A Dad's Plea To Developers Of iPad Apps For Children. Advertisement I spend a lot of time buying and testing iPad apps for kids. To be more specific, I lovingly do this for a certain two-year-old girl who is currently on a very successful #OccupyiPad mission in my house. Through extensive observational research, I’ve discovered what works and doesn’t work for my daughter, so I’m going to shamelessly generalize my findings to all children and propose four essential guidelines for developers who work on iPad apps for children. Affordance Is King Most apps for children show a bunch of different things on the screen that you can touch to make stuff happen.
Cows moo, windows open and close, honey pots need to be collected, etc. The solution is simple: affordance. Pagination Is A Primary Action Pagination is so important to the enjoyment of most children’s apps, but it is often a quagmire. Also, the entire bottom part of the screen is a hot area and needs to be avoided. The Menu Is A Distant Secondary Action I’m looking at you, Talking Tom Cat. The new iPad - View all the technical specifications.
Website testing, user testing, and market research done with Morae by TechSmith. Use Morae to gain valuable insight about your product and remove the guesswork from your decisions. You’ll love that you can record user interactions, analyze the results, and instantly share them with anyone – all within Morae and for any type of research. Pluggable Architecture Write your own Recorder, Observer, and Manager plug-ins with Morae’s pluggable architecture, which enables you and your development team to build features specific to your testing environment.
Learn more about the expanding flexibility of Morae’s pluggable architecture and about the plug-ins that partnering companies have already created on Morae's Plug-ins Page. Field Studies Gain a richer understanding of what customers need by observing them in their natural environment. Here's How: See How a Health System Took Morae on the Road with Field Studies: Intermountain Health System View Customer Stories » Continuous Improvement (Lean Six Sigma) See How to Use Morae with Lean Six Sigma: Visit The Guthrie Group. TobiiEyeTracking's Channel. Tobii Glasses 2 - New Generation Wearable Eye Tracker 19,450 views 2 months ago Tobii Glasses 2 is a new generation wearable eye tracker that shows exactly what a person is looking at in real time, while moving freely in any real-world environment. Based on a new, proprietary, wearable eye-tracking platform from Tobii that will support research and consumer applications, Tobii Glasses 2 offers unprecedented functionality including wireless live viewing and opens up new opportunities for human behavior research and discoveries in real-world environments.
The applications and uses for wearable eye-tracking research span many industries, including in-store shopper marketing, user experience and psychology. The Tobii Glasses 2 Eye Tracker is capable of supporting a wide range of research projects and experience levels from first-time eye-tracking users working on one-time studies to researchers experienced in eye tracking needing advanced functionality for comprehensive analytical projects.
Eye Tracking White Paper. Eye tracking commonly refers to the technique used to record and measure eye movements. The aim of this paper is to give a brief introduction to the human visual system, and to explain how eye movements are recorded and processed by Tobii Eye Trackers. Some basic concepts and issues related to remote eye tracking and eye movement data interpretation are also briefly discussed. 1 Why study eye movements? In order to understand the reasoning behind studying eye movements, some basic facts about the human vision need to be known. 1.1 How does the eye work? Our eyes have many similarities with how a photo camera works: Light reflected from an object or a scene travels into our eyes through a lens. The cause of the differences in our visual field is the two different kinds of light receptor cells available in the eye, i.e. the rods and the cone cells. 1.2 Why do our eyes move?
Eye movements have 3 main functions which are considered important when we process visual information: 3.1 Eye movements. Heck Yes, Windows Is Still Relevant. She & Me - Creative Web Strategy and Content Development. Morae usability testing software from TechSmith. From focus groups to usability studies, Morae helps you gain insight into your user's experiences by providing you with powerful data. Record and remotely observe user interactions, efficiently analyze results, and instantly share your findings with anyone, anywhere. Customize Morae to Work for You Write your own Recorder, Observer, and Manager plug-ins with Morae’s pluggable architecture, which enables you and your development team to build features specific to your testing environment. Get Great Insights with Morae Morae is the gold standard in usability and market research. Morae gives you the ability to set up, record, observe, and analyze usability studies, focus groups, field research, and product testing.
