The History Of Usability

The story of usability is a perverse journey from simplicity to complexity. That’s right, from simplicity to complexity—not the other way around. If you expect a “user-friendly” introduction to usability and that the history of usability is full of well-defined concepts and lean methods, you’re in for a surprise. Usability is a messy, ill-defined, and downright confusing concept. The more you think about it—or practice it—the more confusing it becomes. We learned that the history of usability is a “perverse journey from simplicity to complexity”.

Check out the article at Smashing Magazine.

Responsive WordPress

Right now you quite possibly have sites out there in the wild that look like death on one screen or another. And while your trainwreck site turns site visitors away, devices are proliferating faster than anyone can remember what to call them, making your trainwreck site a trainwreck pile up.

Gone are the days of the fixed layout tailored to some imaginary, cramped CRT. And the half way house of fluid layouts are no longer enough when you’re presenting content to people looking at your site through smartphones, tablets, various sized laptops or arrays of gigantic monitors with resolutions of titantic proportions.

That’s where Responsive Web Design (RWD) comes in.

Since Ethan Marcotte coined the term back in 2010 more and more designers and developers have been building projects responsively; sites that actually bother to query the viewport they’re being experienced through, and adapt to make the experience as good as can possibly be.

So what’s that to you as a WordPress-powered designer or developer? Code Poet asked the people most likely to know. In this short book Chris Coyier, Ian Stewart and Sara Cannon give you the lowdown on their real world uses and strategies for designing WordPress responsively…

Download the book from Code Poet and learn about how three WP pros use fluid images, fluid grids, and media queries to create responsive WordPress sites.

Turning Point

Responsible responsive design demands responsive images—images whose dimensions and file size suit the viewport and bandwidth of the receiving device. As HTML provides no standard element to achieve this purpose, serving responsive images has meant using JavaScript trickery, and accepting that your solution will fail for some users.

Then a few months ago, a W3C Responsive Images Community Group formed—and proposed a simple-to-understand HTML picture element capable of serving responsive images. The group even delivered picture functionality to older browsers via two polyfills: namely, Scott Jehl’s Picturefill and Abban Dunne’s jQuery Picture. The WHATWG has responded by ignoring the community’s work on the picture element, and proposing a more complicated img set element.

Which proposed standard is better, and for whom? Which will win? And what can you do to help avert an “us versus them” crisis that could hurt end-users and turn developers off to the standards process? A List Apart’s own Mat Marquis explains the ins and outs of responsive images and web standards at the turning point.

Dieter Rams’ Speech

Dieter Rams, recognised as one of the most influential industrial designers of the 20th century, will celebrate his 80th birthday on 20 May. To mark the occasion, Rams has invited Vitsœ to release the transcript of his speech, ‘Design by Vitsœ’, which he gave in December 1976 in New York City; it provides an insight into a design ethos that was remarkably ahead of its time.

Rams’s frank and prescient speech asserts his commitment to responsible design and awareness of an “increasing and irreversible shortage of natural resources”. Believing that good design can only come from an understanding of people, Rams asks designers – indeed all of us – to take more responsibility for the state of the world around us: “I imagine our current situation will cause future generations to shudder at the thoughtlessness in the way in which we today fill our homes, our cities and our landscape with a chaos of assorted junk.”

Dieter Rams delivered the speech 36 years ago; it was not until 1983 – seven years later – that the UN would establish the Brundtland Commission to address the deterioration of the human environment and natural resources. Through intelligent and forward-thinking design, epitomised by the 606 Universal Shelving System, Rams’s ethos was already making its way around the world, one home at a time.

You can download the entire speech in its entirety at Vitsœ.

$300 Million Button

It’s hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.

The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. It’s a form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it?

Later, we did an analysis of the retailer’s database, only to discover 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested. — Jared Spool

The form, intended to make shopping easier, turned out to only help a small percentage of the customers who encountered it. (Even many of those customers weren’t helped, since it took just as much effort to update any incorrect information, such as changed addresses or new credit cards.) Instead, the form just prevented sales - a lot of sales.

The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

(Source: uie.com)