To Sketch or Not to Sketch? That is the Question.
To Sketch or Not to Sketch? That is the Question.
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An Event Apart Atlanta 2011
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YOU FIND ME ENSCONCED in the fabulous Buckhead, Atlanta Intercontinental Hotel, preparing to unleash An Event Apart Atlanta 2011, three days of design, code, and content strategy for people who make websites. Eric Meyer and I co-founded our traveling web conference in December, 2005; in 2006 we chose Atlanta for our second event, and it was the worst show we’ve ever done. We hosted at Turner Field, not realizing that half the audience would be forced to crane their necks around pillars if they wanted to see our speakers or the screen on which slides were projected.
Also not realizing that Turner Field’s promised contractual ability to deliver Wi-Fi was more theoretical than factual: the venue’s A/V guy spent the entire show trying to get an internet connection going. You could watch audience members twitchily check their laptops for email every fourteen seconds, then make the “no internet” face that is not unlike the face addicts make when the crack dealer is late, then check their laptops again.
The food was good, our speakers (including local hero Todd Dominey) had wise lessons to impart, and most attendees had a pretty good time, but Eric and I still shudder to remember everything that went wrong with that gig.
Not to jinx anything, but times have changed. We are now a major three-day event, thanks to a kick-ass staff and the wonderful community that has made this show its home. We thank you from the bottoms of our big grateful hearts.
I will see several hundred of you for the next three days. Those not attending may follow along:
- An Event Apart Atlanta three-day schedule
- A Feed Apart – live tweeting, Monday through Wednesday
- AEA Atlanta Flickr Group
- An Event Apart Facebook page
Responsive Web Design – The Book
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SOME IDEAS SEEM inevitable once they arrive. It’s impossible for me to conceive of the universe before rock and roll or to envision Christmas without Mr Dickens’s Carol, and it’s as tough for my kid to picture life before iPads. So too will the internet users and designers who come after us find it hard to believe we once served web content in boxy little hardwired layouts left over from the magical but inflexible world of print.
I remember when the change came. We were putting on An Event Apart, our design conference for people who make websites, and half the speakers at our 2009 Seattle show had tumbled to the magic of media queries. One after another, CSS wizards including Eric Meyer and Dan Cederholm presented the beginnings of an approach to designing content for a world where people were just as likely to be using smart, small-screen devices like iPhone and Android as they were traditional desktop browsers.
Toward the end of the second day, Ethan Marcotte took what the other speakers had shared and amped it to 11. Suddenly, we had moved from maybe to for sure, from possible to inevitable. Ethan even gave us a name for his new approach to web design.
That name appears on the cover of this book, and this book represents the culmination of two years of design research and application by Ethan and leading-edge design practitioners around the world. Armed with this brief book, you will have everything you need to re-imagine your web design universe and boldly go where none have gone before. Happy reading and designing!
Jeffrey Zeldman,
Publisher,
Responsive Web Design
(More) Useful Web Usability Testing Tools
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Usability and User Experience (UX) are two extremely important factors for developing a site or app that really stands out from the competition. With the increasing competition in sites and apps, there are also an ever increasing number of tools to help you make your site or app more usable, and to help you ensure you provide a great experience for your users.
Of course, with this influx of usability and UX tools, it’s hard to sift through all of the rubble to find tools that meet your needs, or even to find any tool at all. We’ve covered a number of great web usability tools in the past, and today we are happy to provide you with more to help you make the web a more usable place, one site (or app) at a time.
Read on for a handy list of a whole bunch of tools, and be sure to let us know in the comments if there are any great tool we’ve missed.
(Full disclosure: I work on IntuitionHQ.com, one of the website usability testing tools featured in this list.)
GoToMeeting
Along the same lines as Skype, this makes it really easy to communicate and observe your users. A good alternative if you need one. ($49/month)
Ethnio
Intercept users (live!) on your site and ask them questions or even call them. It’s a great way to recruit people for testing, and it looks pretty too. (free – $199/month)
WhatUsersDo
This tool provides testers, and then records videos of them using your site, as well as their comments on their experience. From this you can work out what is working well or not so well, and make changes from there. (£30+/user)
IntuitionHQ
(I work on this tool) You create tasks, add screenshots, send them out any way you like to anyone you like, and see how they interact with your designs and UIs via a heatmap. It doesn’t provide a ton of information, but it’s quick, cheap and actionable, which most of the time is just what I need. ($9)
FiveSecondTest
Neat concept. Show a user your screenshot for five seconds, and see what sticks in their mind. Simple and easy. (free – $200/month)
Feedback Army
Submit questions about your site and pay to get 10 responses from their reviewers, all within a short period of time. Good option for quick and dirty testing. ($15/test)
Loop 11
Create tests and tasks, send them out to users then view a report of the results. An annual license is also available. ($350/test)
Usabilla
Set your tasks, send out the tests, and get feedback; users can also leave notes on each of your screenshots. You provide your own participants, topping out at 200 on the $139 plan.(free – $139/month)
Navflow
You upload a sequence of screenshots with a set task/success method and send them on to your users to run through. It then provides results based on the success criteria you set earlier. (free – $200/month)
Video Testing
Clicktale
Records everything your visitors do on your website, including keystrokes ad mouse moves so you can see exactly what they do and how they do it. You can monitor results in real time as well. ($99 – $990/month)
TryMyUI
Similar to WhatUsersDo, they provide a video of a tester using your website, and narrating their thoughts as they go. They also provide a written response to a questionnaire. ($25/test)
Userfly
Records videos of your users on a site, including all mouse movements and clicks, for you to review and gather data from. (free – $200/month)
Userlytics
Userlytics provides particpants, and records videos of both users and their interactions with your site. You also get to ask a survery post your 10 minute test. ($299/test)
UserTesting
Very similar to Userlytics, but you only need to pay for one tester at a time. Gives you a video of users talking about your site as they use it, and a written summary of problems they encountered. ($39/tester)
OpenHallway
Another site that records users as they use your site; but they host your video online for you, and you provide your own testers. ($19 – $199/month)
More Tools
xSort
xSort is a free card sorting app for Mac OS X. If you are a card sorting fan (which is a useful way to work out navigation structures and such) then this is a handy tool to download. (free)
Websort
Websort is online card sorting app with a range of different functionality baked in, such as ways to connect with survey sites, open and closed tests, and a number of ways to access and view your results. ($149 – $2,499)
Gazehawk
Gazehawk is an eye tracking tool that recruits participants and provides results for you. They do this through heatmaps and replays and of how people have interacted with your site. ($495 – $995+)
Last but not least:
Eyes and Ears.
