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For the latest IA Podcast, Jeff Parks and I talked about Beaconfire’s participation in World Usability Day on November 14. Specifically, we discussed the challenges non-profit organizations have in creating user friendly Web sites. We discussed brand, navigation, screen allocation, and calls to action.

• Listen to the podcast or subscribe through iTunes
• Download the World Usability Day Event Post-event Notes document (PDF - 718 KB)

As many of you know, Beaconfire participated in World Usability Day on Nov 14. Our event — Usability Make-over for Nonprofits — saw nineteen nonprofit organizations and some professional information architects. The discussion entailed issues that many nonprofits need to think through when re-designing their Web sites, including the use of brand space, call to action strategy, navigation, and labeling.

We’ve drafted a post-event document available for download here — World Usability Day Post-event Notes (PDF - 718 KB).

Tim Arnold and I, the presenters, are happy to answer any questions you may have:

• Olga Howard — olga.howard [at] beaconfire.com
• Tim Arnold — tim.arnold [at] beaconfire.com

Stay tuned for an upcoming podcast!

As a front end developer, I viewed the release of IE7 with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation. Having spent the past several years coding around the various shortcomings of IE6, I was certainly looking forward to what purported to be, a much more standards-compliant browser. I was, however, also nervous about getting a browser that, while fixing the bugs that allowed me to “hack” stylesheets into working for IE6 (the “* html” hack in particular), failed to correct the bugs that forced me to hack in the first place.

So far, it seems that IE7 is going to make life much easier for folks like me and has required very little (if any) tweaking of sites we’ve built. I’m really hoping that Microsoft’s aggressive upgrade system will push a much quicker adoption of what appears to be a browser actually worth using.

For those as geeky as I, here are some resources from Microsoft explaining the changes to how IE7 handles CSS and PNG graphics:

• Cascading Style Sheet Compatibility in Internet Explorer 7 (MSDN)
• Details on our CSS changes for IE7 (IEBlog)
• IE7 Transparent PNG Implementation (IEBlog)

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, the Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet, and other research institutions have pretty well established that young, affluent, educated, suburban white males are typically the earliest adopters of new online habits and the first to explore most new online tools and services. However, people from other walks of life invariably catch up after a few years.

Someday soon, blogs, Flickr, and MySpace accounts will be commonplace among working, voting, and donating adults and they will use them seamlessly in their interactions with their peers. Every time we work with nonprofit organizations to engage constituents using “Web 2.0″ technologies, we’re implicitly testing the waters to see how near that day is.
If you want to see what that day will look like when it comes, check out this remarkable blog:
http://plainbookhomeschooling.blogspot.com/

This person is neither young, male, affluent, or urban, and yet she has created a blog, pasted a Heifer fundraising widget into the sidebar, urged her friends to pitch in, added herself to Heifer’s blogroll, and signed up to their story tip RSS feed.

In 2006, this woman is defying all kinds of demographic odds. In 2010, she’ll have plenty of company.

If you are looking for an easy way to find the distance from Point A to Point B on a map, then please meet Gmap-Pedometer Mashup. You can find it at http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

It is pretty simple to use. Zoom in to the point where you want to start from. Click “Start Recording” button and double click to plot points on the familiar Google map. As you double click, the application calculates the distance which is displayed in the text box on the left. Since this is a pedometer mashup, you can plot the points you walk or jog on the map, enter your weight, and the application will tell you how many calories you have burnt in the process.

While the mashup is built for avid walkers and joggers, an interesting side benefit is that it can answer those distance questions you have always had. Is it quicker if I took x road to the grocery store as opposed to y? Is this really a short cut to something or do I just perceive it is?

What? You don’t have any distance related question? Then I am afraid you will have to find your own reason to play with the Gmap-Pedometer Mashup.