JJHalans ‹› afterhours

Next Sydney WebStandardsGroup meeting:
“Findability: going beyond SEO”
Presenter: Radica Raeves

Search engine optimisation is usually the first subject that comes to mind when thinking about ways to improve the visibility of your organisation online. But it’s only a piece of the puzzle. In order to help the intended audience find, use and reuse your information, we need to look beyond SEO. Findability could help complete the puzzle. It’s a much broader concept, touching on almost every aspect of the web design and development process, where specialist fields intersect and overlap. We need to try and identify these elements of findability and “plug” them into the user-centred design workflow. It’s a big challenge… Can we connect the dots and bridge the gaps?”

And two iPhone presentations.
Be there!

Next Friday, August 1:

Usability Challenge 2008 is only 6 days away if you’re in Anchorage Alaska, and 5 days away if you’re in Wellington, New Zealand. If you’re one of the almost 5,000 inhabitants of the island nation of Kiribati, then you will be the very first Earthlings to experience Usability Challenge Day 2008, being the easternmost humans on the planet. This is very appropriate given that the I-Kiribati became unofficial Usability Challenge heroes by solving a usability problem of global proportions!

From 1979, Kiribati found itself straddling the International Date Line. This meant that when it was Monday in one part of Kiribati, it was Sunday in another. Not a particularly usable situation for Government agencies trying to get some work done. So in 1995 they moved a bit of the International Date Line. It now skirts around Kiribati, which has been enjoying synchronised weekends every since.

If the I-Kiribati moved the International Date Line to solve a usability problem, what are *you* going to do to make the world a better, safer and/or more usable place?

On Friday 1 August, your mission is to find a usability issue, design a solution, and share the design with someone who can implement it. Don’t forget to also share what you’ve done with your fellow usability challengers too!

It’s "World Usability Day" today. Get into it!
We got presentations on blind and visually impaired surfing, the Office 2007 user experience, mobile phones usability (and mobile race), usability feedback channel, News Corps’ Lab launch, and demos of eye tracking and user testing software. Pretty interesting stuff.

Wow, research has shown that web users judge sites in the blink of an eye.
Potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds.
That is, users were shown a screenshot in just 50 milliseconds, and then they had to rank them.
These results were then compared with the regular ranking of the sites.
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060109/full/060109-13.html