Evaluating the User Interface presentation

Submitted by lisa on June 21, 2009 - 05:36

I recently presented Evaluating the User Interface and User Experience at the Boston Drupal 4 Design camp, held at MIT's Stata Center.

My presentation was for web designers, Drupal themers and anyone else involved in web projects, but my message is this: test and QA your own work, but don't QA your work by yourself; always get a second pair of eyes. My talk covered* the whys and hows of best practices and testing:

  • Screen resolutions
  • Foreground and background color difference and brightness (contrast)
  • Customized error pages
  • Cross-browser testing
  • Microcopy
  • Functionality (especially forms)
  • The 'Where Am I?' test
  • Web Accessibility
  • Jamming your site full of content for testing
  • Using Selenium IDE

* or would have, but we were running behind and I was holding up the closing remarks!

The Evaluating the User Interface and User Experience [PDF, 13.4mb] slides are available. Any and all feedback would be appreciated.

Hey Lisa, This was great! The

Submitted by alicia (not verified) on July 10, 2009 - 20:50.

Hey Lisa, This was great! The comparison screenshots were really cool – it's easy to get bogged down with the amount of things to do/change/improve when creating a site, especially with a CMS (lots of defaults), but you definitely showed the importance of taking care of that stuff. Lots of info I wasn't aware of, and some cool firefox addons to try out. Thanks, wishing i had not missed the real deal in Boston.