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 your designs on multiple technologies


We have described how to consider the external world when designing a website, both technologically and from a user perspective. It is also important to test your designs against the external world. In the next chapter, we discuss how to test with users. Here, we will briefly look at testing internally on different technologies. Simulating the real world, where your website will be experienced, is crucial when testing your designs.

Gibson's accessibility matrix is useful to guide the testing. Wherever you have different input/output combinations, you should test them. You can add devices, operating systems, and browsers to this matrix to complete the test suite. For example, you may begin with screen reader as an option, then note exactly which screen reader(s) you tested against. If differences emerge with other readers, you can add them as separate items for your next design/test cycle.

There are many tools that help performance, accessibility...