Ian Matthias

August 1, 2011

New Use Cases for Microsoft Powerpoint

A few new Use Cases for Microsoft Powerpoint:

Add Animation to Multiple Images without Crashing Powerpoint
Hide / Show all Images for active Powerpoint Slide (i.e. let me see the text without going to Outline View)
Select Image in Animation Bar shows Image in Slide View
Add Image to Slide defaulting Maximum Image Dimensions to less than or equal to Dimensions of Slide

Net productivity increase: ~40%.

Filed under // bug feature powerpoint use-case

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January 11, 2011

Macy's division of retail space

Making some rash assumptions from the store directory it would imply that 73% of the store is dedicated to Women. Food, Customer Services, Home, Men and Children get to fight over the remainder. Maybe an indication of where e-commerce should also be focussing?

Filed under // department-store e-commerce macys retail

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November 8, 2010

Good news for those with m-commerce offerings this Christmas

According to http://www.internetretailing.net/2010/11/smartphone-users-will-drive-an-m-commerce-christmas-as-it-saves-them-time-and-money-survey-reveals/ the Mobile Commuter could become an important user, though still he/she is thwarted by the payment process...

Filed under // m-commerce mobile

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August 28, 2010

Visa and Bank of America to trial Mobile Payments in New York

http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/20/visa-gets-bank-of-america-on-board-for-mobile-payments-trial-st/

Filed under // mobile payment

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February 23, 2010

Useful script to add Goto and Loop functionality to Selenium IDE in Firefox

http://51elliot.blogspot.com/2008/02/selenium-ide-goto.html

Filed under // firefox javascript selenium testing uat

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February 16, 2010

Reviewing and Annotating Websites (using NotableApp)

A friend sent me the link to this tool: http://www.notableapp.com/, which is a great way for non-technical people to capture their comments and feedback on a website and submit to developers.

Rather than wasting time describing where on the page they are, or struggling with taking screenshots and manipulating them in Powerpoint or similar, a simple Firefox plugin takes the screenshot and the user then uses the webapp to comment on the visuals, code, heading structure and SEO of the page.

Unfortunately it doesn't allow easy import of the issues raised into a bug-tracking system (at least not that I have found so far). However, this might not be desirable as the discussions arising in the collaborative space that NotableApp creates to discuss the webpage might require a different resolution.

I certainly aim to use it on small projects in the meantime and have been testing out its functionality already: https://ianmatthias.notableapp.com/website-feedback/34605/Unforgotten-Exmoor-Homepage.

Filed under // annotate bug-tracking issue-tracking review website

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February 2, 2010

Visual cross-browser testing

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/browserlab/

Useful tool for testing the visuals of your website on different browsers. I'm not entirely certain that IE7 and IE8 are entirely accurate as they do not seem to deal with transparency in the same way as it is being dealt with on a local machine.

Filed under // css html multiple-browsers testing

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January 30, 2010

Some Findings from Usability Studies

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/24/10-useful-usability-findings-and-guidelines/

Interesting findings on usability.

Filed under // accessibility

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January 30, 2010

How to create an Accessible Checkout Progress Bar

http://www.groovecommerce.com/ecommerce-blog/ecommerce-web-site-design/creating-an-accessible-checkout-progress-bar/#comment-11644

An interesting article on how this could be done. Due to the reasons below I would probably make the following modifications:

1. To satisfy DDA requirements, information that is conveyed by an image (e.g. the progress bar image) also needs to be conveyed by screen-reader accessible text on the page. For step 3 from your example page I would implement it as below; inserting " (selected)" after the step name provided within the <span> tags.

<h3>Step 3</h3>
<ol title="Checkout Progress" id="step3" class="checkout-progress">
    <li>Checkout</li>
    <li>Billing and Shipping</li>
    <li><span>Confirm Your Order (selected)</span></li>
    <li><span>Complete Order</span></li>
</ol>

2. When I last researched the issue, most screen-readers do not come pre-configured to read out the title text of a link. It is entirely possible that this situation has changed, but if this is still the case I would be inclined to further modify the example by placing the "Return to" text inside <li><span> instead of using title text. I would also be consider using "Back to" and "Forward to", rather than "Return to" as these re-enforce the ordering by indicating the direction through the process that the user would be moving. Further modifying the above example with the steps above and to add a forward link for the final step this would become:

<h3>Step 3</h3>
<ol title="Checkout Progress" id="step3" class="checkout-progress">
    <li>Back to Checkout</li>
    <li>Back to Billing and Shipping</li>
    <li><span>Confirm Your Order (selected)</span></li>
    <li>Forward to Complete Order</li>
</ol>

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