Newsletter issue #73 - 1st April 2010
This issue
Welcome to the April 2010 edition of the Webcredible newsletter!
In this issue:
- Feature article: Personas - the definitive guide
- Blog highlights in March
- New articles in March
- Useful program: NVDA
- Top link: Twitter stats and analytics tools - top 10
Enjoy!
Feature article: Personas - the definitive guide
Conducting user research can produce some amazing insights... but how do you communicate these findings to the rest of your team? This is where personas can step in. Personas, when used effectively can communicate the results of user research in ways that means the results are taken into account throughout the design/development cycle.
Blog highlights in March
Our most popular blog posts this month include:
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Are your PDFs accessible?
PDF files have always been embedded in web pages and that's not likely to change in the near future. The real challenge here is making sure that the information in the PDF can be accessed by all users, as screen reader and screen magnifier users have traditionally had problems with PDFs. However, screen readers can now read aloud PDF files and they can be magnified by screen magnifiers.
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Facebook considered easiest to use social network - I'm dubious
Is it? Really? Personally I'm doubtful, but that's the conclusion of our recent social network usability poll in which half of the respondents felt that Facebook was the easiest to use social network. We asked people 'which social networking site do you think is the easiest to use'?
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Shaking up the online property market
Recent news that Tesco and Google may be gearing up to launch property websites could be a wakeup call for letting and estate agents across the UK and can only be good news for the user experience in this sector.
Our other blog posts were:
- Monthly user experience finds
- Photo book UX pains
- Wikipedia to upgrade user experience
- Guest blog - Where to be and when, the joys of timetables and appointments
- Guest blog - Computers find male voices harder to recognise - Oh Dear
- Guest blog - Student loans, another online form!
- What's happening at Webcredible
New articles in March
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10 unexpected online user behaviours to look out for
When it comes to developing websites and pages we could all use a little help now and then when it comes down to the real detail. Fortunately there's a wide variety of tools on offer to developers that can be of use when it comes to developing, monitoring, evaluating and debugging web pages. Here are 10 of the most useful to you.
Useful program: NVDA
NVDA, or NonVisual Desktop Access, is a relatively new and (best of all) free and open source screen reader. It doesn't yet have the wide array of features that some of the main readers such as JAWS have, but it's a pretty good equivalent.
Top link: Twitter stats and analytics tools - top 10
A great article giving you an insight and overview into the top 10 tools for monitoring your presence on the top social media sites.
Usability, focus group & training facilities hire
Our purpose-built, state-of-the-art facilities are available for hire! From our London-based offices, we can provide:
- Usability lab hire
- Focus group & market research facilities
- Training facilities & room hire
Find out more about hiring our facilities
Training courses
Come on one of our training courses and become a web guru! Our 18 courses are run across 5 training streams:
- Usability & accessibility courses
- Website optimisation courses
- Online copywriting courses
- Web development courses
- Online marketing courses
Training courses are held every 2 weeks in London and are fantastic - small class sizes, highly interactive and taught by experts.
