User Interface

• 
  Signal vs. Noise

• PHOTO: Stewart Butterfield's resignation letter

  37signals

  9 Feb 2010 | 8:12 am

  Stewart Butterfield’s resignation letter from Yahoo (from Watching the birth of Flickr co-founder’s gaming start-up)

• PHOTO: There's quality control for you. This is

  David

  8 Feb 2010 | 4:06 pm

  There’s quality control for you. This is the latest entries in the Entertainment category on iTunes.

• The App Store: Quality control without the quality

  David

  8 Feb 2010 | 1:42 pm

  I love my iPhone and I love Apple (cue images of flag pins and “I love muh countray!”), but I believe they’re blowing it with the App Store gate keeping. That’s of course not a new opinion. Developers left and right have been decrying the broken process. But there’s nothing like feeling it on your own bones to make the point. We have a couple of new features in the wing for Campfire. They’ve been done for more than 10 days now. Why haven’t we released them yet? Because the iPhone app Ember needed to have a simple regular expression updated to support…

• Scope a variable to a block in your template code

  Ryan

  8 Feb 2010 | 10:38 am

  Sometimes you are coding a template and you need to refer to the same method chain over and over. For example, you’re coding a template that summarizes activity on recent messages. You iterate through a block of messages, and for each message you want to display some information pertaining to the last comment. You could do it like this: <div class="active_messages"> <% @active_messages.each do |message| %> <h1><%= message.title %></h1> <div class="latest_comment"> <div class="avatar"> <%= avatar_for(message.comments.last.creator) %>…

• Descriptive words and phrases found on a $6 bottle of hand soap

  Jason F.

  8 Feb 2010 | 9:38 am

  Extremely mild Richly foaming Naturally gentle Deeply cleanses Nourishes Pure and soothing Synergistically Refresh and restore Skin radiance Cool soothing Protects and restores balance Harmonize and replenish Additional moisturizing benefit What doesn’t this stuff do? Lather up and this naturally gentle, richly foaming, pure and soothing nourishing cleanser will synergistically refresh, harmonize, replenish, protect and restore balance with cool soothing botanicals. Kinda ridiculous, isn’t it? Reading this should remind you to read your own site, your own marketing copy, your own…

• 
  456 Berea Street

• sIFR default CSS hides content from at least one screen reader

  Roger Johansson

  8 Feb 2010 | 10:30 am

  Just a heads-up to anyone using sIFR to render text: the default CSS that comes with sIFR hides the replaced text from the VoiceOver screen reader. I don’t know if any others are affected – VoiceOver is the only screen reader I have been able to verify this problem in.Read full postPosted in Accessibility, CSS, Typography.

• Forgotten CSS selectors

  Roger Johansson

  4 Feb 2010 | 11:39 am

  Anyone who has been using CSS for any length of time has probably been frustrated by the lack of selector support in Internet Explorer 6. There are quite a lot of cases where a CSS 2.1 selector will let you target elements in all other relevant browsers, but where you, if you want it to work in IE 6, have to add a class or id attribute to the HTML. Well, the market share of IE 6 is now finally at a level where we as developers can say that a site “supporting” IE 6 does not mean “looking pixel perfect”. Fortunately more and more clients understand this as well. IE 7 has been out for…

• Beware of “Web Page, complete” when saving HTML pages with your browser

  Roger Johansson

  1 Feb 2010 | 10:47 am

  Every now and then I need to ask a client or another developer to save a copy of a web page and email it to me. Mostly it is because they are viewing a page that is behind a firewall and I need to see the markup. Something that happens a lot is that they send me HTML that is more or less mangled. This HTML mangling happens when you choose “Web Page, complete” or a similarly named option in your web browser. With this option selected, browsers don’t save just the HTML source of the page – they also save any associated images, stylesheets, javascript files and other resources and change…

• XHTML Media Types Working Group Note updated

  Roger Johansson

  29 Jan 2010 | 9:38 am

  The W3C Working Group Note XHTML Media Types - Second Edition contains updated guidelines for the use of different media types with XHTML documents – text/html vs. application/xhtml+xml. The note is about a year old now, so this will be old news to some readers. Better late than never, I suppose. The document is now more focused on the text/html vs. application/xhtml+xml media types and includes Compatibility Guidelines for ensuring that documents can work with either media type.Read full postPosted in (X)HTML.

• Unobtrusive JavaScript is not necessarily accessible JavaScript

  Roger Johansson

  26 Jan 2010 | 11:15 am

  Plenty of JavaScript demos and tutorials that you come across on the Web note that they are implemented using unobtrusive JavaScript. While that is great and should always be encouraged, some people seem to believe that unobtrusive JavaScript equals accessible JavaScript. That is not always the case. Unobtrusive JavaScript is normally mentioned to emphasise that a script uses progressive enhancement to cater for people who use a browser without JavaScript support. But that does not mean that a script is accessible, since two key accessibility issues tend to be overlooked – keyboard…

• 
  Boxes and Arrows

• Google, Stanford, and The Government Fight Swine Flu

  31 Jan 2010 | 11:37 pm

  Bolt | Peters recently collaborated with Stanford University’s Bill Behrman on designing the Google Sites template for local governments to use as a backup to deliver information on the H1N1 outbreak, and also disasters and emergencies in general. The goal was to create a template that was well laid-out, easy for non-techie local governments to edit and update with content, and conveyed the most important information to different audiences. How It Started: The Quick FixWith the recent outbreak of H1N1, Santa Clara County’s official public flu information site was taken down by the…

• Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment

  31 Jan 2010 | 11:37 pm

  When the exciting opportunity to work in a post-bubble dot.com startup arose, I jumped to take it. I had the luxury of doing things exactly as I thought right, and for a while it was truly fantastic. I built a team with a dedicated user researcher; information architect; interaction and visual designers and we even made a guerilla usability lab and had regular test sessions. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm I had for my new job waned after six months when an executive was appointed Head of Product Development—who insisted he knew SCRUM1 better than anybody. As the Creative Director, I…

• 5 Steps to Building Social Experiences

  23 Dec 2009 | 12:54 am

  Nowadays everyone wants social in their sites and applications. It’s become a basic requirement in consumer web software and is slowly infiltrating the enterprise as well. So what’s a designer to do when confronted with the requirements to “add social”? Designing social interfaces is more than just slapping on Twitter-like or Facebook-like features onto your site. Not all features are created equal and sometimes a little bit can go a long way. It’s important to consider your audience, your product—what your users will be rallying around and why they would want…

• Research Logistics

  23 Dec 2009 | 12:54 am

  With more companies today putting a stronger emphasis on gaining a deeper understanding of their customer, it’s not unusual for us to be called in for a project to find that our clients don’t have a lot of experience with research and don’t know what to expect. This article is for every designer, architect, manager, engineer, and stakeholder who wants to know more about research and is intended to provide you with the most critical tools for interacting with researchers and understanding how the work that we do can make your job easier. This article will also outline what to…

• Tree Testing

  5 Dec 2009 | 12:02 am

  A big part of information architecture is organisation – creating the structure of a site. For most sites – particularly large ones – this means creating a hierarchical “tree” of topics. But to date, the IA community hasn’t found an effective, simple technique (or tool) to test site structures. The most common method used—closed card sorting—is neither widespread nor particularly suited to this task. Some years ago, Donna Spencer pioneered a simple paper-based technique to test trees of topics. Recent refinements to that method, some made possible by online…

• 
  ZURBlog

• ZURBsoapbox: Justin Kan Founder of Justin.tv Joins Us on Feb 12th

  21 Jan 2010 | 9:15 am

  Photo courtesy of Terry Chay RSVP for ZURBsoapbox on February 12th Where? ZURB HQ 55 N. 3rd Street, Suite 100a Campbell, CA 95008 When? Friday, February 12th, 2009 from 12:00-1:00pm PST RSVP Today » At midnight on March 19, 2007 Justin Kan attached a webcam to his cap and started streaming his life through online video via a laptop-backpack system. He decided he would stream continuous live video and audio 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Justin became a media sensation rather quickly landing his first interview at Today Show in April 2007. He went on to interview with CNET Live, ABC News…