You and others can watch the study or interaction remotely, take notes, and then analyze results to instantly share your insights with others. Software & Web User Experience Testing Morae provides you with hard data and undeniable examples of usability problems. Why Distinct Icon Outlines Help Users Scan Faster. By anthony on 08/04/11 at 10:05 pm Icons are visual cues that help users use interfaces more efficiently. Instead of reading each word on an interface, users can scan for the icon that represents the task they’re trying to do. However, sometimes scanning icons can take longer than expected if the icons don’t have distinct outlines. If you want to make your icons fast and easy to scan, use distinct outlines over uniform ones. Uniform outlines make the shape of your icons look the same. Since they all look the same, it’s hard for any particular icon to stand out when users scan them. Instead, they have to focus more intently on the icon pictures because of the visual noise surrounding the icons.
Distinct outlines shows the unique shape of each icon without any visual noise. This concept is similar to how all caps makes text harder to scan. 9 Rules to Make Your Icons Clear and Intuitive. By anthony on 10/31/11 at 9:09 am Have you ever looked at an icon and struggled to figure out what it meant? Users do this all the time with icons they’re not familiar with. And there are only a small set of icons that users are universally familiar with. This is why when you use icons in your designs it’s important to make them clear and intuitive. 1.
Unless the icons you’re using are universally recognized (i.e. play, print, close, help), you should always label them. No space for labels with multiple icons packed together. 2. To make your icon as intuitive as possible, always make sure that your icon represents both the action and object. Paper airplane icon shows a clear action and object. 3. Icons that function similarly belong together. Icons that share a similar function are labeled and grouped together. 4. Users don’t just rely on how an icon looks to understand its function. Icon order and placement stay consistent despite design changes. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. References. Px - em - % - pt - keyword. Keyword Valid options for setting font-size in keyword are xx-small, x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, and xx-large as well as relative keywords smaller and larger. Surprisingly enough, keyword sizing is pretty consistent across browsers and platforms.
See below a test page in Opera, Firefox, IE 6, and Safari: Note that although the they are pretty close, there are differences in where the lines break and total paragraph height. Only when one of the relative sizing keywords are used does the "cascade" kick in and the font-size of the parent element effects the child. Keywords are a perfectly fine way to size fonts on the web. However, keywords don't offer very fine-grained control of your typography, as the choices are fairly limited. px If you need fine-grained control, sizing fonts in pixel values (px) is an excellent choice (it's my favorite).
Windows, Mac, aliased, anti-aliased, cross-browsers, doesn't matter, a font set at 14px will be 14px tall. Em The first one is the big one. Pt. Designer Myopia: How To Stop Designing For Ourselves. Advertisement Have you ever looked at a bizarre building design and wondered, “What were the architects thinking?” Or have you simply felt frustrated by a building that made you uncomfortable, or felt anger when a beautiful old building was razed and replaced with a contemporary eyesore? You might be forgiven for thinking “these architects must be blind!” New research shows that in a real sense, you might actually be right. That’s Michael Mehaffy and Nikos A. Salingaros describing a phenomenon we’re all familiar with, in their article “Architectural Myopia: Designing for Industry, Not People.”
Longaberger Home Office, Newark, Ohio. In this article, we’ll discuss “designer myopia”: the all-too-common phenomenon whereby, despite our best intentions, we sometimes design with a nearsightedness that results in websites and applications that please ourselves and impress our peers but don’t meet user and business goals. The Causes Of Designer Myopia How did we get here? 1. 2. 3. Summary (al) (il) Is There Ever A Justification For Responsive Text? Media Queries. Abstract HTML4 and CSS2 currently support media-dependent style sheets tailored for different media types. For example, a document may use sans-serif fonts when displayed on a screen and serif fonts when printed. ‘screen’ and ‘print’ are two media types that have been defined. Media queries extend the functionality of media types by allowing more precise labeling of style sheets.
A media query consists of a media type and zero or more expressions that check for the conditions of particular media features. Status of This Document This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. A W3C Recommendation is a mature document that has been widely reviewed and has been shown to be implementable. This document has been reviewed by W3C Members, by software developers, and by other W3C groups and interested parties, and is endorsed by the Director as a W3C Recommendation. Please see the Working Group's implementation report and the Media Queries Test Suite. 1. 3. 5. 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines. Advertisement Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key.
Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites. 1. Form Labels Work Best Above The Field A study by UX Matters found that the ideal position for labels in forms is above the fields. Tumblr features a simple and elegant sign-up form that adheres to UX Matter’s recommendation. Positioning labels on the left also poses another problem: do you left-align or right-align the labels? 2. People instinctively notice other people right away when they come into view. Eye-tracking heat map of a baby looking directly at us, from the UsableWorld study. 3. 4. Hick's law. Hick's law, or the Hick–Hyman Law, named after British psychologist William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman, describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has: increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically.
The Hick–Hyman law assesses cognitive information capacity in choice reaction experiments. The amount of time taken to process a certain amount of bits in the Hick–Hyman law is known as the rate of gain of information. Background[edit] Hick first began experimenting with this theory in 1951. His first experiment involved 10 lamps with corresponding Morse Code keys. The lamps would light at random every five seconds. The choice reaction time was recorded with the number of choices ranging from 2–10 lamps. Hick performed a second experiment using the same task, while keeping the number of alternatives at 10. Law[edit] In the case of choices with unequal probabilities, the law can be generalized as: E. 9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design. Advertisement By now, all good designers and developers realize the importance of usability for their work. Usable websites offer great user experiences, and great user experiences lead to happy customers. Delight and satisfy your visitors, rather than frustrate and annoy them, with smart design decisions.
Here are 9 usability problems that websites commonly face, and some recommended solutions for each of them. 1. Tiny clickable areas Hyperlinks are designed to be clicked, so to make them usable, it makes sense to ensure that they’re easy to click. Here’s an example of the same interface element, the comments link, but this time with a much larger clickable area: Newspond comments link. Why would we want a larger clickable area? <a href=" style="padding: 5px;">Example Site<a> You can read more about padded link targets for better mousing in a 37signals article on padded link targets. 2. Pagination refers to splitting up content onto several pages. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. CSS Text-Rendering. 4 Tips and Tricks for more Legible Content.
These tips and tricks will help you design more readable content for screen readers. Readability & legibility are both areas of interest in accessibility and typographic design, and many resources exist that attempt to define what constitutes well designed copy. In this post, we go over a few commonly overlooked and newer ways to implement more legible type on the web. 1. Add Text-Shadow to Custom Fonts With a growing number of web fonts to choose from, and new ways to implement custom fonts into sites using CSS instead of Javascript or Flash, it’s becoming increasingly popular to stray from traditional common fonts in exchange for fonts that help define a more unique and consistent brand.
This is great for many reasons, and quite a few font foundries have already begun selling web font licenses making the potential for custom fonts substantial. However, for the time being, there are drawbacks. For many common web fonts, this isn’t a big concern. This is easily implemented in CSS: 2. 3. 4. What’s the most readable font for the screen? If there’s a topic that’s bound to get designers riled up into a fiery debate, it’s the issue of choosing the most readable fonts for use on the screen. For most of the web’s life, designers haven’t had much flexibility when it comes to setting the type for their sites, and type decisions have almost always come down to choosing one or two web-safe fonts (a small collection of fonts that are installed on most users’ machines) and setting the font sizes.
CSS’s @font-face has garnered significant attention in the past year as browsers expanded their support for it and major type foundries began developing web licenses, making services such as Typekit possible. What many people don’t realize is that @font-face isn’t new–in fact, Internet Explorer 6, every web designer’s headache, supported it before just about everyone else. There were many problems with Microsoft’s implementation. Serif or Sans-Serif? There are two main types of font: serif and sans-serif. What’s the best typeface? Care With Font Size - Quality Web Tips. The Myth Of The Sophisticated User - Smashing UX Design. Yahoo Design Pattern Library. Social Patterns. And Sogeti Testing Services | Videos. Social Design Strategy. 4 forgotten principles of usability testing.
How Users Read on the Web. How to use multitasking gestures on your iPad. User Experience Consulting | Northridge Interactive. Touch Gesture Reference Guide. Touchscreen Braille Writer Lets the Blind Type on a Tablet | Gadget Lab. Persona-Lene.jpg (809×1156) Touchscreens UX: Godsend or disaster? The Relevance of User Experience: Using Every Opportunity to Impress Users. Touch Gesture Reference Guide.