templatedata

A little while I posted on one of my pet peeves: non-descriptive link labels. There seems to be some confusion as to whether labelling your links descriptively is good practice in terms of accessibility, specifically in teh case of screen readers. I can confirm that it is good practice. The W3C in their Accessibility Guidelines includes the following:

Good link text should not be overly general; don't use "click here." Not only is this phrase device-dependent (it implies a pointing device) it says nothing about what is to be found if the link if followed. Instead of "click here", link text should indicate the nature of the link target, as in "more information about sea lions" or "text-only version of this page". Note that for the latter case (and other format- or language-specific documents), content developers are encouraged to use content negotiation instead, so that users who prefer text versions will have them served automatically.

In addition to clear link text, content developers may specify a value of the "title" attribute that clearly and accurately describes the target of the link.

If more than one link on a page shares the same link text, all those links should point to the same resource. Such consistency will help page design as well as accessibility.

If two or more links refer to different targets but share the same link text, distinguish the links by specifying a different value for the "title" attribute of each A element.

"Auditory users" -- people who are blind, have difficulty seeing, or who are using devices with small or no displays -- are unable to scan the page quickly with their eyes. To get an overview of a page or to quickly find a link, these users will often tab from one link to the next or review a list of available links on a page.

Thus, for a series of related links, include introductory information in the first link, then distinguishing information in the links that follow. This will provide context information for users reading them in sequence.

So, no 'Click heres' and no URLs used as labels, especially when separated from the target name by several lines.

Thank you.

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Ok, an admission up front, I love RSS and what it enables so the following post is going to be biased, perhaps even evangelical. There are some drawbacks with RSS, I am sure there must be because everything has its faults, but I am only going to tell you about all the good things.

Although RSS has been around for a long time, I get asked every week about what it is and why I talk about it a lot. The thing is, I am not completely au fait with how it works technically. I just know that in terms of serving and finding information it has opened up a whole new world.

What I know about RSS - the technical bits:

• RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication"
• It enables feeds (like the old-fashioned news wire feeds) from your site to be read in NewsReaders.
• It uses XML
• It is most useful on sites that have a high content turnover. Completely useless on sites that don't.
• RSS also allows headlines from your site to be displayed on another site with no hard manual labour.

What I know about RSS - the user-side bits:

• RSS enables me to read headlines through a NewsReader (I use NetNewsWire because I use a Mac most of the time)
• I don't surf the net much anymore but get feeds from a selection of sites that I find either incredibly useful or incredibly entertaining.
• I can stay up to date with news, what's going on in the blog world, the footy scores, all through one program without me actually having to remember where the stuff is on the web.
• RSS feed reading is incredibly addictive if you're a bit of a smart-**** like me who likes to get the news before anyone else, just for the hell of it.
• If you want to see if a site has a feed you look for something that says 'XML', 'Subscribe' or 'RSS'. Sometimes they use an image like this:

Where you can find out more:

• RSS explained at Search Engine Watch
• RSS for beginners
• BBC RSS page

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Back in February Andrea Schwandt-Arbogast at Interllectual wrote a short series of posts entitled: Why most University websites suck. The first piece in the series looks at the difficulties in defining the goals and audiences on Uni sites. I couldn't agree more. Our University website has struggled under the expectation that every user has: they will find exactly what they want within one or two clicks from the front page.

This is not such an unreasonable expectation, I agree. The problem comes when we have a multitude of different types of users all trying to find what seems like an infinite number of different types of information. All groups of users have different expectations of the site and most are focused only on what they need. This leads to confusion when they are confronted with the options that don't apply to them.

Such expectations are a difficult load to place on any website. I raised the issue of separate sites for different audiences last month. I believe it is the only way we can address this problem. As the areas of the University websites for different audiences become more complex we are going to have to look at creating dedicated sites. In terms of marketing this offers the opportunity for domains dedicated to audiences and fully contained sites that are easier to manage in terms of IA.

As Andrea points out though, this would mean telling a whole lot of people that they should change the home page in their browser, that the main university website isn't the portal to the world, as it used to be. I agree this would be difficult but I think if people can find what they want on a well-designed site, any resistance to change may be overcome.

In part 2 of her series, Andrea addresses institutional inertia, something I think we're all familiar with.

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Jakob Nielsen discusses when to use formal usability reports and when quick findings are just as useful.

Formal reports are the most common way of documenting usability studies, but informal reports are faster to produce and are often a better choice.