• Giving Holiday Gifts the ZURB way

  21 Dec 2009 | 10:00 am

  Your mom has always told you "It's the thought that counts," but unfortunately you can't buy thoughtfulness at Target. You can however buy a collection of inexpensive items, a 99-cent card, some decent gift wrap and become renown for your thoughtfulness. We like to think that our processes here at ZURB can be applied to almost anything in life. Our project management philosophy is an especially good fit for gift giving. It consists of three simple steps: Tell me Show me Tell me what you showed me Tell me This is where the 99-cent card comes in. We all understand that with gifts need to come…

• Richard White of UserVoice: $250,000 Site Sale on eBay, Killing Goats for 6 Hours, and a Healthy "No"

  14 Dec 2009 | 10:00 am

  Our latest ZURBsoapbox was a hit last Friday with Richard White of UserVoice. Richard joined us to share his story of how UserVoice was born, how it gained traction, and some of the lessons learned along the way. You can listen to the entire podcast below or download it on iTunes. We've put together our favorite highlights below. Listen to Richard White's Podcast Subscribe: iTunes RSS Genesis of UserVoice All attention was directed on Richard's crazy shoes. Twinkle toes. A few years back Richard came across a group of folks in Cambridge, MA trying to build the first Ajax calendar (pre Google…

• ZURBSoapbox: Richard White, Founder and CEO of UserVoice, Joins Us on Dec 4th

  30 Nov 2009 | 1:00 pm

  RSVP for ZURBsoapbox on December 4th Where? ZURB HQ 55 N. 3rd Street, Suite 100a Campbell, CA 95008 When? Friday, December 4th, 2009 from 12:00-1:30pm PST RSVP Today » Photo courtesy of UserVoice Our next ZURBsoapbox, featuring Richard White of UserVoice, is this Friday at 12pm at ZURB HQ. Lunch will be provided and space is limited so please make sure to RSVP via email to make sure we can accommodate everyone. Richard White is a founder and CEO of UserVoice. He is driven by a passion for building simple tools that improve productivity and make peoples lives easier. UserVoice does just…

• Shrink your JavaScript with the Google Compiler Rails Plugin

  13 Nov 2009 | 10:00 am

  Looking for the plugin? Skip the article and go straight to the plugin page. For everyone else... Like it or not, JavaScript has become the heaviest asset on modern webpages. Long gone are the days of waiting for large images to load, now we wait for fancy effects libraries, re-tweet counters, and cornification. When you load Twitter, Yahoo, or Google docs, almost half the data you load will be JavaScript. Below is an asset breakdown for docs.google.com. Users Hate to Wait After download JavaScript files need to be evaluated as well. The greater the complexity and size of the JavaScript the…

• 
  User Interface Trends

• The Horizontal Way

  Kate Vander Ploeg

  5 Feb 2010 | 8:22 am

  Trend: Horizontal Scrolling Most people try fitting their design to the width of a standard window size to avoid horizontal scrolling. Nielsen even claims that “users hate horizontal scrolling” , and names reasons to stray away from horizontal scrolling. But then, there are those–I dare say most of them are designers–who do it anyway. So are these guys designing without regard to the usability of their sites, do they just not give a fudge about usability, or are they designing for a situation they feel warrants horizontal scrolling? Click this link for a showcase of horizontal…

• UItrends Giveaway – Free Dreamweaver Training DVD!

  Jeff Noble

  21 Jan 2010 | 6:47 am

  The boss has gone crazy!!! Well not really but, the fine folks at Class On Demand have provided us a copy of “Dreamweaver For Designers” training DVD. Usually these cost $199.95 but we are giving it away for free to one lucky winner. Zero, Nada. Gratis. All you need to do to win this DVD is leave a comment about why you love the UItrends website by February 20th, 2010. Bonus points if you include some areas we can improve, double bonus points to anyone that can spur Sarah Selser to post another big buttons article or tell us what has happened to Chris Farmer.  Sorry but you do…

• Form Design Inspiration

  Jeff Noble

  19 Jan 2010 | 6:50 am

  According to my admittedly flawed calculations there are approximately  the same number of articles on website form behaviors as the number of McDonald’s customers served each day.  Speaking of McDonald’s, rather than throwing up a lot of the same info, putting together yet another lame attempt at a top whatever number list, or you wasting your time going through all of these articles, I figured it might just be better to list out some of the best resources I found.  Why? Cause I have nothing better to do and hopefully some of these are helpful or at least inspirational to…

• Suggestions…Add as a Friend

  David Mortellaro

  15 Jan 2010 | 1:12 pm

  Trend: Customized Sites for You I thought about this the other day. Amazon. Facebook. LinkedIn. Like me, I am sure many of you use these websites often. They are only a few of many, many websites that are excellent and accurate with recommendations, whether it is merchandise or people. For example, I logged into Amazon recently to do some Christmas shopping. Upon logging in, Amazon had recommendations for me based on my previous purchases. Facebook and LinkedIn have very similar capabilities. Facebook actually scares me sometimes by the timing of its friend recommendations to me. I dreamt one…

• Review: Wireframing tool Cacoo

  Ron Norman

  14 Jan 2010 | 12:39 pm

  It’s the year 2010.  Weren’t we supposed to have jetpacks and flying cars by now? I mean come on, no hoverboards?  No teleportation?? Well, at least UI design is slowly catching up.  The demand for a user interface that delivers a rewarding experience and is aesthetically pleasing has never been higher.  Fortunately, the tools and methods for building a well rounded UI are now very numerous. Wireframes and Mockups have become a standard in the design process, and tools keep popping up specifically for wireframing.  I recently tried out Cacoo, a new web-based wireframing…

• 
  Accessites.org

• We’ll Miss You, Jack

  Mel Pedley

  18 Jan 2010 | 6:05 am

  <img class="right" src="http://accessites.org/site/post-img/jack-pickard.jpg" width="250" height="200" alt="" /> We were both shocked and saddened to learn of the sudden death of Jack Pickard at the weekend. Jack was a part of Accessites.org from its earliest days and, although he had taken a back seat from active Team Access duty more recently, he was still there, in the background, ready to lend a hand if needed. We've lost a great colleague with a wicked sense of humour and the Web has lost a talented developer. Our thoughts and…

• Law Office of Lainey Feingold

  Blair Millen

  5 Nov 2009 | 11:45 am

  <a href="http://lflegal.com/" title="Law Office of Lainey Feingold site"><img class="right border" src="http://accessites.org/site/site-img/lflegal.png" alt="Visit Law Office of Lainey Feingold site" height="120" width="200" /></a> <a href="http://lflegal.com/">Law Office of Lainey Feingold</a>, the business site of disability rights lawyer Lainey Feingold, was designed by Mike Cherim specifically to conform to the level of AAA under the <a class="gloss"…

• Online Video Captioning

  Jen Rohrig

  7 Sep 2009 | 3:53 am

  <img class="right" src="http://accessites.org/site/post-img/onlinevideocaptioning.jpg" width="250" height="200" alt="" /> Guest author, <a href="http://jenrweb.com/">Jen Rohrig</a>, looks at online video captioning on US TV networks. Although I am hard of hearing myself, there was a time when I didn't consider captions for online videos to be of great importance, since I rarely watched videos online. More recently, I've been watching some new online shows and would have been disappointed if captions hadn't been…

