Today, besides the top management there are other employees in an organization who have this need to read, compose and send emails while they are on the move. It is very difficult for them to rush to their offices every time just to access their emails on their P.C.

Moreover the company cannot afford to give an expensive mobile phone or laptop to all its employees with which they can remain connected with their colleagues, employers, customers, suppliers and other resources.

This has created an indispensable “need” for such email solutions which enable mobile users to access their email accounts over their ordinary mobile handsets.

Earlier this facility was available only on very high end mobile phones requiring Enterprise Servers to integrate with existing email platforms. Huge investments had to be made in buying high hand helds or paying huge monthly subscriptions to mobile service providers and above all limited choice of handsets.

But with the advent of new email solutions, now every mobile user can access his emails over his ordinary mobile phone which is capable of internet browsing and that too at a very cost effective rate.

For More Information Visit www.emailatmobile.com

FancyForm is a powerful checkbox replacement script used to provide the ultimate flexibility in changing the appearance and function of HTML form elements. It’s accessible, easy to use and degrades gracefully on all older, non-supporting browsers.

Click on the below link to view
http://lipidity.com/fancy-form/

Borders

Backgrounds

Color

Text

Interface

Selectors

Format

Source : www.w3.org

Summary:
How to define usability? How, when, and where can you improve it? Why should you care? This overview answers these basic questions.

This is the article to give to your boss or anyone else who doesn’t have much time, but needs to know the basic usability facts.

What (Definition of Usability)

Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word “usability” also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process.

Usability is defined by five quality components:

• Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
• Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
• Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
• Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
• Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

There are many other important quality attributes. A key one is utility, which refers to the design’s functionality: Does it do what users need? Usability and utility are equally important: It matters little that something is easy if it’s not what you want. It’s also no good if the system can hypothetically do what you want, but you can’t make it happen because the user interface is too difficult. To study a design’s utility, you can use the same user research methods that improve usability.

Why Usability is Important

On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website’s information is hard to read or doesn’t answer users’ key questions, they leave. Note a pattern here? There’s no such thing as a user reading a website manual or otherwise spending much time trying to figure out an interface. There are plenty of other websites available; leaving is the first line of defense when users encounter a difficulty.

The first law of e-commerce is that if users cannot find the product, they cannot buy it either.

For intranets, usability is a matter of employee productivity. Time users waste being lost on your intranet or pondering difficult instructions is money you waste by paying them to be at work without getting work done.

Current best practices call for spending about 10% of a design project’s budget on usability. On average, this will more than double a website’s desired quality metrics and slightly less than double an intranet’s quality metrics. For software and physical products, the improvements are typically smaller — but still substantial — when you emphasize usability in the design process.

For internal design projects, think of doubling usability as cutting training budgets in half and doubling the number of transactions employees perform per hour. For external designs, think of doubling sales, doubling the number of registered users or customer leads, or doubling whatever other desired goal motivated your design project.

How to Improve Usability

There are many methods for studying usability, but the most basic and useful is user testing, which has three components:

• Get hold of some representative users, such as customers for an e-commerce site or employees for an intranet (in the latter case, they should work outside your department).
• Ask the users to perform representative tasks with the design.
• Observe what the users do, where they succeed, and where they have difficulties with the user interface. Shut up and let the users do the talking.

It’s important to test users individually and let them solve any problems on their own. If you help them or direct their attention to any particular part of the screen, you have contaminated the test results.

To identify a design’s most important usability problems, testing five users is typically enough. Rather than run a big, expensive study, it’s a better use of resources to run many small tests and revise the design between each one so you can fix the usability flaws as you identify them. Iterative design is the best way to increase the quality of user experience. The more versions and interface ideas you test with users, the better.

User testing is different from focus groups, which are a poor way of evaluating design usability. Focus groups have a place in market research, but to evaluate interaction designs you must closely observe individual users as they perform tasks with the user interface. Listening to what people say is misleading: you have to watch what they actually do.

When to Work on Usability

Usability plays a role in each stage of the design process. The resulting need for multiple studies is one reason I recommend making individual studies fast and cheap. Here are the main steps:

1. Before starting the new design, test the old design to identify the good parts that you should keep or emphasize, and the bad parts that give users trouble.
2. Unless you’re working on an intranet, test your competitors’ designs to get cheap data on a range of alternative interfaces that have similar features to your own. (If you work on an intranet, read the intranet design annuals to learn from other designs.)
3. Conduct a field study to see how users behave in their natural habitat.
4. Make paper prototypes of one or more new design ideas and test them. The less time you invest in these design ideas the better, because you’ll need to change them all based on the test results.
5. Refine the design ideas that test best through multiple iterations, gradually moving from low-fidelity prototyping to high-fidelity representations that run on the computer. Test each iteration.
6. Inspect the design relative to established usability guidelines, whether from your own earlier studies or published research.
7. Once you decide on and implement the final design, test it again. Subtle usability problems always creep in during implementation.

Don’t defer user testing until you have a fully implemented design. If you do, it will be impossible to fix the vast majority of the critical usability problems that the test uncovers. Many of these problems are likely to be structural, and fixing them would require major rearchitecting.

The only way to a high-quality user experience is to start user testing early in the design process and to keep testing every step of the way.

Where to Test

If you run at least one user study per week, it’s worth building a dedicated usability laboratory. For most companies, however, it’s fine to conduct tests in a conference room or an office — as long as you can close the door to keep out distractions. What matters is that you get hold of real users and sit with them while they use the design. A notepad is the only equipment you need.

