Author Archives: louise

About louise

London based user experience consultant

Google Maps API

Experimenting with Google maps API with the intention of mapping my current journey into work with photos. It’s very straightforward and pretty easy to get quick results.

Loading the map and setting the correct longitude and latitude was simple, things are starting to get a little more complicated with adding markers and then adding photos to the markers.

https://www.louiseventris.co.uk/map/

Book notes – Emotional Design Donald Norman

Isn’t it strange how attractive things appear to work better.  Is this just a placebo, we expect things to  work better because we’re approaching them from a more positive stance.

According to Alice Isen – ‘Being happy broadens the thought processes and facilitates creative thinking.’ This is something that is explored in creative facitilitation – making brainstorming sessions more creative and fun returns better results. Is this common sense if people are relaxed and happy they’re more likely to be productive than if they’re stressed and unhappy?

In Donald Norman’s book  Emotional Design, he defines the brain as having three levels of processing, the visceral, behavioral and the reflective states.

In this instance visceral refers to the immediate physical response to a situation. Behavioral is more of a physical action or a skilled action whilst reflective  is  thinking about a situation, analysing and interpreting. According to Norman in design the visceral level is about the initial impact of a product, about it’s appearance shape, texture, colour –  how it looks and feels. Behavioural is about the products use, about the users experience with the product and how it functions and performs, how easy and satisfying is it to use.  Lastly the reflective level is about interpreting and reasoning.

Progressive Enhancement

I like the idea of exploring progressive enhancement with my site. PE is adding advanced styling to the page which allows users with more sophisticated browsers a more richer experience. I particularly like the idea of not having to get everything polished in all browsers, this will save so much time and it’s also great to be able to try out new features with out waiting for them to become mainstream.

links for 2009-11-04

Six ways to improve website readability

80% of web users scan web pages, when they do read they read 25% slower than off screen readers.

The key is to write content that can be easily scanned , this can be done by adopting some of the following suggestions.

  1. Highlight key words and use bulleted lists where appropriate to the content, this helps to open up large block of text.
  2. Try not to cut and paste content directly from a printed document – an approximate rule is to cut it down by 75% , this is a must if you expect your users to read it on a screen.
  3. The inverted pyramid technique is a great approach to writing good content.  Start with the conclusion, and then go on to explain the full story.
  4. Aim to stick to one idea per paragraph.
  5. Always keep links phrases concise and clear.  Ask yourself if they make sense if read out of context or as a series of links?  At all costs avoid these terms:  click here, more info, follow this link and this website, they are meaningless when read as a list. A screen reader will just hear the words click here with no idea where the link will take them. Click here implies the use of a mouse which may not be the case. Using descriptive words or phrases  in links  help users to understand what to expect and is of benefit to the search engines.
  6. Are heading and subheadings meaningful – can user quickly scan the page and understand what they’re looking at or looking for.