• Le Web Accessible

  Joe Dolson

  26 Aug 2009 | 7:44 am

  <a href="http://www.lewebaccessible.com/" title="Visit Le Web Accessible site"><img class="right border" src="http://accessites.org/site/site-img/lewebaccessible.png" width="200" height="120" alt="Visit Le Web Accessible site" /></a> <a href="http://www.lewebaccessible.com/" lang="fr">Le Web Accessible</a>, the web site of web accessibility consultant Jean-Fran&#231;ois Naud, offers numerous touches which demonstrate a solid accessible web site. The site exhibits…

• Don’t Just Tick Boxes

  Mel Pedley

  6 Jul 2009 | 9:10 am

  <img class="right" src="http://accessites.org/site/post-img/checkboxes.jpg" width="250" height="200" alt="" /> Meeting the diverse needs of your site's visitors is likely to mean a great deal more than ticking off individual accessibility checkpoints. You cannot just rely on an automated accessibility parser. As <a href="http://www.gawds.org/show.php?contentid=147">Grant Broome explained</a>, whilst automated testing is useful, it cannot replace a manual review or direct user testing. At Accessites, every site that…

• 
  UX Magazine

• Balancing Brands Online: Entertainment Case Study

  Guild Copeland

  9 Feb 2010 | 11:03 am

  How entertainment websites showcase parent companies in balance with their movies and bands. Website designers face issues of prioritization all the time: which type of site content is most important? What should a site's navigational order be? Wear the black t-shirt today, or save it till Friday? In designing for entertainment companies, the issue of content prioritization takes a challenging turn: which one of the multi-million dollar brands—the parent or the product—gets top billing? At Sisu, we have designed award-winning websites for a number of entertainment companies, including…

• Adobe promises faster Mac Flash

  Alex Schleifer

  9 Feb 2010 | 12:41 am

  In the midsts of a debate as to whether HTML5 will make Flash redundant, Adobe is releasing an update to the plug-in on Mac OS X that is expected to "get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering." You can get the beta on the Adobe Labs site. With major players like YouTube trialing HTML5 versions of their sites Adobe has to keep an eye on Flash's performance which is often blamed for crashing browsers and high CPU loads. While HTML5 video playback definitely has performance benefits Flash still has some advantages over it such as fullscreen playback, but…

• Toward a better tablet OS, part 2

  Devin Coldewey

  5 Feb 2010 | 10:29 am

  In which specific UI elements are proposed and the iPad critiqued. Part one of this article can be found here A man could write for days and not say all there is to say about optimizing a UI for multitouch and tablet use. So I'll limit my observations for now to a few specific cases having to do with the mouse, which has influenced UIs so deeply, and for so long, that it's hard for people to imagine how to do anything substantial without one. This is, in fact, one of the reasons it is taking so long for a tablet to emerge. And although a tablet OS must be more than a touch-enabled desktop OS,…

• Toward a better tablet OS, part 1

  Devin Coldewey

  3 Feb 2010 | 3:01 pm

  In which today’s so-called tablets are examined, and found wanting. Part two of this article can be found here As an exploration into the creation of a true tablet computing device, I wrote the piece you are about to read, which, while originally a single 3500-word monster, has been split into two fairly coherent parts in order to spare you a headache. The first part is an examination of current devices, why they are not "true" tablets, and why they have not caught on. It was written the day before Apple's "Creation" event. The second part, which includes some hopes for a revolutionary…

• iPad User Experience Guidelines

  Apple

  2 Feb 2010 | 10:55 am

  Apple's guidelines for how to create user interfaces optimized for the iPad. Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for the iPad outline how to create user interfaces optimized for the iPad device. According to Apple, the best iPad applications: downplay application UI so that the focus is on content; present content in beautiful, often realistic ways; and take full advantage of device capabilities to enable enhanced interaction. The overview of iPad user experience guidelines listed below is © 2010 Apple Inc. More details on these guidelines and further information on developing for the…

• 
  Good Experience

• The Economist had a field day recently with the downturn...

  Mark Hurst

  6 Feb 2010 | 12:09 pm

  The Economist had a field day recently with the downturn in consulting. "Margaret Thatcher regarded Beatrix Potter's 'Ginger and Pickles' as the only business book worth reading." (I hold a similar opinion of most business books.) And from the same issue, see also laid-off lawyers, cast-off consultants.

• Find me at twitter.com/markhurst for the next several days....

  Mark Hurst

  5 Feb 2010 | 1:40 pm

  Find me at twitter.com/markhurst for the next several days.

• New Gel Video: Jamy Ian Swiss

  Mark Hurst

  5 Feb 2010 | 1:28 pm

  There is one key ingredient in all good magic tricks, and Jamy Ian Swiss reveals it before taking the audience through a magic trick as shown from the magician's perspective. This is one of the most thought-provoking and talked-about presentations from Gel 2009 and should be required viewing for anyone in the business of creating good experiences. (Hint: the key ingredient is also the essence of good listening.) See also: • Jamy's website • Pomegranates and empathy (and another reference in Deception considered helpful)

• Innovation and architecture

  Mark Hurst

  4 Feb 2010 | 9:22 am

  I often notice that "innovative" designs travel in packs. As a followup to Fred Kent's Gel video, consider this "eyesore of the month," as posted by Jim Kunstler: Jim writes, "the lesson here is that the most 'innovative' buildings all express exactly the same design innovations. So many geniuses with the same exact thoughts!" Link

• New Gel Video: Javette Orgain

  Mark Hurst

  4 Feb 2010 | 7:33 am

  Practicing medicine on the south side of Chicago, Dr. Javette Orgain describes her work at a community health center there. The challenges and issues in the patient experience, she says, would be better addressed with improved "health literacy."

• 
  information aesthetics

• An Animated Infographic Annual Report

  8 Feb 2010 | 3:42 pm

  Dan Meyer's infographically translated statistics about the year 2009 shows an original and animated view on the now popular practice of publishing one's life as data. The data contains several dozen statistics about the pop culture he consumed, the people he talked to, the (Belgian...) beer he drank, the places he visited, the vehicles he took to those places, and the amount of sleep he enjoyed each day. These statistics was spread across several thousand cells of a spreadsheet, which were then condensed and animated into the 2.5-minute video clip. As one commenter smartly puts it, animating…

• Data Fiction: Storytelling with Information Graphics

  4 Feb 2010 | 4:53 pm

  The combination of storytelling and information visualization has been long predicted, although still very few examples do exist. On the other hand, some might claim typical information aesthetic visualization is all about tell a compelling story. Following project takes infographic storytelling one (literal) step further: Sumedicina [janalange.de] is the title of a fictional thriller story about an international virus scandal, and is mainly told through the medium of infographics. One might not feel completely sure whether this is just an excuse to create a collection of visually impressive…

• Huge Interactive Signpost Shows the Direction to Favorite Locations

  4 Feb 2010 | 1:00 am

  This gigantic, interactive signpost sponsored by Nokia Ovi Maps in the form of a dynamically rotating electronic LED screen allows passers-by to send in their favorite location and coordinates via text or email. The giant pointer, hung on a 60ton construction on height of 50m, then automatically rotates to the given direction and displays the submitted description to the world. Watch the documentary video below. See also the Nokia Blog [1,2] and FarFar. Via Engadget.

