Summer School 2006
After Ivrea, Roma, Split and Timisoara the 5th Convivio Summer School came to Edinburgh, August 14th-25th.
The theme this year was: "Technology, Enjoying or Enduring it? Visions, Boundaries and Transformations in Extending or Replacing Human Capacities."
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26-10-2006 by
Accessibility for blind people.
PingMag’s “Accessibility for blind people” is a very nice interview with a sight-impaired programmer dealing with the difficulties of interacting with on and offline technologies:
“For most of us, using a computer and surfing the web is an almost entirely visual experience. We move cursors around the screen, click buttons and menus, read text and look at pictures.
But although most of us rely on monitors to use computers, blind and visually impaired users haven’t been left out. “
Posted in Interaction Design, Usability | No Comments »
10-10-2006 by
Participation Inequality.
In “Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute” Jakob Nielsen looks at the unbalance between active contributors and “lurkers” on the web, and at ways to lessen the disequilibrium:
“All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don’t participate very much.
Often, they simply lurk in the background.
In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity.
This phenomenon of participation inequality was first studied in depth by Will Hill in the early ’90s.
The problem is that (in this way) the overall system is not representative of Web users.
On any given user-participation site, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users, who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from.
The first step to dealing with participation inequality is to recognize that it will always be with us.
It’s existed in every online community and multi-user service that has ever been studied.
Your only real choice here is in how you shape the inequality curve’s angle.
Although participation will always be somewhat unequal, there are ways to better equalize it, including:
Make it easier to contribute.
Make participation a side effect.
Edit, don’t create.
Reward (but don’t over-reward) participants.
Promote quality contributors.“
Posted in Human Centered Design, Usability | No Comments »