Web Usability

The Form Assembly

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6 years ago
by Vicker in

HTML Form, I guess anybody who written some web pages before should be familiar. It is not a really hard one actually. With some form elements like input, select, options, etc… the form already works. However is it usable and accessible? Have you done enough form validation? Have you provide enough labels for the form elements?

Building a good HTML form is not a easy task, especially if you want to follow those standards. Googling for a while, found out this web which is great to achieve the mentioned points above. The Form Assembly (http://www.formassembly.com)

Same as other informational web sites, there are articles and tutorials on building the web forms. But my focus are on the three links on the left hand side of the web.

Form Builder

A web tool which will help you to build your form in a standard format. What you have to do is just filling your requirements and thats it.

Form Library

Here you can access a large number of templates with different stlye and even different language.

Form Garden

Personally I suggest this to everyone, which is a CSS form builder. You can select the styles available on the right and test it in the center. After your selection, you can simply download the CSS and use it in your own web page.

It is so convenient with all these handy tools and the most important thing is that we can learn from their source and design :p

Web Pages That Suck

0
6 years ago
by Vicker in

Learning from others is the best way to learn something. At least I think so. Sometimes we dont only look at those good designs, but also the bad ones. So that we will keep in mind that we will not follow them.

Web Pages That Suck is a web that provide bad design examples to the visitors. So that you can learn what are the DOs and DONTs in web design and usability. You may visit and learn from them daily in the sector – Daily Sucker or you can read some of the articles that they distributed.One of the point that they mentioned is quite good. That is the 5 Wheres

Where am I?
Where have I been?
Where can I go next?
Where’s the Home Page?
Where’s the Home Home Page?

We cannot expect the visitor will be a regular one. So we must do our best so that the visitor can familiar himself in our web asap, otherwise we lost. Flash is a very popular web technology nowadays. However using it wrongly will eventually crash the whole structure. Flash-DB is one of the example that I met. You can see all the contents are Flash made which are very fancy. But when you try to browse further, you probably will get lost. Because it cannot fullfill the 5 Wheres.

To conclude when we try to use some fancy things. We still need to think about the whole framework, else we sucks…

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

0
6 years ago
by Vicker in

Before having the first lecture there are already quite a large number of things that can be explored simply browsing Andy’s web.

You may notice that there are a number of small icons on the bottom of Andy’s course web. Saying W3C XHTML, W3C CSS, W3C WCAG, BOBBY 508 and BOBBY AAA.

For the first two, I guess is quite familiar to many people. They are the standards posted by W3C. (World Wide Web Consortium) Using the validators provided by them, (HTML validator and CSS validator) anyone can check whether their web page fullfill the requirements of the standards. If it is a success, they can place this icon on their web.

But how about WCAG, 508 and Bobby??

Due to my curiosity, I have made some search on W3C. Actually WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is a guideline which will make a website more accessible. (WCAG 1.0) Section 508 is something similar to WCAG but written in US Federal law.WCAG have a total of 3 accessibility compliance, A, AA and AAA. (where AAA is the best and of course the hardest to achieve) Although W3C do not provide any automated WCAG checker, we can still check it through WebXACT. (WebXACT) I guess the former name is Bobby but now changed. However even WebXACT can not do all the testing inside the guideline, because some of them are not coding related, e.g. color matching.

Although it is hard to acheive all these standards, I think as a web designer we should try our best to do at least most of these. This improves not only the speed of loading the page but also helping our visitors to browse.

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