• Ward Shelley: Infovis Oil Painting Artist

  3 Feb 2010 | 9:35 pm

  Unknown to me before, visual (infovis?) artist Ward Shelley [wardshelley.com] comes as a refreshing surprise. Shalley's impressive oil paintings and pencil drawings use real information in an attempt to depict the understanding of how things evolve and relate to one another, and how this develops over time. Usual topics range from art or cultural history, such as the arc of an artist's career and its influences, or the effect of particular ideas in an aesthetic or political movement. The paintings are interpreted as being "wide-screen", as all information is available to the interacting eye…

• Information Landscapes in 1994 (MIT Prof Muriel Cooper)

  1 Feb 2010 | 10:32 pm

  Back in 1994, Muriel Cooper, one of the co-founders of the MIT Media Lab where she taught interactive media design as the head of the Visible Language Workshop, presented her work at the TED5 conference in Monterey, CA. Her presentation would initiate a new era of data visualization, and it changed the way designers thought of the possibilities of electronic media. (Maybe quite similar to how David Small's dynamic renditions of text changed my way of thinking about 3D visualization). Her work was revolutionary as it pushed typography into the 3 spatial dimensions, and augmented it with…

• 
  UXmatters

• Taming the Elephant in the Room: Brand Perception and Bias

  pabini@uxmatters.com

  8 Feb 2010 | 3:10 am

  By Demetrius Madrigal Published: February 8, 2010 “People’s preconceived notions can be another elephant in the room—a barrier to achieving accurate and actionable feedback on a concept or design.” I’ve been a bit of a pizza snob ever since my first job making pizza at the age of 15. I’ve always had a pretty low opinion of Domino’s Pizza®, so I was very impressed when I saw Domino’s recent efforts to reinvent both their pizza and their brand identity by tackling their problems head on. When I first saw their ads and online video, which you…

• Numeric Filters: Issues and Best Practices

  pabini@uxmatters.com

  8 Feb 2010 | 3:08 am

  By Greg Nudelman Published: February 8, 2010 “Filters with numeric values remain among the most confusing, because many sites have not able to design usable numeric filters that people can use in an intuitive manner.” Faceted search has been around for a long time and has become the de facto standard for search on most ecommerce sites. However, filters with numeric values remain among the most confusing, because many sites have not able to design usable numeric filters that people can use in an intuitive manner. Recently, powerful user interface controls called sliders have become all the…

• Ironclad Contracts: Tougher Than a Pinky Swear

  pabini@uxmatters.com

  8 Feb 2010 | 3:03 am

  By Whitney Hess Published: February 8, 2010 “You’ve passed the seduction phase. You’ve made the client fall in love with you. You’ve determined the terms of your engagement. Now, you need to make things official.” You’ve passed the seduction phase. You’ve made the client fall in love with you. You’ve determined the terms of your engagement. Now, you need to make things official. When I used to do freelance on the side, while still employed full time, I never got my clients to sign contracts. I didn’t see the point, and I hated the formality. It felt stuffy, and I thought it…

• Hierarchical Task Analysis

  pabini@uxmatters.com

  8 Feb 2010 | 2:58 am

  By Peter Hornsby Published: February 8, 2010 “Hierarchical task analysis (HTA) is an underused approach in user experience, but one you can easily apply when either modifying an existing design or creating a new design.” As UX professionals, we have a great many analytical and descriptive tools available to us. In fact, there are so many that it can sometimes be difficult to decide which tool is most appropriate for a given task! Hierarchical task analysis (HTA) is an underused approach in user experience, but one you can easily apply when either modifying an existing design or creating a…

• Label Alignment in Long Forms | Paper Prototyping for Engineers

  pabini@uxmatters.com

  17 Jan 2010 | 9:40 pm

  By Janet M. Six Published: January 18, 2010 Send your questions to Ask UXmatters and get answers from some of the top professionals in UX. In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss two topics: label alignment in long forms paper prototyping for engineers Ask UXmatters answers our readers’ questions about user experience matters. To read our experts’ responses to your question in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your question to: ask.uxmatters@uxmatters.com.

• 
  A List Apart

• Words that Zing

  9 Feb 2010 | 1:00 am

  When someone consults a website, there is a precious opportunity not only to provide useful information but also to influence their decision. To make the most of this opportune moment, we must ensure that the site says or does precisely the right thing at precisely the right time. Understanding the rhetorical concept of kairos can help us craft a context for the opportune moment and hit the mark with appropriately zingy text.

• The Problem with Passwords

  9 Feb 2010 | 1:00 am

  Abandoning password masking as Jakob Nielsen suggests could present serious problems, including undermining a user’s trust by failing to meet a basic expectation. But with design patterns gleaned from offline applications, plus a dash of JavaScript, we can provide feedback and reduce password errors without compromising the basic user experience or losing our visitors’ trust.

• Using SVG for Flexible, Scalable, and Fun Backgrounds, Part II

  26 Jan 2010 | 1:00 am

  In Part II, dig deeper into the technology behind using SVG for your site design. Explore how to incorporate SVG in a cross-browser friendly manner, including using SVGWeb to ensure that the SVG shows in Internet Explorer. And discover the unique characteristic that makes SVG ideal for page backgrounds: scalability.

• Using SVG For Flexible, Scalable, and Fun Backgrounds, Part I

  26 Jan 2010 | 1:00 am

  Many of us think of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as an also-ran: fine for charts and tables, but not much else. Yet SVG can actually enhance a site’s overall design, and can be made to work in even the most stubborn browser. In Part I of a two-part series, Shelley Powers covers important basics of working with SVG, including browser support and accessibility.

• The Survey, 2009

  15 Dec 2009 | 2:00 am

  For the third year in a row, good citizens of the web, we ask that you take a few minutes to tell us about your professional skills, educational background, career prospects, job benefits, and more.

• 
  LukeW | Writings on Digital Product Strategy and Design

• iPad Design Tools & Resources

  Luke Wroblewski

  8 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  Apple's iPad has yet to be released to the public but that doesn't mean you can't start designing applications for it today. Here's a number of resources that can help get you on your way.Video of New iPad InteractionsDuring Apple's 90 minute unveiling of the iPad, a lot of new multi-touch interactions were shown off. But they went by fast. Now you can quickly just catch the UI in action on Apple's new native iPad and iWork applications in these videos.iPad Interesting MomentsThe idea of this collection is to capture the interesting moments during the various iPad interactions (slow down…

• Data Monday: Online Video Characteristics

  Luke Wroblewski

  7 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  As online video continues to grow, it's interesting to see how people are consuming and accessing this medium.The average US Internet user watches 182 videos online in a month. (source).The duration of the average online video is 3.7 minutes. (source). This is up from 2 minutes 46 seconds in 2008 (source)The average video on YouTube (which serves 1 billion videos per day) will get 500 views over time. (source)25% of those views will come in the first four days (source)By and large, only the first 30 to 60 seconds of an online video will be watched. (source)45% of views come from direct…

• iPad Apps: Physicality and Heightened Realism

  Luke Wroblewski

  3 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  One of the more unique iPad User Experience Guidelines from Apple suggests that applications designed for the iPad should have a realistic, physical dimension."The more true to life your application looks and behaves, the easier it is for people to understand how it works and the more they enjoy using it." -Human Interface Guidelines for the iPadYet it's no secret that physical metaphors can easily be overdone in application user interfaces. Just see Microsoft Bob for an example. So I wonder if this guideline from Apple is a deliberate recognition of (or push for) the digitalization of many…

• Event: Silicon Valley IxDA

  Luke Wroblewski

  2 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  On February 17, 2010 I'll be speaking at the Silicon Valley IxDA Event in Sunnyvale, CA on Input: Moving Beyond Web Forms.When: Wednesday, February 17, 2010Socializing: 7:00-7:30 pmProgram: 7:30-9:30 pmWhere: Yahoo! Inc.701 First AvenueMeeting room: Building C, Classroom 5Sunnyvale, CA 94089Official descriptionA Web application can't exist without users' input. We need the data, but do we need Web forms to get it? Traditional Web forms—made up of text fields, radio buttons, check boxes, and a Submit button—have been the mainstay of Web application design. In ecommerce, social networking…

