Measure Your Widgets

xerifa — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:10:17 +0000

A widget is a miniature portable application,a ready to use control that can be used while developing control for a website, a desktop, or on a mobile device. They are typically lightweight web-based apps or images, HTML that can be shared; but they can also be rich applications such as games and interactive graphics. They can be shared and made available for web visitors to take with them for their own consumption.To sustain your control library and inviting more consumers to use it,you need to test its learnability and ease of its usability.You need to measure your widgets.After all your widgets need to build online consumers,invite and retain traffic on your site and build a brand name of your widget library making it widely acceptable.

Share your Web 2.0 widget within your community of developers.If you already have a customer base you can ask your customers to vote for your widget.You can use web analytics to measure number of visitors, click throughs and views.It would be fun it you can engage the customers on your site in some design game where the user has freedom and enough control to manipulate the widget.One can find out some excellent recommendations about how user feels about your widget.To make the user experience engaging you need to provide contextual help for user designing.Above all make most of things open source to give the user better control of your widget in his application.Your widget should be easily deployable and there should be enough examples and help for the user to learn,deploy and customize the widget.Have a Team (Company), Developer, Student and Free License.Create Forum where potential users can put questions to your developers as well as existing users.Keep your users interested and informed through blogs.Give them liberty to download and provide enough documentation about widgets so that it can be efficiently consumed.

Essence of RIA Usability!

xerifa — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:10:03 +0000

The essence of any Rich Internet Application (RIA) is an easy and usable system which brings the usability angle to forefront of any RIA.There should be an optimum balance between business need, technology potential and user expectation out of any Rich Internet Application.User will come to your site with specific goal in his mind and he can be retained only when he can make use of Data or Control provided to him and in the way he perceives it to be used.Focusing on technology cant guarantee engaging experience.Moreover Ajax quick updates,in-page refresh is challenging to people learnability and perceived affordance.Keep it simple where needful and use richness and responsiveness where required.Bring content to users through controls with low learning curve. Have consistent Navigation and Nomenclature with concurrent activities such that user can learn while using and shouldn’t be deviated while doing other concurrent activities.Moreover Use Social Computing to get your rich control and website layout reviewed before implementing it.Most important of all check for your site accessibility and findability.Your Website should cater to all people accessing with lower bandwidth internet connection,people with limited ability and also non-technical web enthusiasts.

The Next Generation Weblog

Measure Your Widgets

Essence of RIA Usability!