.
Price: You can track one page for up to 5,000 clicks for free. If you need to track more pages, check out clickdensity website for price plans.
I’m constantly scanning the web for innovations and trends, and whenever something catches my eye, I try to mention it in this blog. Recently I’ve noticed an emerging trend about the sites that have caught my eye regarding user-generated content online: User-generated content has moved from being supplementary information to being the main attraction of the site. Sites have moved from using customers’ content as an aid while buying products to now making the customers’ content the actual product for sale on the site.
Continue Reading “User-Generated Content Moves from Side Show to Center Stage”
 Many of us are still clamoring on the Web 2.0 bandwagon while other interaction designers are plowing ahead to tackle new ways to share and interact with data. Sure, wikis and folksonomies are awesome, but information challenges are piling up, and a designer’s work is never done. In fact, that’s what makes our line of work so darn interesting—not to mention valuable to companies.
A while back after attending the Future of Web Design conference, I blogged about what Web 3.0 might look like. While my speculations were high level, a recent article entitled User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload in Read Write Web showcases information challenges that are starting to rear their ugly yet beautiful heads.
Each scenario in the post includes a description of the interface, a hint at new information challenges, and a clip from YouTube to show off the technology. Below are examples of the types of interfaces and new design challenges that are ahead.
Giant touch screens
Touch screens assume, well, touch. So how do users interact when items are out of reach?
Desktops that mimic the ordered chaos of a physical desktop
If we’re mimicking physical space, a pile of documents should get displaced or should react as another document collides with it. How do we allow users to create both tidy and untidy piles?
Thought-controlled menus
A thought-controlled interface might be hard to imagine, though we already have thought-controlled artificial limbs that react solely to nerves controlled by your brain, so why not an interface?
3-D gaming
The article shows the impact moving from 2-D to 3-D can have on even the simplest gaming interfaces.
Very cool stuff. Check out the full article: User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload
Last week I went to download the latest version of Bobby, an IBM tool that tests web pages to ensure they meet accessibility guidelines set by the W3C’s Web Access Initiative and Section 508 from the U.S. Federal Government. To my dismay, IBM has stopped offerring this tool for free, as of February 1, 2008. Going forward, IBM will be incorporating Bobby’s functionality into the product IBM Rational Policy Tester Accessibility Edition solution (previously known as WebXM Accessibility Module).
I realize that, as designers, we need to do more than scan our code to ensure our pages meet federal guidelines; we need to test pages with screen readers and ideally conduct usability tests with visually impaired users. But Bobby was a handy tool for taking a first pass at accessibility and identifying key problems. It has been the tool of choice for every company I have ever worked for or with on a web project. What tools should we turn to now that Bobby is no longer Freeware?
Continue Reading “Accessing Accessibility Tools”
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