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2008-12-17 Yahoo! Currency Converter - my favorite project is now live

About 9 months ago my fellow co-worker, the User Experience Designer Graham Beale, and I started developing ideas for a prototype of a new Currency Converter for the worldwide relaunch of Yahoo! Finance.

We wanted Features we haven't seen like this in the Internet so far. We wanted conversion without a page reload, searching for currencies like in the Firefox 3 "awesome bar", total accessibility, much more and of course everything in realtime.

About a year, many user tests, many new ideas, a lot of Screenreader testing with my fellow co-worker Artur Ortega and even more time developing, the result went online yesterday night!

I need to blog about the many Screenreader specific tricks, we used and for a large part also created for this, separately. Until then I wish you lots of fun with the brand new Yahoo! Currency Converter and suggest to use the App at one point only using the Keyboard, switch of Javascript or just play with the neat Currency Search :-).

Update:

My article about Making the new Yahoo! Currency Converter accessible is now online on the YDN Blog!

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StuLooks awesome Dirk! Had a quick go with keyboard nav and JS disabled. Impressive stuff. Looking forward to reading more about the work you did to make it accessible.
#1 Stu on 2008-12-17 16:20 (Reply)
Dirk GinaderThanks Stu :-) I'll try to get the detailed article done during the holidays.
#1.1 Dirk Ginader (Homepage) on 2008-12-17 18:40 (Reply)
Paul BakausHi Dirk,

congratulations first, it looks really cool!
However, I'm writing you because there's a huge issue with the converter in the case of Firefox+Firebug:

Since you're logging into the console, the complete application fails to convert when the Firebug console is deactivated. Hope you can resolve that asap!
#2 Paul Bakaus (Homepage) on 2008-12-17 18:24 (Reply)
Dirk GinaderHi Paul,
thanks a lot :-)
The issue you are referring to is already fixed and will hopefully be pushed live tonight. The logging was of course supposed to be off in the live environment ;-)
#2.1 Dirk Ginader (Homepage) on 2008-12-17 18:39 (Reply)
Frederik Van ZandeLooks really neat.

After trying it out for a while I'm gonna ad 2 workflow suggestions:
- store the last chosen currencies: If I go back after a day, it will be most likely I'll do the same money conversion again (unless your test results say otherwise)(from € to £ for example)
Right it always goes back to the standard currency conversion ($ to €)
- Is it already choosing the default currency, from the country I come from, with IP localization? If not, it would be a nice feature.

Great work on the accessibility!
#3 Frederik Van Zande on 2008-12-18 01:34 (Reply)
Dirk GinaderThank you Frederik for the nice suggestions! We're still adding Features and I believe you'll be happy to hear the 2 features you fancy are on the list :-)
#3.1 Dirk Ginader (Homepage) on 2008-12-18 05:49 (Reply)
NicholasI would like an 'Invert' button that swaps the left and right sides. I realise the pocket guide has this below, but it's not as obvious as the great big numbers are (and inverting allows me to change from £->$ to $->€ more quickly, for example).
#4 Nicholas on 2009-01-01 23:35 (Reply)
Dirk Ginaderthanks for the input. That's one of the features we added and removed again in the prototyping phase, because it just made the nice and easy-to-understand interface a bit too full while only doubling already existing functionality (you can simply add Numbers on the right hand side field and get the result on the left).
#4.1 Dirk Ginader (Homepage) on 2009-01-02 09:58 (Reply)
vsantagio@yahoo.comImpressive work. I would like to see more details on the implementation of the work you have present.
#5 vsantagio@yahoo.com (Homepage) on 2010-01-24 16:02 (Reply)
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