• iPad User Experience Guidelines

  Luke Wroblewski

  1 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for the iPad outline how to create user interfaces optimized for the iPad device. According to Apple, the best iPad applications: downplay application UI so that the focus is on content; present content in beautiful, often realistic ways; and take full advantage of device capabilities to enable enhanced interaction.The iPad user experience guidelines are © 2010 Apple Inc.Support All OrientationsEnhance Interactivity (Don’t Just Add Features)Flatten Your Information HierarchyReduce Full-Screen TransitionsEnable Collaboration and ConnectednessAdd…

• 
  Andy Budd::Blogography Articles

• Clearleft offers free training to budding conference speakers

  andybudd

  3 Feb 2010 | 8:57 am

  In order to get more people in the design scene speaking at events like SillSwap, BarCamp and even dConstruct or UX London, I’ve been toying with the idea of organising a free public speaking course. It would be held on a yet-to-be-determined Saturday at the Clearleft offices in Brighton and would focus on practical, hands-on tuition. We would start with how to plan, research and design a talk that delights your audience, paying special attention to story telling and narrative. We would then move onto the delivery and performance side of things; teaching people how to project their…

• The best products sell them selves

  andybudd

  27 Jan 2010 | 1:18 am

  The concept of ‘Pull Marketing’ is all the rage at the moment. In the age of the Mad Men, selling a new product was easy. You’d be handed a commodity product like toothpaste or washing powder and set about building a brand to set it apart from the competition. You would then buy advertising space on a small number of influential marketing channels and wait for the sales to roll in. The growth of multi-channel TV, the commercialisation of radio and the rise of desktop publishing in the 80s fragmented audiences, making it hard to get the message out. However it was the…

• Information Anxiety

  andybudd

  23 Jan 2010 | 1:47 pm

  One of the problems of working in the knowledge economy is the constant need to keep abreast of current trends and thinking. This would be fine if you worked in a mature industry or one with a limited number of books, papers and conferences appearing each year. However in the knowledge economy of the web, more information is being published every day than could be consumed in a year. What’s more, that pace is increasing. The problem is exacerbated by a number of things. First of all I’m a reasonably prolific speaker, so feel the need to spend time researching my next topic and…

• Good products are one in a million

  andybudd

  20 Jan 2010 | 3:55 am

  I have an idea for a thing (1 million people) I tried to build a thing (50,000 people) I built a thing that works (10,000 people) I built a thing that people use (1,000) I built a thing that’s easy to use (50 people) I built a thing that people enjoy using (5 people) I built a thing that people love (1 person)

• 7 Ways to Improve your Public Speaking

  andybudd

  3 Jan 2010 | 1:10 pm

  As a self confirmed conference junkie I speak at a dozen events each year, and attend many more. As such I’ve probably seen close to a thousand talks over the last five years. Because of this I’ve got a pretty good idea what makes for an exciting talk and how you can guarantee your session will suck. As somebody who also organises two conferences, UX London and dConstruct I’m really keen on getting new talent into the speaking circuit while still maintaining quality. As such I’ve put together a quick guide to help both new and experienced speakers kick arse/ass. Most…

• 
  uselog.com | the product usability weblog

• Hooligans like a challenge: indestructible bus stop destroyed

  Jasper (uselog.com)

  1 Feb 2010 | 2:36 am

  The design of your product will evoke a certain behavior. That's the basic premise underlying the principle of what's labelled product impact, persuasive technology, design for society, design with intent, or design for conversion. A vivid example of this principle is the bus stop. They are often deliberately designed to be, and especially to look, fragile, as companies such as JC Decaux experienced that fragile-looking bus shelters are considered less of a challenge to destroy, and therefore are less subject to vandalism. In addition these companies have a policy of fixing anything that…

• Dutch public transport chip-card system flawed at introduction

  Jasper (uselog.com)

  22 Jan 2010 | 6:01 am

  The OV-chipkaart is the new ticket system for Dutch public transport, using RFID cards, similar to Hong Kong's MTR (metro) octopus card. In the past year several regional transport organizations (bus, tram, subway) as well as the Dutch railways have introduced the new system. The old ticket system for bus, tram and subways (the strippenkaart) will - and in some cases has been - phased out. So in some cities, the only way to get on public transport is the OV-chipkaart, and in the future it will also be the only alternative on the trains. You can choose between an anonymous rechargeable card,…

• eBooks will not replace real books because of usability (says bookseller)

  Jasper (uselog.com)

  19 Jan 2010 | 2:17 am

  "Electronic books are sort of convenient. Especially if you're going on a trip. We're selling these things ourselves and it's starting to generate a considerable turnover. <...> The real book can never be beat because of its superior usability. It's so often that you just want to go back a few pages, to reread what a character said. Try doing that with an E-book." - Matthijs van der Lely, CEO of Selexyz bookstores, in an interview with De Volkskrant (in Dutch). [Photo: Libraryman]

• UPA2010: Usability Professionals' Association annual meeting

  Jasper (uselog.com)

  11 Jan 2010 | 4:45 am

  The Annual Meeting 2010 of the Usability Professionals' Association (UPA) is being held from May 24-28, 2010 in Munich, Germany. The UPA is an organisation of usability practitioners worldwide, and supports people who research, design, and evaluate the user experience of products and services. Its conferences offer a chance to meet people from practice and as well as usability researchers. The program usually caters for very experienced as well as less experienced usability specialists. The presentations often feature a practical takeaway. As with many conferences, the committee did…

• Show your love for Hartmut Esslinger and not-an-mp3-player

  Jasper (uselog.com)

  8 Jan 2010 | 1:44 am

  Two new shirts in the uselog shirtshop. "Design is not a matter of democracy" Time to show your love for Hartmut Esslinger, founder of frog design, and creator of Apple's Snowwhite design language (applied in amongst others the first Apple Macintosh). To do this I present to you the Hartmut Esslinger fanshirt, featuring a remarkably Michael Knight-like portrait of old Hartmut, and my favorite quote of his: "Design is not a matter of democracy." For all of you who hate designing products in a committee. Ceci n'est pas un lecteur mp3 There are of course two reasons why this shirt does not show…

• 
  Monday By Noon

• We’re Ready for CSS3, but are we Ready for CSS3?

  Jonathan Christopher

  8 Feb 2010 | 5:06 am

  We're all smitten with CSS3. It's reinvigorated that sense of newness that CSS and Web Standards brought our way just a few years ago. We're able to more easily replicate the set of design standards that has become nearly universal much faster than before with just a few CSS declarations. There are a number of CSS3 rules I'd be writing for each and every project, but I'm just not sure it's as ready for prime time as many designers are making it out to be.

• jQuery Enlightenment by Cody Lindley Book Review

  Jonathan Christopher

  1 Feb 2010 | 7:01 am

  jQuery Enlightenment by Cody Lindley reinvigorated my enthusiasm for technical references. If you're at all interested in learning more about jQuery, or you just want an excellent reference on hand, jQuery Enlightenment is it!

• The Last of the Pods Basics: Pagination and Sorting

  Jonathan Christopher

  25 Jan 2010 | 6:57 am

  To wrap up the Basics of Pods in January, I'd like to cover the last couple items I feel are almost essential in having the user experience of Pods come full circle for both you and your user. Pods offers both pagination and sorting out of the box, and each can be very helpful when it comes to working with the plugin.

• Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook Book Review

  Jonathan Christopher

  18 Jan 2010 | 4:00 am

  Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook is a resource full of recipes focused on the popular Ext JS JavaScript library. While not for those new to Ext JS, it's a great addition to the library of anyone looking to better their Ext JS skills using this handy reference.

• How to use Pick Columns (Relationships) in Pods

  Jonathan Christopher

  11 Jan 2010 | 6:57 am

  Pods Pick columns help you create relationships with WordPress objects or other Pods themselves. It's a great way to bring the content management offered by Pods to the next level.

