Yesterday a fellow Resourcian pointed out an article written by Jakob Nielsen entitled “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings“.

I’ll readily admit I take anything Nielsen writes with a grain of salt. Coming from such a well-known name in the arena of web usability, I don’t find “alertbox” terribly easy to read. One of the biggest challenges I find with it is the number of characters to a line. There has been plenty of research done as to the optimal length of lines on the web, although now as I try to track those numbers down, I find that many of the resources date from the early 2000s, and it’s possible users perceptions have changed as their familiarity with the web has increased.

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Hmmm…
Actually, that article states that while users prefer a shorter line length esthetically, they actually read faster with a longer one. This is one of those classic usability conundrums I associate with Nielsen: do you appeal to what the user perceives he prefers, or simply provide what he wants? I think it depends on the level of engagement with the client. According to the “Ten Demandments“, there are ten stages in fostering a positive online experience: #1 is “earn my trust” and #3 is “make it easy”. A reader will come to the table with his own expectations, and you must first cultivate a trust relationship prior to forcing him to read long, ugly pages.
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Still, I think that there are upper limits on what a user will read online. I’ve posted my papers from class to my blog, and I think looking at something too long will only deter potential readers.

Naturally, many people turn to the web for their primary information source, so it is important that information be informative and timely. Blogs simpify the publishing process to facilitate the dissemination of information. However, they also make it incredibly easy for people to share with the world the news of their puppy’s latest chewing adventure. When I first created a space online in the 90s, every attempt to publish was a development exercice. Every new “article” was a new page, and every other page had to be updated to link to it. You had to be willing to invest in what you wanted to say! Blogging was introduced to simplify and streamline that process, and I would argue serve a different market and model than a full-fledged website.

I don’t know if this is entirely fair, as the medium of presentation shouldn’t really influence the content completely. But I have a different expectation when I read something at *.blogspot.com than at a domain destination. Perhaps that harkens back to that level of trust the Ten Demandments refers to, and that engagement happens before I even hit the site itself, at the domain name level. Interesting….

With only a few months remaining in my college career (this time), I realized I had better take advantage of student discounts. My bookshelf will soon include the following:

I had an interesting discussion with a co-worker yesterday about file-naming. A given project has pages dedicated to their leadership team and we were deciding how best to name these files of biographical information. Initially I felt very strongly that a page describing Julie Maples should be named jmaples.xxx, since it describes the content. That way if Julie went from general manager to ceo, we could continue to refer to the same page. My coworker felt the pages should be named according to job title, that is, Julie’s information should now live on the gm.xxx page, and if she were to be promoted, it should be removed from that page and added to the ceo.xxx page.

What was interesting about the discussion (I know, it doesn’t sound that interesting right now), is that we were both concerned about the same problem: ensuring users got the information they were seeking. We didn’t want inaccuracies or broken links. From my standpoint, I felt that information about Julie should always be on Julie’s page, regardless of her title. His concern was that people may not even know they were looking for Julie’s information; they would potentially be looking for the GM’s information. If it were Julie or Sam wasn’t the issue.

This issue really arose as we attempted to anticipate the user needs. Why were users going to get this information: the person, or the role? On the navigation of our site, the users’ names are linked, hence my rationale for naming them accordingly. On other sister sites, however, it was quite possible the links would go to “meet the CEO of XYZ company”. My co-worker was looking at how other sites would link to ours. In a closed site (what I was envisioning), when information changed, we would have the control to go in and change information and update links. We lose that control, however, when we become a destination site for other links. From that standpoint, I could see his point.

My next suggestion was to employ server-side redirects, so that someone could access gm.xxx or jmaples.xxx and get Julie’s page now, and if Julie were replaced by Sam, the redirect from gm.xxx would go to Sam’s page. My ever practical co-worker had concerns about introducing another level of changes to be made, although my standpoint remains that it simply should be done.

… I promise, the interesting stuff is coming…..

Ok, the reason why I was still thinking about this today is not because I don’t like to believe others are “more right” than I am, but because I was asking these questions of our copy writer and our information architect, and he said that this was really our (tech) domain. I don’t know about that, and it reminded me of the discussion we had back at LexisNexis about alt vs title vs link text. Who owns that? We had some great discussions about what title text on a link should describe: the destination of the link or the action the user is taking? Is that a copy issue, or more about user flow and interaction? Coming from an accessibility standpoint, I had a very different view than the Human Factors Engineers, since they wanted to “tell a story” and I wanted to let a blind user know where the link went.

As I continue to get more interested in the information architecture side of things, I am starting to see things differently: a page describing Julie Maples isn’t just about Julie Maples, it is also an endpoint for a given user task, it satisfies one or more user needs. So how do we help a user complete that task?

