Is an Accessible website always Usable?

The simple answer is: well, yes, it should be...As always, USER TESTING is the key.

Is an Accessible website always Usable? - By Leona Tomlinson

Making a website accessible will go some way to making it usable, but it may not necessarily mean that the website will be ‘easy to use’.

10 Reasons why your Website sucks

The terminology might seem a tad rude for a non-US audience, but it's a darn fine article all the same. Does your website um, "suck"??

10 Reasons why your Website sucks - There are a lot of excellent websites out there and many have focused on improving the user experience in recent years, but there are still a lot of sites that fail to pay enough attention to usability issues.

Drupal - Lack of Expected Functionality

One key piece of functionality which most users moving "up" from common PHP/MySQL CMS systems like PHPNuke or PostNuke [not to mention Bloggers] will expect is automatic update of RSS Newsfeeds. Nope, although the 'News Aggregator' is a key module of Drupal, there is no default update of Newsfeeds. Users have to track down cron.php and make sure to set up various 'cron jobs' with their hosting services. This is all offline - i.e., totally separate from Drupal, and a task for developers and web masters.

Drupal - And Furthermore...

Furthermore, the Menu administration is very far from being intuitive. This is partly to do with the terminology used. 'Edit Primary Links' sounds scary and not totally transparent in meaning. Uh, why not 'Edit Menu'?

And moving things about in the Menu Hierarchy is pretty troublesome, too. I got there in the end, but um, it took some doing...

One very confusing thing is that the menu items are NOT appropiately grouped. Surely admin tasks should be grouped - in a panel of their own? Otherwise, when you create pages, everything just gets all mixed up together.

At last - our very own Social Network

Catalyse writes:

At last - our very own Social Network - Catalyze, a new networking community for user experience professionals, has been launched by the UPA in association with the International Institute of Business Analysts.

More Drupal Worries

Still wrestling with Drupal [ www.drupal.com ] the open source Content Management System on which this site was created.

Key to my "mis-understanding" of key Drupal concepts is my "failure" to realise the difference between posting the various types of 'new content'.

What is the difference between a blog posting, a news story and a new page?

Okay, I now know what a 'new page' is - static content. But I don't believe a contributor to a community portal would.

Usability Testing versus the Focus Group

Usability Testing versus the Focus Group - BBC Radio 4's 'You and Yours' popular consumer rights show recently hosted a panel discussion on the relative merits of focus groups versus usability testing as a means of learning more about user preferences, behaviours and challenges.

User Interfaces - the deciding factor in whether mobile phone companies boom or bust...

Interesting aticle in the Guardian about the relative financial strengths of Sony Ericsson and Motorola. Motorola would appear to have fell from financial grace and have a struggle on their hands. Sony Ericsson, on the other hand, are thriving.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/2007/07/12/phone_wars_so...

In the associated comments, users bemoan Motorola's "awkward" interface and threaten never to buy a Motorola phone again.

Still a-wrestling with Drupal

I'm finding that this Drupal CMS system is a bit of a handful. Like most people, I can't be er bothered to read the manual, natch, and I'm a wondering...

WHY DOESN'T IT JUST BLEEDIN' WORK???

Not, ahem, that I'm a complete novice - having worked quite intensively with CMS systems of all sorts for the last SIX YEARS or more e.g., Open Market [that's an old one!], Teamsite, PhpNuke, PostNuke and very many more...

Still, this Drupal... Great system and obviously very powerful - but intuitive it AIN'T. Perhaps a TASK-based menu system might help?

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