August 2008 Archives

August 29, 2008

It is a strange experience, preparing for an uncertain outcome. Of course, that's life, but when it comes to Hurricane Gustav, it's a more immediate uncertainty that is more unsettling than wondering where you'll be at age 80.

I'm not one for predictions, but life for those of us with immediate interest in the gulf coast is extremely on edge...let's keep our fingers crossed that it is all for nothing. I feel very lucky to be inland right now.

Meantime, the satellite images make it look very pretty:

Foods that every kitchen in a hurricane zone should have.

By kim | Permalink | Comments (0)

---

August 23, 2008

I have been searching sites devoted to energy and land conservation for an upcoming side project I'm working on. I found a great site for teens called Do Something that provides excellent resources for all kinds of activism, from conservation to animal rights to politics. I'm really impressed with it, and it has a fun design to boot.

One of the true gems I found today was the photo of the month page on the Nature Conservancy Website. They have some absolutely breathtaking images with great stories behind them. This photo of three children in Honduras was one of my favorites.

By kim | Permalink | Comments (0)

---

August 19, 2008

In my bookmarks, I have a folder called "pretty sites" where I place sites I would like to print up and hang on my wall. Here is one that I found recently while looking up "where-are-they-now-info" on one of my favorite 80's icons, Siouxsie Sioux. I'm a little creeped out by the bug on her cheek, but the colors and butterflies are amazing:

By kim | Permalink | Comments (0)

---

I started this blog for several reasons -- one was to have something professionally related to my portfolio (still under construction), another was to keep track of my own progress as a developer, and another reason I started was to make connection with like-minded people who were in the same or similar profession as me.

I'm falling short on actually getting into it though, because of the first reason, having something related to my portfolio showing that I care enough to do research on what I do for a living.

I do care, but the fact is that there is only so much that can be said about designing for news sites without complaining and being critical. I hate bloggers who write entries like, "the top ten things websites should never do" or "what makes me hate your website." In trying to think of topics related to news design, that's what immediately comes to mind...critical thought on what's wrong with the websites now.

Granted, that's part of the job of making better and more efficient ways to deliver the news online, but since this is my personal blog and I want to not think critically about what news sites are doing wrong in my spare time, I'm going to start posting about stuff that I like and that's probably not even close to being news related.

It will be much happier, much more fun for me, and maybe even informative if only in the most shallow sort of way.

So here goes...no more news design talk unless it's discussing something particularly revolutionary or cool.

By kim | Permalink | Comments (0)

---

August 14, 2008

This week in A List Apart, there is a fantastic article by Lisa Herrod called Deafness and the User Experience. For all interested in making your sites as usable as possible, this should be required reading.

I have just assumed that for the Deaf, subtitles and captioning would be enough when visiting a website with audio or video -- and I never considered that there are things that need to be done on text based sites to provide a better, more understandable user experience. There are a lot of things, in general, I hadn't considered until now, like how sign language doesn't directly translate into what we speak or write. Lisa provides some great hints on what can be done to avoid language confusion and so much more.

Also, on her personal website, you can vote for her presentation on Aging, Cognition & Deafness: The Quirky Corners of Web Accessibility to be accepted for next year's SXSW.

By kim | Permalink | Comments (1)

---

August 13, 2008

About a month ago, I was visiting my Dad in Tulsa and I used his pc to check my email and do a little surfing. I didn't know, until I had to adjust my eyes to the huge font size, how bad his eyesight had become. I also didn't realize how terrible most websites look with pumped up font size.

Although people like Jakob Nielsen and Molly Holzschlag have been preaching the value of web usability and standards, sadly most websites don't allow for simple font size adjustment. It sometimes seems enough to use alt tags on images or to worry about how our sites look in IE6, but if most of us realized how terrible our sites look with 16px, 20px, or even larger font size, we would realize it's not enough.

Why should we care? How many older people are actually surfing the web anyway? A lot, actually, and that number is growing. According to Pew Internet and American Live Project, 70% of people aged 50 - 64 are online, and 35% of people over age 65 are online. As the rest of us will eventually be in those age groups, we'll be pumping up the size of our fonts, too...and it will pay off to start thinking about that huge fact sooner rather than later.

My Dad was online before I was, and at 69 years old, still spends a lot of time online. He does his banking and pays his bills online, he reads the news online and chats with his buddies on Google Talk. He shops for coffee and exotic beer...does comparison shopping before buying a new TV or lawnmower. He makes travel plans and searches for recipes, but because he magnifies the fonts, he isn't getting the same user experience that those of us with better vision are getting. He's a great example of how web-savvy older people can be, and of why we need to worry about designing for them, too.

I pulled up several news sites and grew the font size up to anywhere from 16px to 24px, and on a 1440 x 900 monitor, all failed. I measured all of the big players, since they're considered, for the most part, the ideal and are the sites most local organizations want to emulate. I tested in Firefox, IE6, IE7 and Safari. IE6 doesn't provide the same control as the other browsers, so many sites did better there for that reason. In IE7, using the zoom feature, the sites broke in different ways, since the page is actually zoomed instead of the font-size itself increasing. Firefox and Safari use a similar method of increasing the font size, and so the pages broke in the same way. The following shots are based on Firefox.

ABC News

ABC News' main problem was with content overlapping headers. The top story headline and teaser were cut off and the top nav was a bit jumbled. With a few styling changes though, their site could show well with big font.

NY Times

The New York Times did okay up to about 16px to 18px, but beyond that it broke. The bottom half of the page did fairly well, but the main content area at the top skewed all over the place.

CBS News

CBS became unreadable in areas with increased font size. Their top nav broke and the top story was partially hidden by the left navigation. A lot of their special features were broken as well, where it was hard to tell what was going on.

CNN

If you wanted to just look through the top stories on CNN's website with huge font, you would be in luck. The headlines and teasers fared well with an increase in font size, but the top nav didn't. There is overlapping and unreadability in that area, but with an improvement there, CNN would pass the big font test.

MSNBC

MSNBC was the worst offender. It broke after enlarging with just one click, and as the font grew, the more unreadable the site became. Headlines and content were cut off, text overlapped, there is no way to figure out what's going on in the world by looking at that.

I also checked out non-news sites aimed at seniors, and found that even the AARP website broke under the weight of big font, not to the point of being unreadable but to the point that some of the top nav links disappeared. The Ageless Project, which is a wonderful thing, also, sadly, broke.

I don't mean to limit the talk to advanced age, because there are younger people out there who are also visually impaired and who have to use a larger font as well. So it's not just the AARP's of the world that need to worry about providing a good user experience along with larger fonts. News sites in particular, though, should be concerned about the ability to present well under various text-sizing circumstances. Everyone needs to know the latest news, and people of all ages check it at least occasionally. It's only right to make sure they can read the news without fumbling around a broken layout. For the marketers and ad execs out there, it makes financial sense to make sure that everyone can access the site comfortably in order to click on the promotions, ads, etc.

I'm on a new crusade against big font discrimination. Check your site to see if it passes the test and if not, see what you can do to change that. Of course, it would be ridiculous to think that a site can look the same with various font sizes, but it can at least be usable, if not beautiful.

By kim | Permalink | Comments (0)

---