Tag: Web

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.

Webizen became W3C Developers Avenue

Webizen is no more. Yay! We released W3C Developers Avenue instead, and it’s a good thing! It’s much simpler, streamlined and more scalable.

https://twitter.com/w3c/status/659265539135676416

Webizen kept a public task force busy for a year and went through two major iterations between W3C TPAC 2013 in Shenzhen and TPAC 2014 in Santa Clara, where the W3C Advisory Committee approved the proposal.

In the year leading to last week’s TPAC 2015 in Sapporo, we redid all again! An implementation of Webizen representation groups was going to be a forum. Meanwhile, the Team had been experimenting with a new forum, Discourse, to which anyone can bring ideas; and the Web Platform Working Group charter was being developed, a component of which was for the community to incubate new web platform features via Github and Discourse. So, we slowed down rolling out Webizen as we realised some Webizen participation benefits were going to be made available for free under the Discourse banner, and to rethink what would make sense to put together.

While Webizen was a modestly fee-based participation program, we abandoned the idea of benefits for a fee, and introducing instead a gratitude program, Friends. We focused on how W3C gives developers a greater voice, and which services the Web developers value in particular: our free validators and tools, to build Web content that works now and will work in the future; W3C Community Groups that more than six thousand people have embraced since 2011, to propose and incubate new work; our free and premium Training program, to learn from the creators of the Web technologies; and Discourse, to share ideas and feedback with the community on Web Standards.

It was important for us to release during TPAC 2015, and it was high time we did, really. After all, it was an anniversary date of the question from which it all stemmed. The first anniversary was the approval of a version, the second had to be the launch. And we did it, in the nick of time, but it was challenging.

I tested my abilities to manage a project and I learned a lot for the future, to say the least. Meanwhile, to make up for this, I worked over weekends, in the plane, and every night in Japan leading to the launch. Karen gave good feedback on content and Guillaume, as designer and integrator, scrumed with coding. The foundations of the work had been laid out months ago, but many of the building blocks still needed attention and polish, that we applied right up to the release on the W3C Technical Plenary Day, literally two minutes before the H hour.

I had aimed for much earlier in the day and for a fuller version, but a piece of code in the Friends component stopped working and when it was obvious it was not going to be fixed in time, we had to back-track a little. Donations to support the W3C mission and free developer tools are thus possible via Paypal only at this point, but soon we will accept contributions via credit card through MIT, a 501(c)(3) organization, which are tax-deductible for United States citizens.

Next steps for W3C Developers Avenue are more Developer meetups and outreach, and general (r)evolutions to further developer engagement at W3C and the value of W3C to the Web community. You have thoughts on those? I welcome your input!

I wrote on the topic before: Individuals influencer of the Web at W3C –utopia? (February 2014), Introducing #Webizen electoral college (April 2014).

The future is what we build

Before I started my day, I read Trouble at the Koolaid Point, by Seriouspony [who writes “I’m not linking it to the blog, and it won’t likely stay up long”]. I had not heard about her until very recently, and reading her account felt like a punch in the face. It stayed with me since then. I think it’s going to stay with me a while.

Midway through her account, Seriouspony wrote:

“This is the world we have created.”

Later in the day at work, I followed tweets and news of the Keynote on the future of the Web that Tim Berners-Lee gave at the opening of IPExpo in London. He said many inspiring things in his habitual humble manner, but one in particular resonated with me. It was in response to a question from the floor related to the Dark Web. I soon found it in Brian’s timeline:

(The Register also quoted Tim at the end of a piece they published after his keynote.)

Kevin read Seriouspony too; here is his advice to which I live by:

https://twitter.com/kplawver/status/519866535922642944

And finally, Amy retweeted this:

https://twitter.com/kneath/status/519883872280928256

All is not white and all is not black, but there are some pretty dark grey stuff out there. Let’s be considerate of our fellow humans, please. Let’s stand up for ourselves. If the future is what we build, let’s build and nurture a world we can be proud of.

Introducing #Webizen electoral college

In a previous post “Individuals influencer of the Web at W3C –utopia?”, I drew up some balance sheet of possibilities for individuals to affiliate with the Web community.

What started as a simple fan club design is evolving into something far more appealing, which is re-aligning with my initial interest of individuals having a voice in the Consortium.

One of the key components of the W3C is the Advisory Committee, composed of one representative from each W3C Member. The Advisory Committee has a number of roles described in the W3C Process: review, appeal, vote.

So, what if we told you that Webizens can run for an Advisory Committee position?

The draft proposal is built in a wiki, the sections of particular relevance are:

The section on Package of benefits hasn’t been updated in a while and might need your input as well. And if you have an opinion on a communication strategy, you’ll be my best friend forever!

The design of the framework is still work in progress, is done in the open and public participation is free. We target to deliver a proposal by early June.

I am seeking feedback and comments, and thank you kindly for it! You may:

  • comment in this blog,
  • write to the public-webizen@w3.org mailing list (publicly archive),
  • edit the wiki directly,
  • even use IRC (irc.w3.org, port 6665, channel #webizen).