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.