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Kara Pernice, Web 2.0 has heralded the age of user-generated content on the web. Practically anyone can publish web pages with little knowledge of web usability and web standards. How much of a problem do you think this is for moving towards a web that takes an older population into account?
Asked by emflem on Nov 07 2007 11:17:29 AM and supported by 23 members
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Answer

I think that all the tools - the older tools and the newer Web 2.0 tools - in every case the designer has the ability to do good with it or do bad with it. And taking any tool out of the box and just using it in its generic state is usually not going to be easy. We find this with intranet portal software, we find this with Flash, we find this with Ajax, we find this with everything. You have to think about the known design recommendations, the standards that you’ve known about for many, many years, and apply them to any new tools which is why when people ask me is usability ever going to go away in terms of a discipline or a department, I don’t have a fear, let’s put it this way, that I won’t have a job, because as technologies change, we have the opportunity to do good or bad designs with them and any time we encounter a new technology, we usually start off with bad designs. Think about Flash when it first came out – all we saw were these big spinning things when you entered a website that weren’t helpful. But now if you look around, you can see some really nice implementations of Flash, applications that really do a service for the users and for the website itself. So I think the same thing is happening with these newer tools. As we see, some people are really starting to use them in a very usable way for everyone including seniors. More often, I think they’re just getting their wings. MORE!

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