The E-Access Bulletin reports…

Two American universities have rejected the market-leading Kindle DX electronic book reader as a textbook replacement due to its inaccessibility for blind students. Both Syracuse University in New York State and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have chosen not to use the Kindle – manufactured by Amazon.com – as a teaching-aid, after their own trials found it was not fully accessible.

Interesting lessons for anyone else considering an e-reader device, and who wants to make it useful for as wide an audience as possible.
(forwarded by Pat)

Clients could make better use of research

Adweek recently published an article reporting…

Consumer research is ingrained in the cultures of many large corporations but relatively few are maximizing its use, according to a new study from The Boston Consulting Group [...] In fact, based on a four-stage scale of research development that BCG used to evaluate the 40 global companies it surveyed, nearly 90 percent were in the first or second stage, where research is generally tactical and applied in limited contexts.

This has generated quite a few comments, and criticism, although nobody seems to disagree with the basic sentiment of the report (that research could be more prevalent and better used). What do you think?
(forwarded by Pat)

Map of the design landscape

Over on DesignAday, Jack Moffett shares a timeline visualisation of the major—mostly US—design disciplines created by one of his graduate students.
(forwarded by Angus)

IA tools: storyboards

Matt Hodgson shares his thoughts on storyboards…

Storyboards are a great way to describe a user’s journey, their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, capabilities, behaviours and expectations, throughout a single scenario. They’re light-weight, easy to do, and as a visual tool can be used in workshops or just by a couple of members of the team. They also work perfectly on agile projects because they’re visual and, therefore, an instant placeholder for a conversation.

(forwarded by Angus)

So you wanna be a user experience designer

Whitney Hess shares her five guiding principles for working in UX…

I have collected a set of guiding principles for user experience designers, to encourage behaviors that I believe are necessary to being a successful practitioner, as well as a set of guiding principles for experience design — which I think anyone who touches a product used by humans should strive to follow.

(forwarded by Angus)

Getting to the customer – why everything you think about User Centred Design is wrong

On Black&White, Thomas Petersen discusses solving the right problem at the right time…

What you are solving in the wireframe phase is problems inherent in the wireframe phase, not problems with the product. What you are solving when testing the prototype is problems inherent in the prototype not in the final product. There is only one true test and that is the final product. Not until then will you start to receive valuable feedback in combination with quantitative feedback. You will get it where it matters.

This is something we’ve talked about in our team on a number of occasions. It’s an important aspect of the UX design process to get sorted out.
(forwarded by Angus)

Google tests streamlining search options feature

Over on Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan tells us how Google is tackling its “UI jazz problem”…

“I don’t like jazz, because you never know what’s going to happen next,” Mayer said, continuing on to apply the musical style to Google’s search results. “I’ve been calling this problem ‘user interface jazz.’ This result looks this way, and that result looks that way [something much different], and it really does slow you down.”

(forwarded by Angus)

Some design principles from the Global Agenda Council on Design

Tim Brown, of renowned design and innovation consulting firm, IDEO, shares with us seven principles as discussed at the recent World Economic Forum event in Dubai…

Design is an agent of change that enables us to understand complex changes and problems, and to turn them into something useful. Tackling today’s global challenges will require radical thinking, creative solutions and collaborative action. Here is a set of principles identified by the Global Agenda Council on Design that could help your Council to develop ideas and strategies to address the complex problems facing us all.

(forwarded by Angus)

…we keep thinking about ‘accessibility’ and ‘usability’ as separate, almost orthogonal aspects of design. Unfortunately, this remains the dominant model, and it has now become a barrier to future progress because it encourages designers to think about creating tools and services for the ‘normal’ population before considering accessibility [...] Instead of thinking about ‘access’ at one end and ‘usability’ at another, we should attempt to recast our debate in terms of what technology does for all of us, not just those whose have ‘special’ requirements.

Fairly standard argument for properly integrating accessibility into design practices, but where I think the article gets more interesting is with this:

So how should we frame our debate if we move beyond what I think is a dangerous attempt to retain the distinction between ‘usability’ and ‘accessibility’? I think it is time to explore the idea of affordance’, as it could offer us a way forward. [...] Bill Gaver [...] wrote: “Affordances go beyond value-free physical descriptions of the environment by expressing environmental attributes relative to humans. For example, the physical measure of height, which has no inherent meaning, can be recast in terms of the affordance of accessibility, which does. Because accessibility emerges from the relation between elevation and people’s physical characteristics, it is an objective fact about a situation.”

[...] If we start to frame the issues facing users whose capabilities deviate from the norm in terms of affordances rather than simply of accessibility, this might free us from the ‘modal totalitarianism’ that infects so much design, whether in products like screens and keyboards or on-screen in websites, widgets and services.

Affordances matter equally to the ‘abled’ as to the ‘disabled’, and so the same design methods can be used, and outcomes can be evaluated in a much broader way. This allows us to start to move away from the current model, in which we have ‘assistive’ technologies to overcome ‘deficits’ that make some users ‘abnormal’, to one in which we all have skills and abilities that vary along a large number of axes.

Has anybody used this approach to reframe their requirements in terms of affordances instead of accessibility?

Nano Praise: Apple’s latest iPod Nano has been praised by the American Federation of the Blind for incorporating innovations that make the device accessible to blind users. The latest model of Apple’s popular portable music player features spoken menus to allow listeners to hear track names and details, a variable contrast screen and the ability to resize text.

(You can read the original article on AFB.org)