As obvious as this may seem, the first thing you need to do while testing usability is to use your eyes and ears. Watch what people do. See how they interact with a certain interface. Listen to their comments, and observe their behaviour. You’d be amazed what you can learn.
(Image source: Shutterstock)
Pencil and Paper.
Following closely on the heals of eyes and ears, pencil and paper are two tools that you almost always have on hand. They don’t require any technical expertise, and you can quickly and easily produce prototypes of any design or interface that you can imagine. If nothing else, at least try sketching out your ideas.
(Image source: Shutterstock)
So Now What?
Now you’ve found all of these great tools, where do you go from here? It’s always a good time to test, and there is always something you can learn with your testing. The following few articles, along with all the tools featured above, will help move you in the right direction:
- Usability Tools – Part I (hongkiat.com)
- Usability Testing: What You need to Know? (hongkiat.com)
- Usability Testing Demystified (alistapart.com)
- Usability Testing With Card Sorting (sixrevisions.com)
- Getting started with Usability Testing in 7 simple steps (intuitionhq.com)
- Usability 101: Introduction to Usability Testing (useit.com)
- Usability Testing: Don’t Guess, Test (uxbooth.com)
Do you have any other tools you’d like to see in this list? Questions or comments about the usability testing process? Be sure to let us know in the comments. Happy testing!
Start user testing with a homepage healthcheck
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Progressive enhancement: all you need to know is here
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ONE GLORIOUS AFTERNOON in March, 2006, as a friend and I hurried past Austin’s Downtown Hilton Hotel to catch the next session of the SXSW Interactive Festival, a young stranger arrested our progress. With no introduction or preliminaries, he announced that he was available to speak at An Event Apart, a conference for web designers that Eric Meyer and I had launched three months previously. Turning to my companion with my best impression (which is none too good) of Mr Burns of “The Simpsons,” I asked, “Who is this brash young upstart, Smithers?”
The brash young upstart quickly became an essential colleague. In the months and years that followed, Aaron Gustafson created dazzling front- and back-end code for some of my agency’s most demanding clients. Just as importantly, he brilliantly tech-edited the second and third editions of Designing With Web Standards. The job largely consists of alerting Ethan Marcotte and me to the stuff we don’t know about web standards. I’ll let you think about that one. For five years now, Aaron has also been a tough but fair technical editor for A List Apart magazine, where he helps authors succeed while ensuring that they are truly innovative, that their methods are accessible and semantic, and (thanks to his near-encyclopedic knowledge) that they give all prior art its due. Moreover, Aaron has written seminal pieces for the magazine, and, yes, he has lectured at An Event Apart.
Given my experiences with the man and my admiration for his knowledge and abilities, I was thrilled when Aaron told me the premise of this book and began letting me look at chapters. This isn’t just another web design book. It’s an essential and missing piece of the canon. Our industry has long needed a compendium of best practices in adaptive, standards-based design. And with the rise of mobile, the recent significant improvements in desktop and phone browsers, and the new capabilities that come with HTML5, CSS3, and gestural interfaces, it is even more vital that we who make websites have a reliable resource that tells us how to take advantage of these new capabilities while creating content that works in browsers and devices of all sizes and widely differing capabilities. This book is that resource.
The convergence of these new elements and opportunities is encouraging web professionals to finally design for the web as it always should have been done. Adaptive design is the way, and nobody has a wider command than Aaron of the thinking and techniques required to do it well. In these pages you will find all that thinking and those methods. Never again will you lose a day debating how to do great web design (and create great code) that works for everyone. I plan to give this book to all my students, and to everyone I work with. I encourage you to do likewise. And now, enough preliminaries. Dive in, and enjoy!
Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences with Progressive Enhancement
by Aaron Gustafson
Foreword by Jeffrey Zeldman
