Design Blog

Thinking of usability in the context of web surfing, I thought of 5 Little Things I am really grateful for! Here:

1. Sounds On/Off
Its often that I end up on websites where they’d have a music jump me and startle me and often its even likeable, but what I am raving about here… is not the actual music, but the ability to control it. Talking about a volume bar, or at least an On/Off option. I might be at home already listening to some music and suddenly theres a new layer of sounds to it creating a strange effect! When I find out that there is no button to turn that website music off, it really doesn’t make me feel like sticking around it any longer.

2. YouTube’s Dim the Lights
YouTube had an idea to put this feature that when clicked, just turned everything around the video player window dark! For watching a video, you might find it more comfortable that way to reduce the bright white surrounding so your focus is more on the video. Unfortunately, this feature is now only available for videos longer than 50 minutes! So, as a sample you can see this video. At the top right of the video window, click the image of the lightbulb

3. Autocomplete
When I have to select stuff from long lists, nothing beats having an autocomplete feature! For users of GMail, you might recognize this as the feature that brings out the list of recipients when you are trying to type in who you’re sending the email to. We’ve actually implemented this feature in Therap SComms too hoping our users will also benefit from it.

4. GMail Labs’ Attachment Reminder
As forgetfulness of human nature goes, its a very common thing to forget to actually attach that important feature to an email before sending it out! I have heard of one story where someone sent 3 mails before finally remembering to attach the file. The second mail apologized for not sending the attachment and it was still forgotten! So, anyway, this feature picks up from the written email whether the author intended to send an attachment if it finds words like ‘attachment’ ‘sending a file’ etc in it! Pretty smart, and it has saved a lot of time for me personally many a times. Mind you, that this feature is not there by default in GMail, you’d have to go to Settings, and then Labs to find it. Don’t forget!

5. Search As You Type on Firefox
As far as browsers go, I LOVE Firefox! Theres a world of useful plugins, and the built in search engines for google, imdb, wikipedia and others .. .its all very cool! But there is one feature that really helps me out – That’s the “search as you type” feature. Its not turned on by default (I don’t know why) and for that not many people know it or use it! But if you have often ended up on long pages and you are interested in a certain part only, this feature can help you out immensely. Turn this on from Options > Advanced > General. And this feature also comes into good use when I am testing Therap out for usability issues, or browsing through my really long FirstPage. Often the FirstPage can have many many modules and go south quite a bit. In those circumstances, I just start typing in the module name – ‘Personal Finance’ for example, and as soon as I have typed till only “Perso” the browser has already scrolled to where that box appears on the FirstPage! This way, I don’t have to scroll down and read through the names on the FirstPage boxes to find the module I am looking for. Of course, users of other browsers can very well use Ctr-F to search for it, but with this option on Firefox, its faster doing a lot of things throughout the day.

Cheers!

We design a splash pages as ’tis the season for some getting together and learning Therap. Therap has rounded up some great features and modules and those need telling too!

For a full listing of our conferences for 2011, go to Conferences. You’ll find the details there – information flyers, and schedules, that’ll help you pick the one most suitable for you. The presence of Therap staff and users from the different regions make the events very useful for both training existing users and also telling prospective agencies all about Therap’s applications for developmental disability providers.

What is a “Splash”?

Inside Therap’s application, theres a mechanism to display a message to the user as soon as he or she logs in. That message is called a ‘Splash’! You can view the splash and select to never have it shown again by clicking on a check-box there. Provider agencies can display splash messages to their staff, or Therap can display one that all users in all agencies will see. We use the splash message to inform you of updates to the system or upcoming events that will be of value.

We saw the release of some very nice features that deal with the health and medical data of individuals with developmental disability.

To learn how to use these modules, head over to our support site:

We probably have the most amount of user presentations lined up for the upcoming conference in Fishkill, NY. We had started the Therap Certified Trainers program to identify people who have a special knack for using Therap, and the presentations will see a lot of them take the mic. We have to make sure people know about it, and for that we made a splash recently:

Anyone read that and go “Yay”?

Well, the design team is at work to get Therappers nice lil web-card to get you in the season’s mood. We absolutely salute everyone in this industry working hard and hope everyone has a delightful time in the coming year and the holidays before it. Currently we’re wondering whether to go with a snowman or just candy!

Also getting into the holiday spirit is SUS (Services for the UnderServed ), an agency in New York City. They have started raise an amount of money to buy holiday gifts for all 3,500 New Yorkers they serve! The site they set up for this collection is really nice and I’d like you all to visit if possible.

Visit: giftsnyc.org/

The design team is very impressed with the design of the site, and especially the map that shows the people who contributed from NYC using stars in the locations they are from (right side of the image above). If you are organizing anything to make sure everyone has a happy holiday, share it with us!

Cheers!

How will a modern touch screen keyboard look like? Will it look like the 8pen? I was looking for keyboard alternative in Android market place, when I came across this. I liked it and thought of sharing it with all of you.

So watch the video and if you have Android 1.6 or higher give it a try.

We’ve last updated our Automated Training to include :
Training Management System
Provider Administration
Medication Administration Records
Therap’s Help & Support

Now, the CD version has been updated with these also. Download

For those who haven’t tried the CD out, heres what it is and how it works:
We have created a version with all the automated training in one place. You can download a zip file using the link above and then take the contents of the zip file and put it onto a disc. Have someone in IT help you out if you are not sure what to do. After you’ve made the CD, putting it into a computer will load the training menu. You’d see T-Girl jump in and welcome you, and a main menu that looks like this:

Therap Training is training on the modules in Therap that direct care workers, nurses will use. The training for Provider Administrators is also accessible from here, as are two documents with information to assist those planning to use the CD for Automated Training. We highly recommend reading those if you want to use this CD. The CD is great for use in classroom scenarios, since T-Girl pauses the training at times so that the trainees can take time to try out what is being shown on the screen, or for you, the trainer to give out any agency specific directions. Hitting the spacebar once will pause the training. Another press on the spacebar will resume it.

The scripts are available on this CD, so a trainer can go through it beforehand and decide the pauses and interruptions necessary to either give out those directions or to provide time for those attending the class to carry out tasks on their Therap Test Mode. The CD also has a feature to set a playlist for a class, which allows controlling what topics are played and whats not. You could even decide to copy this CD for your trainees so they can go over the training at home.

We have now made available SCORM compliant versions of our automated training on our Help & Support site’s training section. SCORM stands for Sharable Content Object Reference Model, and you can learn more about it from this website.

We’ve come to know about SCORM through the fine folks in Albertina Kerr. We’ve worked with them and converted all the training done by T-Girl and Mr. FirstPage. As I understand, if you have an LMS (Learning Management System) which supports SCORM, you can download the zip files of the individual training from our site and then upload to your LMS. Through that you can then get the LMS to report if your learners have completed a training, how much they’ve gotten on a quiz that T-Girl took etc. The LMS then will also remember for the learner where they had last stopped watching the T-Girl training.

It all sounds rather cool to me. Something to look into to improve your agency’s training!

Download SCORM Compliant Automated Training

Long ago, we announced that we were trying out a fun lil’ animated video for a rap that Jeremy, Richard’s son made about Therap. Its been over a year now that it was made and I realized we put it on our facebook but not this blog! So in case, someones missed it, its a good time to recollect, and have some fun again!

Watch the video:

Sincerely,

Tanm