Month: November 2017

In honour of World Usability (#WUD)


World Usability Day (#WUD), generally the second Thursday of November, aims at ensuring that services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use, and at celebrating and educating – celebrating the strides we have made in creating usable products and educating the masses about how usability impacts our daily lives. It is about making our world work better.

This year I attended with 40 or so others, FLUPA Nice The World Usability Day local meetup where Google’s Material Design was introduced, and a small workshop was held on visually designing wireframes.

I learned that 21% of the French population are in a situation of handicap (that is 23M people) and that 80% of handicaps are invisible. W3C was mentioned for its work on WCAG, but unfortunately not for its WAI tutorials or Developer tools.

Other useful snippets:

  • Digital accessibility is a vector of social integration.
  • My priority design principles include:
    • Visible elements
    • … including visible buttons using or or two words
    • Most important elements at the top
    • Similar types of information are grouped
    • Clear hierarchy of information
    • Consistency of UX throughout
    • Sufficient font size and colour contrast
    • 2 to 3 colours (that match, preferably although it’s a matter of taste)
    • 2 font types at most, maybe a third if used in a logotype
    • Short sentences
    • A little jargon as possible
    • Consistent usage of personal pronouns
  • Given that only a handful of frameworks appear to be used to create websites nowadays, people really need to be creative in order to stand out and be identifiable.

#inktober 2017 days 26-31

[Inktober: 31 days 31 drawings, following a prompt list.]

Voilà, Inktober 2017 is over. I really enjoyed doing it this year again and will probably do it next year. I was not inspired every day but most days I was. I’m quite proud of most the drawings I made and I hope you liked them as well. (Interestingly some of those I didn’t particularly like were liked/favourited more than I anticipated, and by the same token, a few of those I found outstanding didn’t garner a lot of popularity.)

Day 26: ‘Squeak’. Black and white ink drawing of a cat playing with a mouse, against a circular background of red watercolour.

Day 27: ‘Climb’. Black and grey ink drawing of the silhouette of a woman rock-climbing.

Day 28: ‘Fall’. Grey India ink soft brush pen, black ink pin pen and black ink brush pen drawing of a man falling from a skyscraper. For this one, I had to hold a soft brush pen in each hand so that the dark and light greys would blend better. I don’t know how others do it.

Day 29: ‘United’. Grey India ink soft brush pen, black ink pin pen and black ink brush pen drawing of two carps, forming a circle.

Day 30: ‘Found’. Grey India ink soft brush pens and black ink pin pen drawing of a foundry and tiny people. I made a typo in the theme on the drawing, oh well.

Day 31: ‘Mask’. Black ink pin pen and white Posca pen drawing of a man holding a mask.

Inktober prompt list:
Inktober prompt list