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A laptop thief got more than he bargained for when s/he stole his lecturer's laptop. Listen to the lecturer's speech.

I realised today that I hadn't added a 'blogroll' to this blog, even though it is one of the first things I did with my other blogs. So, accordingly I have added a blogroll on the right and to the left you will see a list of links to various del.icio.us tags that you may find useful. Suggestions for other tags welcome, please leave them in the comments.

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The chi-web and sig-ia mailing lists are two email based discussion groups on the topics of web usability, ui design and information architecture.

This site is a compilation of summary postings from these lists.

Useful for research.

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One of the biggest misconceptions within organisations seems to be that the purchase and implementation of a CMS will solve content problems. CMSs solve only half the problem. They make the management of content easier but they don't ease the pain of content creation.

Let's look a few of the common complaints expressed about web content:

• Out of date
• Inaccurate
• Sparse
• Lacking in an owner
• Difficult to read
• Difficult to manage

Of these few complaints only the last can be solved by a CMS. A fully automated system that makes the entering of content easier does not make it easier to produce interesting, well-written and timely content. Someone has to take responsibility for the content, to research and write it. Only then can the CMS come into play.

"Offline" strategies need to considered in conjunction with a CMS. Some of these are:

• Ultimate responsibility assumed by someone high-up in the organisation for the production and quality of content.
• A well defined online strategy developed that addresses the needs of the organisation and the needs of the audience. If an organisation can not commit to a large-scale, content-rich website there is no point in designing one. A scaled down but accurate and interesting site is a far better solution.
• Individual job descriptions should be appraised constantly in line with the ever-changing demands of a website. Content always seems to be omitted in such appraisals. Someone's job has to officially include the production of quality web content.
• A passion for content has to be identified and nurtured. Plenty of people have a passion for cutting-edge technology but those with passion for good content are few and far between. Resources need to be assigned to the development of content development skills, not only programming skills.

There are many more that could be added to this list but you no doubt get the picture by now. Buying a CMS may solve the problem of having only a handful of individuals who can work on the content of a website. It doesn't solve the problem of actually getting the content ready to go into the CMS.

The SMH has been on the web ten years. They have developed a 'mini-site' to celebrate this feat, including some interesting screen shots from the days of old. (Yes, even the SMH had to start somewhere and my, how the shots show their age.)

An interesting piece of online history, well worth a look. I recommend the article by Des Devlin, specially if you are interested in how organisations deal with sites that have high content turnover and distributed authors. (Sounds like content management to me...)

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The nominations for the Webby Awards have been announced. Not surprisingly, the BBC has been nominated in a swag of categories, only confirming my admiration for their online strategies and design. (Listening to live BBC radio in your lounge room in Sydney is a truly wondrous thing).

One of my favourite sites ever, Rather Good, has been quite rightfully nominated in the Weird category. If you like bad animations of cats playing instruments to pop songs, go pay it a visit.

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One of the most ignored facets of redesigning a website is the content inventory or audit. You have to know what you already have in order to redesign it. You need to know what you've got, what you would like to have, what you need to write, rewrite etc. Alt tags addresses this theme in The Content Inventory: Roadmap to a successful CMS implementation.

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For those of you who work in Adobe, there's a new how-to magazine dedicated to Adobe stuff. It's called Layers.

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Perhaps a nomination for the "too-much-time-on-their-hands" category but there has been a study done by researchers at Georgia Tech University on sharing music through iTunes in the workplace.

They found that people tried to build up a persona through the music they shared with others. They shared music they thought would make them look 'cool' and hid the stuff that may compromise their persona.

They also found that music sharing aided the "building of community" in the workplace.

I know several of us who share music in this building and I have to admit that it does open up a side of someone you may not have known about but I think the best thing is purely just the access to music. These days I feel I'm too old to make excuses about my music! And besides, its kind of hip in a strange way to have a weakness for at least one very daggy artist...well, at least that's what I tell myself...

Apologies, just a few links today as I have been busy and not able to blog properly. Life has indeed got in the way of blogging.

• Step Two's monthly KM briefing tackles CMS interoperability.
• Their content management briefing looks at intranets and asks: Why are they structured like the organisation chart?
• Human Factors looks at consistency in usable interfaces:"So how much consistency is enough? And which consistencies are the important ones? And what type of evidence could we use to capture key aspects of perceived consistency?"

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