Archive for March 2006
Accessible, standards-compliant shopping carts…
... are, unfortunately, a bit thin on the ground. Things seem to be changing slowly, though, and there now seem to be at least a few of them around. These include:
- SelectaCart. Has a front-end demo that looks good. Prices from £499 per site, but hosting and bespoke options also available.
- Tradingeye. Has an online shop-front demo which looks pretty good at first glance. It doesn’t seem to give you a password for the admin demo though (update 07-04-06: the kind folks at Tradingeye emailed me, and the username/password is demo/demo). £799 per site.
- Karova. Nice shiny website. £495 per site. Looks very promising indeed, but difficult to see what features are available. No online demo. Was used to power the Disney Store UK before they inexplicably decided to go back to a tag soup version.
- freeCSScart. Invite-only beta at the moment (yawn!), with obligatory Web2.0 styling and star badges, but looks promising. We can infer, however, that it (a) uses CSS, and (b) is free. It claims that it will be fully standards compliant, which I’m hoping will mean fully accessible as well. Will it get bought out by one of the big boys before it sees the light of day, though?
I have to admit that I haven’t used any of these packages in anger (or in a state of inner tranquility for that matter), nor have I looked in any depth at how true their claims of accessibility are. While there aren’t really a lot of options to choose from, they all look potentially better bets than the sordid, nested-table-osity of the e-commerce solutions currently listed on opensourceCMS.com.
4 CommentsFirefox X-ray extension
March 30, 2006 | Posted by stuartchurch | Filed under XHTML/CSSEver had a problem searching for a specific bit of code in the ‘view source’ window? Well, X-ray is a nifty new – well, newish – extenstion for Firefox that should help. X-ray shows the page markup in the context of the page, so you can visually orient yourself to where the code is. Simple, but really, really useful.
[via 465 Berea Street]
You have no option!
March 27, 2006 | Posted by stuartchurch | Filed under E-commerce, UsabilityWhile testing an e-commerce site for a client, I had to create a dummy account in the PayPal sandbox. As I set up the account, I reached a screen called “Optional Business Information”. As the information was clearly labelled ‘optional’, I assumed that I could just skip the screen. I was therefore pretty surprised to be told that some of my ‘optional’ information was missing or incomplete:
Obviously PayPal’s concept of optional is very different to mine!
Web development rules
March 21, 2006 | Posted by stuartchurch | Filed under DesignI personally don’t believe that there are any rules of web development (otherwise, why would myspace be so phenomenally successful?). Having said that, here are 20 Rules Of Smart And Successful Web-development from Vitaly Friedman. They’re more guidelines than rules, but they contain a lot of wisdom.
Accessibility in the news: guidelines and lawsuits
March 9, 2006 | Posted by stuartchurch | Filed under AccessibilityIn the United States target.com is being sued by the National Federation of the Blind for having an inaccessible website. It seems that rather than just being merely incompetent, target.com actively refused requests from blind users to make their site more accessible. It’ll be interesting to see what the outcome is, and whether a similar, but unsuccessful case against Southwest Airlines in 2002 has set a precedent.
Now, if target.com were UK-based then the sort of document that might help them to realise the error of their ways is PAS 78, the newly-published and forgettably-titled web accessibility best practice guide from the British Standards Institute. Unfortunately, at 30 quid a pop I suspect that it’s going to be a case of preaching to the converted. Some people reckon that this is just taking the pas (ho ho!).
Big little things
March 8, 2006 | Posted by stuartchurch | Filed under Technology, UsabilityThe finest details of design can sometimes have a pretty big effect on how easy or difficult it is to use a product. Even things that are, superficially at least, at the periphery of what you’re trying to do can make the difference between a good and bad experience. Here are two examples drawn from my own recent experiences.
The good : my iPod headphones
Well, actually there’s nothing particularly special about the headphones themselves. As far as headphones go, they’re perfectly adequate. The design feature that I really love about them, though, is the little slidey plastic thing that keeps the ear-pieces together when you’re not using them. On my old iPod ‘phones I used to spend frustrating hours (or what seemed like it) cursing as I grappled with a twisted tangle of spaghetti that redefined the laws of topology while simultaneously preventing me from listening to the latest Ricky Gervais podcast. However carefully I stored the headphones I always ended up with the same jumbled morass. So great was my need to solve this problem that I’d even designed the plastic slidey thing in my head before I realized it actually existed. As it turns out, the contrast between the two sets of headphones is so great that I’m genuinely pleased every time I effortlessly separate my earpieces and start listening to music. Of course, this also raises one of the great conundrums of design: you don’t really notice an awful lot of good design because you just get on with what you want to do (listening to music, in this case). It’s only when good design is contrasted with bad that you start to really appreciate its benefit.
The bad : SCART plugs
I think it’s fair to say that I loathe SCART plugs with a passion. When I switch on my TV just expect it to work. I don’t expect to have to adopt a yoga position to reach over the TV set to wiggle the SCART plug around, while at the same time trying to see whether the picture has miraculously appeared. SCART plugs seem monumentally poorly designed for their job (and let’s face it, their job is pretty simple!). Stupid things about SCART plugs are:
- They’re shallow, so you don’t get much purchase between the plug and socket.
- They have really heavy cables, which puts extra stress on the socket because cables usually hang out of the backs of things, rather than being supported.
- The cable doesn’t spread its weight evenly across the plug. The plugs have the cable coming out of the side so that it acts like a lever and slowly prises the plug from the socket.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. I found out from the guy who installed my digital TV that they have to use specially adapted SCART plugs with clips on them because one of the commonest causes of customer helpdesk calls is plugs working their way out of the back of set-top boxes.
The good thing about SCART sockets? Only that you don’t have to call them by their full name. Syndicat des Constructeurs d’Appareils Radio Récepteurs et Téléviseurs. See.
About
I'm Stuart Church, a user experience consultant with Pure Usability in Bristol, UK. Sensorydrive is my personal blog and covers user experience design, information architecture, product design, psychology, research methods, perception and pretty much anything else that takes my fancy! You can find out a bit more about me if you want...
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