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I heartily recommend Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design (May, 2008) for people who create web forms and for those who hire others to create them. The book is structured in three parts: form structure, form elements, and form interaction, and includes a plethora of real-world examples. Whether you’re a novice or expert, walking through Wroblewski’s overview of forms-related issues will provoke your thinking about design choices and their impact. Luke is Chief Design Architect at Yahoo! and blogs at Functioning Form.

Below are some of my thoughts and recommendations in response to the book.

Deepen your understanding of other people’s experiences

Who are we to not bother to ensure the resources we create are universally usable? As you are thinking about making better web forms, deepen your understanding of how design choices affect people with disabilities. Read the entire post: Book Review: Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

Lollicode’s Twitscoop has become my daily source for breaking news, from the Hudson plane crash and earthquakes to Top Chef results. I use Twitscoop primarily through my favorite desktop Twitter client, Tweetdeck. The center column of my deck shows what’s “Buzzing Right Now:” the twitter zeitgeist as ascertained by Twitscoop. A click on any word of interest in the Twitscoop tag cloud results in a page with tweets containing the word, and a frequency graph of the term’s Twitter appearances.

In May, Twitscoop launched changes, becoming a full-fledged Twitter client. These changes posed some discoverability issues for me, in part because I was having a broader Twitter search issue. The people at Twitscoop have been great about troubleshooting with me. (They seem genuinely interested in making improvements to their interface, based on some of the public interactions with users on Twitter, their emails with me, and their ‘About’ page.)

I do have a few suggestions that mostly relate to helping users bridge the gap between what they know and what they need to know to make use of the service.

Read the entire post: Twitscoop: Roadmap to Discoverability

Google analytics login is like no other Google app. It always takes me a minute to figure out how to sign in. Every other Google app offers login on the top level page with a submit button: "Sign In." Below the login, there is a call to action (big blue button) to "Create Account" or "Get Started." Analytics, on the other hand, offers a text link to "Sign up" and the call to action button, "Access Analytics" takes you to the login. Access analytics? Couldn’t it at least say "Login?" How about just following the login design of every other Google app?

After first reading about OpenID, I started looking for WordPress plugins to get it working on my site. There were ux issues with each of the plugins I tried. I planned to compare them here, but after some investigation I’m reluctant to recommend OpenID because of control, privacy, and especially security concerns. There is much work already in progress to address these issues. Below I’ll describe OpenID, discuss some of the down sides, and offer a few recommendations if you want to try it out. Read the entire post: OpenID: Control, Security, User Experience

I’m intrigued by Adobe’s web-based word processor, Buzzword. (Adobe announced the purchase of the creator Virtual Ubiquity September 30th, 2007.) Buzzword is inviting to use, creates beautiful documents, has innovative file management and file sharing options. It’s built in Flex, using Flash (on the web) and AIR (on the desktop) so you can work online and offline. There are definitely areas where it has a ways to go in terms of features and accessibility.

During a demo, Rick Treitman, of Virtual Ubiquity, said “We don’t qualify as an accessible product, but Adobe has accessibility experts and I’m sure they’ll be crawling all over it.” Here’s hoping. He described Buzzword as an “ideal tool for students” and sees “students and educators as the bulk of early adopters.” Treitman indicated that they will be looking to Adobe to implement internationalization: “We’ve architected it properly to make that happen.” Documents can currently be saved as an MSWord doc, rich text file, html, or plain text. Encryption is not currently available.

Like other web-based word processing platforms (e.g. Google Docs), you can share a document by entering someone’s email address. You can assign levels of access (co-author, reviewer, editor). You can sort your document list: alphabetically, by author, by your own roles, by last time you viewed the docs, by last time you modified them, and by file size. Read the entire post: Adobe Buzzword Features & Accessibility