• 
  UserGlue UserBlog

• Interaction10 – Rob Nero – TRKBRD: From Idea to Conception with Physical Prototype

  Russ

  8 Feb 2010 | 8:17 pm

  Rob Nero’s presentation at the Pharmacy during Interaction10 was so packed that Todd Zaki Warfel, Brad Nunnally and I all ended up sitting on the floor in the very front of the room. We may have had the best darn seats in the house. This presentation blew our minds. TRKBRD is far from a perfect nor finished device, but it’s a clever prototype that was fun to learn about. Hands-down, more of our conferences need more talks like this. We learned of failures and successes and hacks and end-runs, and there was energy just in watching the story. This was definitely one of the…

• Interaction10 – Kevin Cheng – Augmented Reality: Is it Real? Should We Care?

  Russ

  8 Feb 2010 | 5:16 pm

  Kevin Cheng was one of the first folks I met at the IA Summit in 2008 in Miami, and I’ve been a fan of him ever since. Besides being a bright chap and an all around good egg, he’s recently become a Product Manager at The Twitters (and they’re hiring, folks!), but you may also know him from such online comics as OK/Cancel. He’s also getting married on 10/10/10, but you’ll have to ask him some questions around that, yourself. Augmented Reality: Is it Real? Should We Care? Description: This year, we’ve seen the mobile market make incredible strides in technology.

• Interaction10 – Jon Kolko – My Heart is in the Design

  Russ

  8 Feb 2010 | 4:56 pm

  Unfortunately, I was a little late to arrive to Jon Kolko’s keynote, but I really enjoyed his presentation and wished his talk would have been longer. Without further pause, here’s some descriptions and some notes. My Heart is in the Design Description: Interaction design has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with shaping our engagement with society and with each other. As designers, we build the artifacts and frameworks that support this engagement, keeping us entertained, aroused, engaged and productive. We are cultural architects, and possess capabilities to…

• Interaction10 – Dave Gray – Knowledge Games

  Russ

  7 Feb 2010 | 8:03 pm

  (Sorry, had some odd WordPress snafu–this is a repost of a post I somehow killed off inadvertantly) Dave Gray’s session was–as always–fun, insightful and inspiring. He’s always a great speaker and a sure-fire bet to be one of your favorite sessions if you’re at a conference he’s presenting at. He did not let us down this time, and I hope my notes make sense. Knowledge Games Description: We’re moving from an industrial to a knowledge economy, where creativity and innovation will be the keys to value. New rules apply. Yet two hundred years of…

• Interaction10 – Livia Labate – Ceci n’est pas une KPI

  Russ

  7 Feb 2010 | 7:27 pm

  I’m proud to call Livia Labate a good friend and a fellow board member for the IA Institute, so I’ll admit having bias here. That aside, she gave a great presentation and everyone learned a bit more about Key Performance Indicators, as well as the challenges and struggles that Livia went through in her journey to be able to share this information with us. Ceci n’est pas une KPI Session Description: “What are the Key Performance Indicators of a succesful user experience?” asked the business stakeholder, “It depends” answered the wise interaction designer… Inquiries…

• 
  Church of the Customer Blog

• A tale of 2 birthday cards

  Jackie Huba

  4 Feb 2010 | 1:48 pm

  It was my birthday this week, so that usually means birthday-related direct mail from women's retail stores. I have two examples that showcase distinct differences between doing the minimum amount and doing something worth buzz. Ann Taylor delivered a typical postcard: 15% off a one-time purchase in February. "On your special day, treat yourself with your Birthday Bonus," says. "It's your birthday. May all of your wishes come true." Anthropologie sent a card in a odd-sized bubble pouch featuring a perforated cupcake with a candle on it. The candle is part of a necklace. It, too, offers 15%…

• Simplify your objectives

  Ben McConnell

  27 Jan 2010 | 4:50 am

  Strategic objectives are the Holy Grail of a company's being. They typically involve big plans, so the natural inclination is to compose a lengthy description of each objective. That means strategies and tactics are often piled into the wording of the objective. That unnecessarily complicates the objective, making it less likely to be understood quickly and efficiently. Anything not understood easily is unlikely to spread. Here's a fictitious, slightly over-the-top example of what a top-heavy objective might look like: Understand how to create better innovation opportunities for our products…

• Why it's important to be a linchpin and an artist

  Jackie Huba

  25 Jan 2010 | 9:00 pm

  If you want to succeed in today's world of work, author Seth Godin says you should focus on being a "linchpin." That's the title of his new book, so we asked him a few questions about it. Q: What is a linchpin, and why is it important to become one? A linchpin is the part you can't live without, the thing that makes a difference. In every organization there are one (or several) people like this. It might be the brilliant inventor who creates the impossible, but it's far more likely to be the great sales rep or customer service person who makes a connection, or the marketer who knows how to…

• 5 new ways to compete for book PR

  Ben McConnell

  18 Jan 2010 | 4:15 am

  (Editor's note: This is a guest post from Barbara Henricks of CaveHenricks, a public relations firm for business books and authors. She's considered by many to be one of the best book publicists in the publishing industry. She can be reached at barbara@cavehenricks.com.) I’ve been in the PR business nearly 20 years, and there’s been more change the past two years than in the first 18. That’s created much fear and confusion. Readers are consuming content from more outlets and with a staggering number of devices-- via iPhones, computers, Blackberries, Kindles, Nooks and Sony Readers, to…

• Please donate to Haiti earthquake relief

  Jackie Huba

  15 Jan 2010 | 10:49 am

  If you are able, please consider giving to the Haiti relief efforts. We have given to Yele Haiti, a grassroots movement that builds global awareness for Haiti while helping to transform the country through programs in education, sports, the arts and environment. Yéle Haiti was founded in 2005 by Wyclef Jean, Grammy-award winning musician, humanitarian and Goodwill Ambassador to Haiti.

• 
  Curb Cut

• Accessibility Fail, Fail, Fail, Fail and a Win

  Christopher Phillips

  8 Feb 2010 | 6:35 am

  After seeing a number of accessibility fails posted on the Fail Blog: It was great to see this one on their companion blog, Epic Win:

• Open Education and Accessibility

  Christopher Phillips

  14 Aug 2009 | 2:12 am

  The Open Education Conference is happening right now in Vancouver, but is also offering a number of ways to participate remotely, including live and archived streams of the event, or simply follow the tag opened09 just about anywhere (Twitter opened09, Flickr opened09, Delicious opened09, Blogsearch opened09, etc…) The theme of this year’s conference is “Crossing the Chasm” and while I was disappointed that there weren’t more sessions addressing disability accessibility directly, there is a tremendous amount of value in almost every session I have watched to anyone interested in any…

• Game On

  Christopher Phillips

  2 Jun 2009 | 7:46 am

  Dallin Paul Looking Good Congratulations to my youngest brother Dallin Paul who graduates from high school today. After high school, many students with disabilities are offered the opportunity to to participate in some type of post-high education program. Dallin Paul is graduating with an exceptionally large cohort of peers in special education and because of poor planning on the part of the school district his options for a post high education have been severely limited. Long story short, the school district picked the wrong family to try and place a student in a converted gym for a…

• Mad Pride

  Christopher Phillips

  15 May 2009 | 5:33 am

  Newsweek tagline: “Why some mentally ill patients are rejecting their medication and making the case for ‘mad pride.’” From The Growing Push for “Mad Pride”. I am familiar with various movements that celebrate the positive aspects of difference such as Disability Pride, Deaf Pride and Crip Pride, but only recently came across the idea of Mad Pride, a movement that celebrates the positive aspects of mental health diagnoses. The movement has been around for awhile, but a recent Newsweek article was the first I learned of it, at least that I remember since I received my own mental…

• Accessibility Blog and Twitter Roundup from WebAIM

  Christopher Phillips

  30 Apr 2009 | 3:24 pm

  Jared Smith has posted an updated list of the list of accessibility blogs that he follows. In addition, he has added a list of Twitter users “that post frequent and insightful messages on web accessibility”. Accessibility Blog Roundup II Twitter Accessibility Roundup Twitter messages tagged with #accessibility Twitter Accessibility Search

