Nick Lo wrote:
I think Felix has put in a lot of time and effort with his work at...
http://members.ij.net/mrmazda/auth/wauth1.html
...and I found a lot of his demonstrations useful.
I'd like to add my name under that comment. Have visited his site a
number of times over the last couple of months, while trying to find
some background for use in my own research.
As a designer developer I'd like to see two basic things to convince
me of an argument:
1. Well designed examples: ...
-> So my first request would be if you are trying to convince
designers, but cannot produce visually appealing examples of points
you are trying to demonstrate, give links to sites that do. I already
use and send clients/other developers to sites like:
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/index.cfm
http://www.htmldog.com/
Design is as important as content (in my view). It's hard to tell people
anything if they don't like the look of the page. Guess web designers
are no different from other visitors in that respect.
However, what should we think if a well-designed web page with a lot of
good information, breaks when put under just a little bit of stress?
(I broke both your examples - sorry :-) )
Question: How much should a well designed example be able to take?
I guess that's part of your second request...
2. User examples/case studies: ...
-> My second request is then to give some indication as to the type
of users this is important to and therefore the priority of
consideration that it should be given, i.e. everything is important
to somebody but is it important to me?
Are there any user groups that we can refer to? Sorry if that sounds
like a stupid question, but it looks to me like we are "in the dark"
here. Are there any reliable case studies on the web? I have read
plenty, but I'm still "in the dark".
It is sometimes difficult to come up with "hard evidence" about anything
on the web, and useful discussions are often disrupted when we try to
find some practical "middle ground". Sorry, but "THREAD CLOSED" isn't
always helpful or meaningful...
I can't surf around and break peoples pages and say they are well
designed or not-so-well designed if I don't know more about where that
"middle ground" is, and the practical limits were we have to "let it go".
All studies I have found goes "all over the place", and I end up with
something close to what a Norwegian Government page says about
improvements for those who are not as lucky as myself:
"don't bother to do anything, because it won't work well for many
anyway, and it will probably make things worse for most" (my
interpretation and translation). Not much to go on.
---
Case study:
I had to base my own case studies (to use on my own site) on a few
friends who just surfed through half a dozen different page-structures/
web pages, and rely on simple "better" and "worse" comments. These
friends of mine happened to be blind, so they could "see" things from
that angle.
They also represented large national groups of people with low or no
vision, who could add some more to my simple case study. However, none
of them were able to tell me much about their software and hardware, and
all I know is that their solutions are spread all over the place. Not
much standards there...
A few common factors came through for blind and low-vision visitors.
- they preferred CSS-styled pages over nested-table design (not surprising).
- they preferred well-sequenced pages with main content first (links on
top were no problem, but they didn't like them there.
OTOH: link-relations in the page head were just fine for those who had
access to them).
- they didn't care about font-size as long as the design-part didn't get
in the way (those with low vision zoomed text and blew the designs to
pieces, using all sorts of methods).
- they like to read all the "hidden" stuff that people with normal
vision don't know is there (I use off-screen positioning and alt text
where I think it matters - testing in Opera/Lynx - seems to work).
- they like it when the written content reflects the graphical content
well enough to give them some "insight" into what those images are all
about. Most of them are good at "visualizing". (I try to make my pages
make sense with no images, and not rely on alt-text).
I don't think the above qualifies as a case study, but...
Since at this stage of standards-based web development we are all
spending a lot of time educating I thought it would be good to just
outline what would be helpful to me and I hope other developers on
the list.
...maybe with a little more discussion it might be of some use to
someone. At least it would be to me.
ref: http://www.gunlaug.no/contents/wd_1_03.html (still working on it)
regards
Georg
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