Today I got access to the new Hotmail interface. Pretty, but lacks the usual icons. I feel lost. The icons were a great help on finding what I needed. Now I just have to read the labels… I’m not feeling as a happy user right now… 
Keep it simple, but not too simple.
Last week I had a workshop about Microformats with André Luís sponsored by PrimeIT and Sapo. It was very interesting and really answered some of the questions I had about Microformats.
What are Microformats?
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.
Which Microformats did I implement in this blog after this workshop?
hAtom is a microformat for identifying semantic information in weblog posts and practically any other place Atom (http://www.atomenabled.org/) may be used, such as news articles. hAtom content is easily added to most blogs by simple modifications to the blog’s template definitions.
Since, as André told us, the new feature of IE8 called Web Slices is based o hAtom, by adding the class
hslice next to the hentry class, now I also support Web Slices!
hCard is a simple, open, distributed format for representing people, companies, organizations, and places, using a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC2426) properties and values in semantic HTML or XHTML.
xFolk (from “xFolksomony”) is a simple and open format for publishing collections of bookmarks. It better enables services for improving user experience and sharing data in web-based bookmarking software.
I was glad to ear that support for Microformats is growing on the web, and the web browsers are becoming Microformats-aware. According to André, Firefox 3 (or 3.1, I don’t remember) already brings an API for Microformats, although there isn’t any support in the user interface. Maybe in FireFox 4 we’ll get it. And as I said before, IE is supporting one of the Microformats.
There are some web browser plugins that make Microformats usable. For FireFox you can get Operator which will add a toolbar like shown in the picture bellow. You can access the contacts, events, bookmarks, etc available in the current webpage.
For Internet Explorer you can get Oomph, but I wasn’t able to use it with my blog… Well, maybe in the future it will work better.
Adding Microformats support in your blog or website can be pretty simple. It took me about 2 hours in this blog, thanks to a nice base Wordpress theme easily customizable.
A área me usabilidade é-me bastante querida deste que tive a cadeira de Interfaces Pessoa-Máquina. Sempre que tenho oportunidade de aprendar mais sobre este assunto que tantas vezes é colocado de parte, tento aproveitar ao máximo.
Um destes casos é a User Experience Week que engloba uma apresentação pública e 2 workshops. Para os workshops não tenho budget mas na apresentação devo estar presente!
User Experience StrategyApresentação, 2 Horas Auditório Microsoft |
User Experience DesignWorkshop de 2 dias, Hotel Real Oeiras |
Information Architecture & SearchWorkshop de um dia, Hotel Real Oeiras |
Parabéns à Fullsix e à Microsoft por mais uma excelente iniciativa conjunta.
Ontem necessitei de fazer uma encomenda no site da FNAC, mas não foi propriamente fácil. Fiquei frustrado o suficiente para lhes enviar um e-mail para o Apoio a Clientes.
Bom dia.
Acabei agora de realizar uma encomenda na loja online, e há algumas coisas que não percebo. Primeiro tive bastantes dificuldades em realizar a encomenda devido a questões de usabilidade: Ao seleccionar como local de entrega uma loja FNAC, as caixas de texto para expedição (morada, código postal, etc) ficaram inactivas (o que é espectável). No entanto permaneceram com preenchimento obrigatório, o que me obrigou a mudar o local de entrega para "Morada", preencher tudo, e só aí escolher a loja para entrega…
Quando é aberto o formulário para expedição, no envio para morada apenas aparece a opção de recepção das 9 às 18 horas, só preenchendo os diversos campos aparece a opção das 19 às 22h. Ora além da falta de
transparência para o utilizador, ainda se arriscam a perder encomendas por falta desta informação. Finalmente no pagamento, é-me pedido o NIB, o qual copio da minha aplicação de e-banking e colo na caixa de texto.
Recebo uma mensagem de "NIB incorrecto" à qual não é anexada qualquer informação do formato esperado, depois de tirar espaços, o código do país e os digitos finais de checkdigit, lá consegui submeter o pedido.
Têm sorte que não desisti a meio. Por fim em vez de uma mensagem de "Compra efectuada com sucesso, vá ao seu e-mail" tenho o carrinho vazio, levando-me a pensar que tinha perdido o processo de encomenda.
Aconselhava seriamente a uma revisão da usabilidade do vosso site.Com os melhores cumprimentos,
Bruno Silva
Foram simpáticos o suficiente para responderem a pedir desculpas e a dizerem que se encontravam com “problemas técnicos”… Era o que esperava, mas pelo menos despejei a frustração! 
Também achei curioso dizerem que estavam totalmente disponíveis para mais esclarecimentos, e de seguida me fecharem o ticket no sistema deles. lol
I’ve previously written that I was using Wordpress PDA Plugin in order to give mobile users a nice user experience. Today during lunch time I’ve upgraded the plugin which now has a iPhone/iPod version. (I must give a word of appreciation to the new “one click upgrade” feature in Wordpress)
It has animations in page transitions and all. Pretty cool. It still have some bugs (at least when testing it in Firefox with a fake User Agent), but it is usable. Maybe one of my readers will give me feedback from his iPhone experience navigating in this website.
While testing a project on which I’m working I accidentally went to TMN’s website (a Portuguese cellphone company) with Javascript disabled.
First of all I think that is great that they use a <noscript> tag to warn the user that the user experience quality will be decreased because Javascript is disabled. Because of this message I switched it on right away. Without this message I would probably get some strange behavior while using the website, complaint about it and then maybe I would remember that I had Javascript disabled (or just leave the website without realizing it).
Something that you can’t see in the image above is that the website look & feel doesn’t get too damaged by the absence of Javascript support which is nice too.
One thing that I didn’t like that much was the fact of this website language is Portuguese but the warning message is written in English… TMN’s clients don’t have to understand English, and I believe that many don’t. This issue seems like a “copy-paste” without message customization.