• 
  InfoDesign: Understanding by Design

• The Synaptic Web

  PJB

  8 Feb 2010 | 6:05 am

  "The purpose of this document is to present a straw man overview of emerging trends on the next generation web. We encourage participation and conversation about these proposals so that we, as participants in this ecosystem, can come to a communal understanding our current and emerging opportunities for the web." (Khris Loux, Eric Blantz, and Chris Saad) - courtesy of ruurdpriester

• Hierarchical Task Analysis

  PJB

  8 Feb 2010 | 3:41 am

  "As UX professionals, we have a great many analytical and descriptive tools available to us. In fact, there are so many that it can sometimes be difficult to decide which tool is most appropriate for a given task! Hierarchical task analysis (HTA) is an underused approach in user experience, but one you can easily apply when either modifying an existing design or creating a new design." (Peter Hornsby - UXmatters)

• Browse Is The New Black

  PJB

  8 Feb 2010 | 2:43 am

  "Search, search, search. Everyone is talking about search these days. Bing, semantic search, site search. That's all you hear. Don’t get me wrong: search is wildly important to our daily experiences on the web. I’ve written a bit on search on this blog. (...) But at the same time were seeing a lot of new products and interfaces that offer enhanced online browsing experiences. Browsing it totally underrated, I believe. What's more, looking broadly across human information behavior, we see that browsing is more than an accident, impulsive activity–it's not just aimless surfing."…

• iPad Interesting Moments

  PJB

  8 Feb 2010 | 1:35 am

  "The use of real world style transitions (flipping bookcase over, flipping pages, spreading stacks, rotating orientation, collecting selected elements into stacks) work extremely well with a multi-touch interface. I am using my physical body not a mechanical mouse so the response should feel more real world. This is also what Apple mentions in their UX guidelines." (Bill Scott - Looks Good works Well)

• Live at Interaction’10

  PJB

  7 Feb 2010 | 6:49 am

  "The first day of Interaction 10 in the wonderful city of Savannah, Georgia, kicked off without a hitch. Though eventually everyone was plagued by spotty, windy rain storms, the general pulse of the conference was positive and uplifting. Attendees were still talking about some of the great workshops from the day before, and they carried that energy over into today’s sessions. If one thing had to describe the overall theme of the first day it would be the importance of providing meaning in the work that we do. Below are recaps of the opening and closing keynotes, as well as some of the…

• 
  Information Architects

• iPad Stencil for Omnigraffle

  This is the first version of an OmniGraffle template for folks designing iPad apps. It's not complete; we plan to update it as we're working on our own designs. Contains backgrounds, title bars, buttons, selectors, and other iPhone UI elements Based the iPad PSD GUI by Teehan+Lax. Text is fully editable on ...

• The iPad and the Publishing Industry

  The Thing iPad will save the publishing industry as much as the iPod has saved the music industry. Meaning: There are a couple of things in publishing that it will change. What things? What's going to happen to the news industry? The book industry? Will it allow us to sell ...

• What’s Next in Web Design?

  I've been asked by the Italian magazine L'Espresso to write an article on The Future of Web Design. Here is the (longer) English text. Thinking about what’s next online is fun because everything you wish to come true will come true. While commercial products obey to the laws of the market, ...

• Web Trend Map Video Interview

  I sat down with the video team of GaijinPot.com for a short interview about the Web Trend Map. As you will learn we are planning to publish a book (a Web Trend Map Atlas) next year. Along with the next poster we plan to publish a book in cooperation with ...

• Can Experience be Designed?

  First, think about a number between one and ten. Then take a step back and look at the words "User Experience Design" as if you had never seen them. Look at them closely until you hear them with the vanilla motor voice of Christopher Walken: USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN. What do you ...

• 
  Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

• A List Apart 300

  Jeffrey Zeldman

  9 Feb 2010 | 7:29 am

  Issue 300 of A List Apart for people who make websites solves password-related usability problems with a dash of JavaScript, and employs content strategy to help your site do the right thing at the right time: The Problem with Passwords by LYLE MULLICAN Abandoning password masking as Jakob Nielsen suggests could present serious problems, undermining a user’s trust by failing to meet a basic expectation. But with design patterns gleaned from offline applications, plus a dash of JavaScript, we can provide feedback and reduce password errors without compromising the basic user experience or…

• Free advice: show up early

  Jeffrey Zeldman

  5 Feb 2010 | 7:31 am

  Delay happens. The train is late, the flight is cancelled, the traffic is murder. Travel is the leading edge of entropy, and entropy is the universe’s final comment on the meaning of it all. If the universe is expanding and there are snow delays on Route 1, it’s not your fault that you’re 15 minutes late to the meeting, right? Don’t be so quick to excuse yourself. If 80% of success is just showing up, 90% is showing up early. It’s hard for the client to sympathize with your lateness when she, who had farther to travel, managed to make the meeting on time. No…

• Ahem

  Jeffrey Zeldman

  3 Feb 2010 | 3:39 am

  The first part of my post of 1 February was not an attack on Flash. It described a way of working with Flash that also supports users who don’t have access to Flash. I’ve followed and advocated that approach for 10 years. It has nothing to do with Apple’s recent decisions and everything to do with making content available to people and search engines. It’s how our agency and others use Flash; we’ve published articles on the subject in our magazine, notably Semantic Flash: Slippery When Wet by Daniel Mall. We do the same thing with JavaScript—make sure the site…

• Free advice: buy a dongle

  Jeffrey Zeldman

  2 Feb 2010 | 7:20 am

  There is still no Wi-Fi on the northeast corridor Amtrak trains that carry hundreds of thousands of business travelers each day. So quit whining and get a USB 3G modem. It’s free with monthly service, which is tax-deductible. For the $60/month I pay Verizon, I can connect my laptop to the internet from any train, bus, boat, lounge, lobby, conference room, coffee shop, or just about any other environment to which modern business takes me.

• Laying Pipe

  Jeffrey Zeldman

  2 Feb 2010 | 5:22 am

  Dan Benjamin and yours truly discuss the secret history of blogging, transitioning from freelance to agency, the story behind the web standards movement, the launch of A Book Apart and its first title, HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith, the trajectory of content management systems, managing the growth of a design business, and more in the inaugural episode of the Pipeline.

• 
  Bloug

• No use case necessary

  louisr

  28 Jan 2010 | 6:14 am

  Given that it's now the official national craze, I too will ruminate on the iPad... I don't think that there's a clear use case for something that's small but not as small as a phone, and useful but not as useful as a laptop. (Best effort in a weak field to define the use case so far comes from Luke Wroblewski: "a digital version of your leisure time activities".) But that doesn't matter. It's relatively easy for Apple to create a new platform. There are already plenty of apps out there that will run on it, and the developer community will soon provide us with many, many more. It's what they…

• London, a word please

  louisr

  20 Jan 2010 | 6:16 am

  The early bird registration deadline is coming up (January 31) for the Etre workshops that Steve Krug and I will be teaching in London at the ICA (March 1 and 2). If you don't mind, a word: There are a lot of great opportunities to take good UX-related workshops in and around London. Why come to these? Well, Steve Krug is simply fantastic. What can I say? We've been on the road for seven years, and every time I pop into his workshop, people are absolutely engaged: talking, interacting with each other and with Steve. (He's nice enough to say similar things about my workshop.) Did you think I…

• Site search best practices

  louisr

  19 Jan 2010 | 7:35 am

  A client recently asked me to help come up with a list of "world-class" implementations of site search. "World-class" is always a red flag term for me, because it's a crutch term that suggests that there isn't a clear idea of what constitutes actual quality. (Ergo, it should be banned, like "redesign" and "building community".) So, being the annoying consultant that I am, I gently scolded them, saying that there wasn't one ideal or even optimal local search implementation. But there were some principles worth considering. Here's my first stab; given that these took only a few minutes, I'll…

