Website usability

Eoin

Hi folks,

I was wondering if anyone knows of any good training courses in Dublin that specialise in website usability and / or interface design? Hopefully, work will fork out for it, so either day time (week long) or night courses are good.

Also, if anyone can recommend any good books, it would be appreciated (I know I can just STFW, but there are so many out there I wouldn't mind some recommendations!). I know Jakob Nielsen seems to be the most famous usability expert - any more you can think of?

thanks in advance,

Eoin

Rollo Tamasi

eoin_s wrote:

I know Jakob Nielsen seems to be the most famous usability expert - any more you can think of?

there is a blast from the past, and a horrible one at that! I wouldn't listen to a tap that guy says, a lot of his work is outdated in my opinion and if you followed his advise your webpage would consist of no images and five lines of text.

For usability check out the w3c.org

akari no ryu

Rollo Tamasi wrote:

there is a blast from the past, and a horrible one at that! I wouldn't listen to a tap that guy says, a lot of his work is outdated in my opinion and if you followed his advise your webpage would consist of no images and five lines of text.

Funny. On pages 175 and 187 of "Designing Web Usability" he compliments sites which use a fairly normal amount of images for their design approach (nameley Newsweek.com and monster.com, respectively).
I found his approach to be rather spot on, if a bit out dated.

Rollo Tamasi

he says a lot of things for such a basic thing as assessibilty, most of it is common sense. I read an article of his before and the article was on why the page had no images. It was nuts i tells ya! Off the wall stuff!

AngryAnderson

Hehe. Jakob Nielson... lot's of common sense and stating the bloody obvious but not much help when it comes to progressive web design or making future technology more usable. An aged dinosaur and not someone to aspire to at all. Plus I've never seen anyone who backtracks on his assertions so much. If you want to learn about usability - don't listen to anyone's opinions.

Eoin

Right, I might scratch Mr Nielson off the reading list so!

I check the W3C site a lot, but I think their usability stuff is at a more technical level.

Interestingly, one of the first search results for "usability" on the W3C site, returned this page. If you look at it, the background image is a pretty hefty 250KB. Only about half of this image is actually displayed. It took a while to load, and in the meantime the text over it was very hard to read as it is yellow against the white background colour of the page.

I think this shows that although a page can conform to the strictest standards, it does not follow that it is a usable page.

For anyone interested, I have found some of the tips on www.netmechanic.com very useful - I know there is a lot of stuff there that would seem really obvious, but well worth a look all the same.

Rollo Tamasi

tbh i have always found the w3c website to be the biggest joke when it comes to usabilty. Horrible design, really inconsistent and i can't navigate through it at all.

aidan_walsh

Well, in fairness the W3 are looking at usability from a technical standpoint as opposed to a design one.

Rollo Tamasi

technically i think its ****e