Book Image

UX for the Web

By : Marli Ritter, Cara Winterbottom
Book Image

UX for the Web

By: Marli Ritter, Cara Winterbottom

Overview of this book

If you want to create web apps that are not only beautiful to look at, but also easy to use and fully accessible to everyone, including people with special needs, this book will provide you with the basic building blocks to achieve just that. The book starts with the basics of UX, the relationship between Human-Centered Design (HCD), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and the User-Centered Design (UCD) Process; it gradually takes you through the best practices to create a web app that stands out from your competitors. You’ll also learn how to create an emotional connection with the user to increase user interaction and client retention by different means of communication channels. We’ll guide you through the steps in developing an effective UX strategy through user research and persona creation and how to bring that UX strategy to life with beautiful, yet functional designs that cater for complex features with micro interactions. Practical UX methodologies such as creating a solid Information Architecture (IA), wireframes, and prototypes will be discussed in detail. We’ll also show you how to test your designs with representative users, and ensure that they are usable on different devices, browsers and assistive technologies. Lastly, we’ll focus on making your web app fully accessible from a development and design perspective by taking you through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Testing for accessibility


In order to know that you have catered for accessibility and assistive technologies in your website, you need to test. This will be time consuming. It often takes longer to view and interact with websites if you have disabilities, so if you are simulating disabilities, you will experience the same delays. This is useful, as it is valuable to be aware of the difficulties experienced by users. However, you will also not be familiar with the techniques and tools, so they will take you longer to use than they would a disabled person who is more familiar with them. So, set aside a good amount of time to do this testing, and share it out among the team so that everyone involved in building the website is aware of the issues.

Here are some of the ways of testing the accessibility of your website:

  • Keyboard only: Check if you can access all parts of your website while only using the keyboard. Especially, check the tab order while doing this, to make sure it is logical. Can...