Umbrella Today, which is a beautifully crafted site (CSS parallax effect!) that tells you whether or not you should bring an umbrella outside, does not work for me. See, it asks for a zip code—presumably limited to the United States only. But I don’t live there.
Now, I know, there are countless websites that exclude a certain demographic in every imaginable way, not just by geography. After all, on the Internet you’re free to do anything you want. But if you don’t like how something is working (or isn’t working), you’re free to blog about it as well.
Go local, be successful, then branch out
To all the developers out there: going local is a good strategy, but if you can help it, try to make your nifty little web app more accessible than just for your neighborhood.
And I’m not just talking about the one-person startups but also the bigger fish in the pond. I wonder how long it will take for Google Maps to completely and accurately cover the planet. (I don’t know if we should be excited when it does, either, but that’s a different story.)
True usability and accessibility
When we mention the term usability in terms of web development, we look at how comfortable users are in using and interacting with the interfaces that are created. Closely associated with usability is accessibility, which champions the idea of never leaving any differently-abled user out.
Doesn’t true usability and accessibility cover my dilemma with Umbrella Today, since I’m left out of its target userbase?
I do hope the makers of Umbrella Today and other people like them stop discriminating by zip code and start reaching out to other parts of the world.
Again, this is if they can help it. Because if there’s one medium that can make it possible, it should be the Web.
For those who couldn’t attend the An Event Apart conference at San Francisco, held last August 18-19, head over to Jeremy Keith’s journal for an excellent retelling of what went down.
Words are enough to give one the impression that the talks were brilliant. Let me quote some passages based on the blog posts at Adactio:
Understanding Web Design by Jeffrey Zeldman:
You should not be designing just to make other designers jealous. It happens a lot in design but it happens in development too (I’m looking at you, Ajax). Good design is invisible. It’s about the character of the content, not the character of the designer. Let’s get away from showing off get to empathetic web design. It means user-centred design but by abandoning that label we can side-step the religious wars between UCD and agile.
The Lessons of CSS Frameworks by Eric Meyer:
If you’re going to use a framework, it should be yours; one that you’ve created. You can look at existing frameworks for ideas and hack at it. But the professionals in this room are not well served by picking up a framework and using it as-is.
Storytelling by Design Jason Santa Maria:
Design for the web has chiefly been driven forward by technology rather than message. Maybe it’s time to go back and start asking what are the stories we are trying to tell. The form of design should be driven by the story.
Web Application Hierarchy by Luke W.:
We make sense of the world in terms of relationships. We don’t know when we smell because we’re used to the smell, but other people notice because our smell stands out. It’s much the same with sight. We can associate or disassociate things using contrast, distance and size. We can use contrast in visual weight to guide the eye and create a flow.
Shepherding Passionate Users by Heather Champ:
When the universe gives you lemons, make lemonade. When there was unannounced downtime on Flickr, they turned it into a colouring contest: print out these circles, colour them in and the winner will get a prize. Over 2000 submissions were uploaded. The level of creativity was startling. Every one participated ended up getting an extra three months on their account.
The Framework Age by Liz Danzico:
User-centred design and participatory design are great ways of involving the users in the design process but that’s still different to actual use. It’s time for a new way of working: designing for improvisation (but remember that no one single process will ever be successful).
Implementing Design: Bulletproof A-Z by Dan Cederholm:
Rounded corners are usually a pain in the ass. But you can do them today with namespaced webkit- and moz- border-radius declarations. … What about other browsers? Well, they don’t get rounded corners but so what? Rounded corners just degrade gracefully to rectangles.
This roundup actually covers only day one, so be sure to subscribe to Adactio for the next round of talks for day two.
It is bound to happen, the Google Web Browser that is. For a company so focused on delivering online applications that compete with the old desktop variant, a reliable browser and the direct connection with the users it offers just sounds like the obvious choice.
So where is the Google Web Browser?
Some might say that Firefox is the closest to the Google Web Browser we’re getting, and that may be true, although a bit simplified. Sure, there’s a Google search toolbar installed per default, but the same goes for Safari, you know. Problem with the latter is that it sucks in Gmail, for instance, which isn’t acceptable since that’s probably the most used Google web application out there, right?
So why should Google do their own web browser? more