Why the need to override them at all?

Mostly it has to do with my own curiosity and the “can it be done” approach with which I come at everything, but I have had a few clients over the years who (bless their hearts) love to get a little creative styling their articles. One will add a bright green paragraph, centered in some font that might as well be comic sans, or another will use an h1 to make the text really big and then style it bold florescent something. All of this, of course, is done within the confines of my nicely styled template I just built for them (and which they paid for).

To be fair, in most of these cases, it’s the CMS doing the dirty work. They’re just clicking a button to make something bigger or more colorful and WordPress (typically) or another CMS engine is working behind the scenes, adding a span usually, with a style applied. Occasionally, the CMS will add a style to a heading or a paragraph, but in most cases, the following will solve the problem (or prevent the problem):

UPDATE: Stuart and John say a simple [style] will work and include IE7&8 too! – check out the comments for more suggestions and improvements to this solution. Nathan had a good idea for covering all the bases.

/* override inline styles */
span[style]{
    color: inherit !important;
    font-size: inherit !important;
}

Explanation

The first line tells the browser (any browser that’s listening, that is) to look for any span element span with a style attribute [style containing anything ^=""] and then stop and do the following {.

Then, I tell it to inherit the color and font-size from its parent element. The browser (a smart one, mind you) will work backwards up the cascade and find the last styled element with a color or font size applied and use that instead. By declaring it !important I’ve told the browser to ignore anything except this declaration I’ve just made.

Of course, change span to any other element that may have a style to it. For that matter, you could likely control any attribute of any element on the page using this same technique, no?

How this came about?

I have been using this technique on links for a couple of years now. I forget now where I picked it up, but it was originally used to style external links: a[href^="http://"] will allow you to style external links separately so long as your internal links are relative urls.

Then I saw the technique again around the same time, being used by A List Apart to call out the href contents in a print stylesheet (print this page and you’ll see I’ve done this on my site as well):

.storycontent a[href]:after {
    content: "<" attr(href) ">";
    font-size: 85%;
    text-decoration:none;
}

So today, while I was watching the Chronicles of Narnia (of all things) with the girls, it occurred to me that this could possibly be used to fix my inline style override issue. During a commercial I tried it out and by the end of the commercial I was on my way to this blog post.

Browsers?

Of course, just like the link trick mentioned above, this works in nearly every browser except IE 6. I’m told IE 7 & 8 will work with the change above.

Good to go

• Safari 3 Mac
• Firefox 1.5 Mac and PC
• Opera 9.5
• IE 7
• IE 8

No dice, no surprise

• IE 6

On the bright side…

This isn’t something that is necessary in every browser anyway, it’s just an extra thing that can come in handy, and I hope you’ll find some (productive) use for it yourselves.

And if this technique happens to offend you or scream in the face of all you hold dear in web standards, please forgive me, I’m a bit of a control freak.

Source : www.CSSbeauty.com

We’ve got used to a number of things. To traditional mouse-keyboard user interaction, to 2D windows-based user interface and to a rather unspectacular user’s workflow which enables one user interact with only one application at a time. For instance, while you’re browsing in your web browser you can’t scale your text and resize your window simultaneously — unless you are a keyboard-shortcut-master.

Good news: it can be different. Below we present some of the outstanding recent developments in the field of user experience design. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but they are reality. And in fact, they are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous over the next years.

Future For Gamers: Cheoptics360™

Absolutely incredible. Cheoptics360 is a Vizoo’s product which can change our understanding of 3D for always. This is a documentation of the 5×5 meter Cheoptics360 in the Vizoo’s showroom. No special effects or compositing has been used editing this movie. This is the real thing. Official web-site.

reactable

reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface.

By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language. Demos.

Multi-Touch

Multi-Touch Technology
Multi-Touch-based devices accept input from multiple fingers and multiple users simultaneously, allowing for complex gestures, including grabbing, stretching, swiveling and sliding virtual objects across the table. While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Demos 1, Demos 2.

Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for interactive walls and tabletops. Multi-Touch is already widely used. Apple’s iPhone has Multi-Touch scrolling and picture manipulation.

Microsoft Surface

Multi-Touch is also the core of Microsoft Surface, an interactive tabletop which allows a user, or multiple users, to manipulate digital content by the use of natural motions, hand gestures, or physical objects by putting them on the surface. Microsoft Surface Reviewed.

Photosynth

Photosynth
Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo.

The technology was recently acquired by Microsoft and is now a part of Microsoft Live Labs. Microsoft Photosynth web-site. Photosynth Technology is a new way to view photos on a computer. The software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.

BumpTop

Bumptop is a fresh user interface that takes the usual desktop metaphor to a glorious, 3D extreme. In this physics-driven universe, important files finally get the weight they deserve via an oddly satisfying resizing feature, and the drudgery of file organization becomes a freewheeling playground full of crumpled documents and clipping-covered “walls.” TED-presentation of Bumptop.

Further References

• 3D Operating System
  Next Generation Operating System from Sun Micro Systems
• XTR3D is real-time software that analyzes 3D human motions using only one simple web cam, without any additional accessories. It will allow users to play games and interact in virtual worlds using natural human motions instead of keyboards, mouses and joysticks. Released Sep 27, 2007.

Source : http://www.smashingmagazine.com

Source:http://hci.sapp.org/