Usability

We all want our projects to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. We work hard on the work we produce and we want to make sure that our product is usable, appealing, and inclusive, but frequently an unintended bias or underlying assumption may turn an innocuous oversight into an inconvenience or even a barrier for the people we’re trying to reach. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to increase your product’s appeal.

The prestigious w3 Awards competition has recognized DesignHammer with a Silver Award following their collaborative project with world-leading dive safety association Divers Alert Network to consolidate three of their disparate web properties into one user-friendly WordPress website with an engaging theme and custom design.

November 11th is Usability Day, also known as "Make Things Easier Day", which begs the question: are we actually making things easier for people with disabilities? Recent surveys suggest no, not necessarily. Despite the best intentions of user experience designers and software developers, we are failing in our efforts to make software both accessible and usable for all.

Today is World Usability Day, an annual reminder to “promote the values of usability, usability engineering, user-centered design, universal usability, and every user's responsibility to ask for things that work better.” This year’s theme is Human-Centered AI, and hopefully not the murder-death-kill machine variety of Artificial Intelligence.

The Nielson Norman Group continues to see significant usability problems with PDFs used as website content. Don’t frustrate your users and just say No to PDFs.

As someone who has been working on digital accessibility for over twenty years, it was great to see a blog post from AIGA, The Professional Association for Design, on not only the importance of designing for accessibility, but doing so from the start of a project, as well as in collaboration with disabled users.