Cre8tive Flow

Thread pick: What in the world is Contextual Usability?

Thanks to this question, my pet terms of the moment are contextual usability and experiential design. Late Spring is lush and sweet in my corner of the world, and I’m walking around seeing everything in terms of how experience is facilitated in the contextual environment. This is fun stuff for a psychology buff.

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Thread pick: Usability of Ads.

What is the relationship between usability and advertising effectiveness?

Usability has user-friendly written all over it. Online ads are so rant-friendly that ISPs boost branding by offering free ad blockers.

Effective ads motivate and inform. Online ads also hang on click thrus. Click thrus, not end results, are the most commonly discussed benchmark. Results for destination sites are more connected with targeted traffic, branding and usability.

Hated, in-your-face, online ad techniques can increase click-thrus. Is irritation a necessary evil?

Could advertising results be better if user experience is respected?

The UPA Voice (Usability Professionals Assocation) is running a fun article by Cliff Anderson, on Jared Spool, best known for his User Interface Engineering (UIE) web site.

The early days of UIE involved quite a bit of evangelization. One of the presentations that Jared showed to potential clients was called “Software That Makes People Cry,” and was based on a test that UIE had run where a user did just that. He originally thought companies would “flock to do ,” but found he had to sell the idea and to tailor his message.

Metaphors can be used to help structure a web site, and add a unique and interesting way of thinking about a site and the products or services that it might offer.

Proctor and Gamble used an interesting metaphor on their site for laundry detergent Tide, based upon the structure of a typical American home, and the types of stains that might be found in different rooms of that home. It seemed like a good idea.

Nice interview with Steve Krug at Boxes and Arrows.

One of the interesting tidbits of information from the article is a new book in the works on how to do “low-cost/no-cost do-it-yourself usability testing.”

His first book, “Don’t Make me Think,” was an entertaining, informative, and easy to read introduction to usability, and is highly recommended. If the second book is as good as the first one, it should be worth keeping an eye out for.

A couple of nice articles about accessibility crossed my path today, and I wanted to share them.

The first one discusses the costs of not designing with accessibility in mind - 100,000 reasons to design for accessibility - from Bruce Lawson.

The second one is from Juicy Studios, and offers some ideas on how to implement Skip links. More than just a simple discussion of how to use skip links, it also goes into why they should be used, and has a great section on Don Norman’s concepts of the gulf of execution and the gulf of evaluation.

If you’d like to comment on the latest standards being set under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2), you have another 11 days or so.

The new guidelines will probably become a W3C recommendation early in 2005.

One of the biggest criticisms of the present guidelines are that they are difficult to understand. If you have some skill at taking the “difficult to explain” and making it simple, there’s a need for that skill.

One of my favorite authors on matters related to the web, HTML, and standards has a new book coming out soon.

In anticipation of it, the Web Standards Group has an interview with her that raises some great issues. See Ten Questions for Molly Holzschlag.