J. Blustein

Suggested Thesis Topics

Web Usability Measures

Can we develop automated measures of how good a web page or web site is? (A longer description of this project is available from my main project page).

Students

Contents List

  1. Some Good Starting Points
    1. HCI in general
    2. HCI specifically for the WWW
    3. Existing tools
  2. Sources for rules
    1. Rules in general
    2. Basic books about colour
    3. Colour on the WWW
  3. Cascading Style Sheets
  4. About This Webpage

  1. Some Good Starting Points

    1. HCI in general

      http://www.hcibib.org/
      The HCI Bibliography project
      http://www.ida.liu.se/labs/aslab/groups/um/hci/
      Human-Computer Interaction Resources on the Net by Mikael Ericsson
      http://www.slis.indiana.edu/hcilab/Papers.html
      HCI publications by members of the faculty at Indiana Univ.
      http://www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/main.cgi
      HCI glossary at UsabilityFirst.com
      http://jthom.best.vwh.net/usability/biblio.htm
      Suggested Reading for Usability Testing by James Hom
    2. HCI specifically for the WWW

      http://www.usableweb.com/
      Usable Web by Keith Instone
      http://www.usability.gov/guidelines/
      Guidelines and research about WWW usability (at US National Cancer Institute)
      http://www.usability.gov/
      Main WWW Usability website (at US National Cancer Institute)
      http://www.useit.com/
      Useit.com by Jakob Nielsen, including Alertbox and guidelines
    3. Existing tools

      Yunfeng (Henry) Shan found most of these

      http://www.snow.utoronto.ca
      A-Prompt from UofT's Adaptive Technology Resource Centre
      http://www.cast.org/bobby
      Bobby from CAST
      http://www2.imagiware.com/RxHTML
      Doctor HTML
      http://www.usablenet.com
      LIFT: web preflight and usability assistant
      http://www.watchfire.com/news/press.asp
      LinkBot, MacroBot, and MetaBot
      http://www.netmechanic.com
      NetMechanic
      http://http://www.webcriteria.com
      WebCriteria
      http://websitegarage.netscape.com
      WebGarage from Netscape
      http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/WebTools/WebSAT
      WebSAT from NIST
      http://webtango.berkeley.edu
      WebTANGO from UC Berkley
      eyePilot
      software to help colour blind people understand computer interfaces
      Evaluation, Repair, and Transformation Tools for Web Content Accessibility
      at the W3C's web accessibility initiative (WAI) website
      Tools for Creating and Verifying Accessible Web Page at Univ. of Illinois
  2. Sources for rules

    1. Rules in general

      http://www.w3.org/WAI/
      W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
      http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Design_Arts/Graphic_Design/Web_Page_Design_and_Layout/Accessibility/
      Yahoo! category
      http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Web_Usability/
      Google Web Directory category
      http://nadc.ucla.edu/dawpi.htm
      National Arts and Disability Centre
      http://www.joehallock.com/edu/COM498/
      Joe Hallock's Colour Assignment
    2. Basic books about colour

      Principles of Color
      by Faber Birren
      © 1987
      published by Schiffer Publishing, Inc. (77 Lower Valley Road, Atglen PA, 19310-9717, USA)
      ISBN 0-88740-103-1
      Interaction of Color
      by Josef Albers
      published by Yale University Press
      Revised pocket edition © 1975
      Revised edition ISBN 0-30001-846-0
    3. Colour on the WWW

      1. Notes
        • NOTE: when searching for information about colour also look for color (without the u).
        • WebTANGO (listed in existing tools section, above) might do some colour contrast checks
      2. List of Resources
        10 colour contrast checking tools to improve the accessibility of your design by Roger Johansson
        http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/08/newman/
        Considering the Color-Blind (an article in Web Techniques)
        http://www.btexact.com/ces/colours/
        Customer Experience Solutions
        http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~muter/pmuter1.htm
        Optimization of Reading
        Hill & Scharff
        http://www.mariaclaudiacortes.com/
        Color in Motion: An interactive Experience of Color Communication and Color Symbolism by Claudia Cortés (via Bibi's Box blog)
        http://www.bibi.org/box/archives/2005/03/this_post_is_ab.html
        This post is about colour and art at Bibi's Box blog
        http://www.firelily.com/opinions/color.html
        Color Perception Issues
        http://vischeck.com/showme.shtml
        vischeck: color vision simulator
        http://www.humanfactors.com/color/colorblind.asp
        Accomodate Colorblind Users (at Human Factors International website)
        follow the links on the left of their page
        http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~muter/pmuter1.htm
        Optimization of Reading by Paul Muter in Cognitive aspects of electronic text processing (1996)
        http://web.archive.org/web/20030407084913/www.usability.gov/guidelines/accessibility.html#one
        Simulated example of colour deficiency on the WWW from old version of Research-Based Web Design & Usabiliyt Guidelines provided by the USA's National Cancer Institute usability.gov) [from archive.org's wayback engine]
        http://sig.enst.fr/~brettel/
        Research and Code about colour deficiencies
  3. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

    http://css.nu
    CSS Pointers Group
    http://richinstyle.com/guides/css2.html
    CSS2 tutorial at RichInStyle.com
    http://www.webreview.com/style/css1/glossary.shtml
    CSS glossary by Eric A. Meyer (at webreview.com)

See Also

I have a list of more suggested thesis topics.


http://www.cs.dal.ca/~jamie/grad/w3usab.html

This document is written in valid XHTML 1.0 & this document makes use of cascading style sheets.

Created on 04 Feb. 2002 by J. Blustein.
Last updated on 11 Feb. 2003 by J. Blustein.