Divide By Zero - a blog by Kamran Ayub

At work (SUA), we’re revamping the entire Events & Conferences sub-site because it’s nigh unusable for our users.

We conducted a handful of usability tests and while it wasn’t horrendous, there was definitely stuff we could improve on. Audio and video package rates were hard to find, policies were hard to find, the whole finding a room process was convoluted. A bunch of things.

One of my favorite parts about my job is revamping a sub-site. I’ve done two revamps (well, three if you count the entire site-wide template design) so far, one for the Student Groups site and one for the Events Calendar.

The E&C site is real exciting because we’ll probably be doing an AJAX JavaScript application to easily browse rooms. We’re also revamping the room-specific pages, probably doing PHP arrays. I suppose if it becomes unwieldy, we might do MySQL instead.

I don’t know why, but I really enjoy making designs better. You saw what I did to the Facebook Application, GamePie. I think it’s fun to see if you can make things more usable. I should consider doing fun mock-ups of big name sites with better usability and accessibility design.

I mean, have you seen Amazon without CSS and JavaScript?

That’s not even close to usable or accessible. Granted, they do have an accessible text-only site, but it’s much less toned down than the “Amazon PC� homepage.

Did I mention I didn’t see a link to the accessible page on the Amazon homepage? Maybe it’s buried somewhere but I couldn’t see it.

Plus, I’ve heard that not all products are on the text only site. Yah, way to think of the disabled population Amazon. There’s no excuse to not have a good, usable and accessible website. They make billions of dollars, it’d take a month to just redo everything (alright, not really, but to actually make a usable design and code a static page, seriously…).

I know that there’s bureaucracy and maybe the site designers do want to make their site better, but it has to happen at some point. I don’t understand why the “greater web� (i.e. corporate big wigs) don’t listen to reason. Hasn’t anyone told them that accessible design will make their business increase, SEO rank increase, and generate buzz? Disabled users can’t shop effectively at Amazon… that’s pretty lame.

SUA is a top Google ranker because of how well we’ve done on the usability aspect. It’s compatible with screen readers, text-only browsers, and all major (and minor) web browsers except MSIE 4 (test it out with BrowserShots.org). If you search for “SUA� we’re no. 3. Cross-site linking and lots of content will do that for you.

Anyway, I’m thinking doing some small mockup projects for sites like these just for fun. See if I can make their pages better and more usable. It would be fun!