Ah, the fun part of a research project: when you know just enough to be dangerous…

Trying to figure out the scope for my capstone, I’ve done some reading on WAI-ARIA, which seems to focus on helping making AJAXy-applications accessible via roles and states. However, we really work more with flash and flex at work, and I want to figure out how to push accessibility via those mediums as well. I came across a great resource at niquimerret.com, a girl geek who is passionate about both Flash and Accessibility. Perfect! I read a post she’d made on accessibility “bugs” in flash, and left her a long rambling comment on some of my questions about flash and accessibility. I figured I may as well leave it here as well in the hopes of garnering some additional responses…

One thing I was wondering about, and maybe you can offer some insight: WAI-ARIA mentions using live regions to make AJAX applications accessible. (AJAX live regions allows text to be spoken without giving it focus. This is good in that it means that users can be informed of multiple updates without losing their place within the content.) Is this something that could be coded into the Flash, perhaps at the actionscript level?

My other stumbling point is at which point this would need to be supported… obviously, the flash player would need to understand these roles/states, but is that enough, or would the browser also need to be aware of it? That is.. would flash on FF be “more” accessible than on IE? Or is WAI-ARIA really a browser thing, not a flash thing?

Graduation is scheduled for May 11, 2008.. now I just have to complete my capstone project and I’ll be the proud holder of a Masters of Computer Science degree.

Up until last trimester, the capstone was like a thesis: the student selected a topic, found an advisor and did self-directed study. They recently changed the format to a more traditional class with an instructor and weekly assignments. I was fortunate enough to be allowed to be grandfathered into the old format.

I’m excited about this because it will afford me the opportunity to do some really indepth research into a topic of my choosing. The challenge? The selection of a topic! From what I understand, this was part of the rationale for the format change: students were having trouble finding a topic. My problem is the opposite: there are several topics I would want to write on!

I’ve mentioned in this blog for quite a while that I wanted to write my capstone on “usability-supporting architectural patterns”. I then started thinking about Accessibility in RIAs. I briefly considered doing some research on the Adobe AIR platform, which would have likely meant porting some existing web applications over to the platform to access their differences. Now, however, the term has started and Accessibility/RIAs it is!

The program chair will be overseeing my work, and while I have the general topic in mind, I’m not entirely sure yet what direction it will go in. I fear 12 weeks will simply not be enough to really touch on everything I want to look into. I suppose this is why academics work in the same field for years and years — one can’t really hope to condense everything into a matter of weeks (or a single document).

Some of my thoughts to incorporate into the scope of the project include:
– definitions of: WCAG, Section 508, ADA, RIA, AJAX
– if/how the guidelines apply to non-traditional web apps
– how to make RIAs accessible
– overview of existing testing tools for web accessibility
– ROI/rationale for caring about accessibility

Possibly: how SEO/Accessibility complement/contrast with each other

When I attended Access U last Spring, one of my key interests was in how to sell accessibility to an organization, and who was responsible for it. At the time, the development team I was working on was well informed in best practices wrt accessibility and compliance testing. However, now that I’ve started to fall into a realm of more rich interactive online experiences, there seems to less knowledge of what it means to be accessible, and in fact, the extent to which it is even possible. Obviously I want to sell it to my organization, but I first need to become informed myself as to what that means.

My long term organizational goal would be to sell accessibility to my company, so my capstone will help me to clarify what accessibility means in this new interactive online space. Once we know the “what” and “where” (and hopefully the “how”), we can identify the “who” (and the “how much”)?

After three major releases and a few more point releases than I’d care to mention, I believe we’ve reached a turning point with www.pcavote.com. The actual awards show we were developing the site to support and complement aired last week, so the timing is really ideal.

For anyone living under a rock, the writer’s strike caused the People’s Choice Awards to radically alter the format of the broadcast, a few weeks before the show. As a result, the program did not get the high viewership it had been hoping for (The TVSquad article “Did you catch the People’s Choice Awards? Neither did anyone else” says it all….). So the television broadcast didn’t do well, because the format was different than what people expected (and assumedly wanted). What’s interesting, however, is that the website has certainly continued its popularity post-show. Last week we launched a feature where users could create their own “buzz polls” for other users to vote and comment on. Less than a week later (and with poll creation being limited to registered members, to a maximum of nine active polls per user at a time), we now have over 850 polls (polls may be removed due to “offensive content”). Some of the polls focus on specific personalities, others are more related to the event behind all this community.

In all, this is a great example of what we Resourcians refer to as “open brand.” Despite being part of the team that developed the site, I now see it differently as a “community member”. It’s fun, and being actively engaged in the site has brought up all sorts of thoughts of improvements or enhancements. Many of the projects I’ve worked on over the past seven years in my career as a web developer have ended with the deliverable: something that was put out into the world. But this is different: what we created is fundamentally different than what it IS. The community, how people are interacting with the site, how people could interact with the site.. it’s an organic entity with opportunity to change and develop and improve. Hm, I think we may have invented our own Frankenstein’s monster, although not in a bad way….

Although it’s a disappointment for the organizers that the show format changed, I think it’s really fortunate we have been working on fostering this community over the past 6 months. Really, the People’s Choice Awards are not solely about those two hours on the red carpet: they are supposed to represent the power of the people to influence hollywood, to have a say. Here, we have provided them with that opportunity, 24/7/365. The show must (and will, and did) go on, but it’s not just about those two hours….