• A Union Index?

  louisr

  7 Dec 2009 | 3:44 pm

  I've been kicking around an odd idea ever since starting Rosenfeld Media—the idea of a union index, a compilation of all of our books' indices. Now that we've actually got a few books out (#6 is due in about six weeks), it's time to revisit the idea and consider the indices' collective potential. Want to help me figure it out? First, imagine a single, combined index—possibly a single page—that'd reference whichever books where an index entry occurred. Then picture the ability to filter that index by individual title. Now we're ready for some questions: Does it make sense to…

• Updates on new books and workshops

  louisr

  16 Nov 2009 | 12:20 pm

  So much going on right now—good stuff, really—but not much time to tend to Bloug. So just a few notes for now: Rosenfeld Media just published its fifth book: Todd Zaki Warfel's Prototyping: A Practitioner's Guide. I'm thrilled with Todd's work; this is a hugely practical take on a hugely practical topic, and Todd will show you how to prototype from low-tech approaches (e.g., paper) to high-tech (e.g., Axure). And it's on sale now! Our sixth title is just around the corner, and it could be a real game-changer for the user research community. I've read the draft of Nate Bolt and…

• 
  mcu.org.uk

• 60 Hot To Touch Accessible Web Design Tips by Jim Byrne - published in paperback today

  New book by Jim Byrne launched: 60 hot to touch Accessible Web Design tips - the tips no web developer can live without!. Now available in paperback. It takes a different approach to the standard big and heavy web technique tomes currently available - this one offers light bytes for easy digestion. It contains 60 easy to understand, practical tips you can put to good use when developing your next website.

• New Website launched: Accessible Web Design Services Glasgow

  Former Making Connections Unit Director and Web accessibility specialist Jim Byrne has launched his new business website with the aim of helping organisations: Comply with Disability Discrimination legislation. Reach the largest potential audience - via an accessible, usable website. Access tailored training and support to maintain websites in the most efficient and accessible way.

• Seminar: The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and UK websites

  A two hour seminar: Date: 25th May 9.45am - 12am. Book early to avoid disappointment. Venue: The Volunteer Centre, 84 Miller Street, Glasgow G1 1DT Cost: 39UK pounds per person. Facilitator: Jim Byrne email: ddaseminar@jimbyrne.co.uk Does your website comply with the DDA? Book your place on this seminar to explore the issues and find out what you need to know about the DDA and UK websites. This seminar is aimed at those individuals responsible for the creation, or management, of an organisation’s website. By the end of the seminar you will have answers to the following questions: Is your…

• Jim Byrne leaves Glasgow Caledonian University - now providing Web accessibility services

  Jim Byrne leaves Glasgow Caledonian University - to provide accessibility web design, development and training services. I have been working within Glasgow Caledonian University since 1996, running the Making Connections Unit as a non-profit organisation providing advice, support and services to organisations interested in publishing accessible information on the web. In the last year I have worked as the University Web Accessibility Project Manager, providing training and consultancy to the web team (and external organisations) and working towards ensuring university websites are accessible…

• Accessible Web Design in Practice Training Course

  There are still a few places left on the next Making Connections Unit, Accessible Web Design in Practice training course on the 9th and 10th of December. This a 2 day course being run in Glasgow Caledonian University Library in the Centre of Glasgow; the venue is close to both main Glasgow bus and train stations. Register your interest in the course by filling in the booking form. About the course This course is not about creating unattractive 'text only' pages; accessible design is about designing for disabled people and non-disabled people. The training combines off-line discussion and…

• 
  Max Design

• Some links for light reading (9/02/10)

  Russ

  8 Feb 2010 | 11:37 pm

  Social Inclusion for the Web What Web Designers need to know about EPUB We don’t do workflow – The Digital Divide SVG or Canvas? ?hoosing between the two Taming the Elephant in the Room: Brand Perception and Bias The Apple Store’s Checkout Form Redesign The Man Who Looked Into Facebook’s Soul What are the business benefits of HTML5 video? Conversion Room: Improve your web-forms and increase conversions Smashing Silos Explaining what YQL is to non-technical people sIFR default CSS hides content from at least one screen reader Debug PHP with Firebug and FirePHP

• Max Design 2010 workshop series

  Russ

  7 Feb 2010 | 5:38 pm

  We are very excited to announce our CSS, JavaScript and Accessibility workshops for 2010. This year’s workshops will give participants the latest knowledge and skill through our hands-on workshops. 3 expert presenters Kevin Yank – Highly respected technical author and JavaScript expert Roger Hudson – Detailed knowledge of WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 Russ Weakley – Extensive experience in real-world CSS development and training 6 different workshops Workshop 1: Introduction to JavaScript (half-day) Workshop 2: Introduction to Accessibility (half-day) Workshop 3: Introduction to…

• Some links for light reading (3/02/10)

  Russ

  3 Feb 2010 | 2:07 am

  Adding map links and a small map to any text using JavaScript jQuery source viewer Jilion – SublimeVideo HipHop for PHP: Move Fast How should Web browsers render alternative text? Accessible HTML5 Video with JavaScripted captions LunaScript: A new language and platform to take your Web 2.0 apps to the moon? Web Apps: Where Business Needs and User Needs Collide Content Strategy: More than a Bunch of Tactics font-face Browser Support & Tutorial Multiple Backgrounds and CSS Gradients Introducing Gordon: the Flash Player Written in JavaScript 50 Brilliant CSS3/JavaScript Coding…

• Time for a change

  Russ

  1 Feb 2010 | 8:47 pm

  It has been over four years since I last reworked the Max Design site, and it was definitely beginning to show. The site was running WordPress 1.5, and the design was getting very tired. So, over the last few weeks I have gradually been working through the new look. One of the biggest changes was pulling a lot of the old static “articles and presentations” pages into WordPress so they could be managed more cleanly. Unfortunately this has meant a major site restructure, so there will be a lot of 404 errors while things are gradually sorted. A huge thank you to two people for their…

• Some links for light reading (27/01/10)

  Russ

  26 Jan 2010 | 6:35 am

  Unlocking innovation Four Tools for CSS Optimization and Compression Label Alignment in Long Forms High Contrast Proof CSS Sprites Take a few minutes to encourage web accessibility. You can make a difference Safari and Transparent Borders The Dark Side of HTML 5 Video Sass – Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets 5 by 5 Unobtrusive JavaScript is not necessarily accessible JavaScript Flyosity Find The Right JavaScript Solution With A 7-Step Test Using SVG for Flexible, Scalable, and Fun Backgrounds, Part II Articles: Using SVG For Flexible, Scalable, and Fun Backgrounds, Part I Front-end…

• 
  Muffin Research Labs

• Solved: VirtualBox Ubuntu Karmic Server VM crashes

  Stuart Colville

  8 Feb 2010 | 2:12 pm

  Had a weird issue when setting up an Ubuntu Karmic JEOS VM under VirtualBox. When it was installed it rebooted and then the VM window dissappeared. I tried to boot it a second time and it got to grub and then as soon as I selected the kernel I wanted to boot again it crashed. Kernel logs were showing that VirtualBox was segfaulting. I decided to take a look at the VBox.log for the vm and I found this: 00:08:38.967 VM: Raising runtime error 'PAEmode' (fFlags=0x1) 00:08:38.967 Changing the VM state from 'RUNNING' to 'FATAL_ERROR'. 00:08:38.967 Console: VM runtime error: fatal=true ,…

• Howto: SSH into VirtualBox 3 Linux Guests

  Stuart Colville

  8 Feb 2010 | 5:11 am

  In a previous post I wrote about using a TAP interface to be able to SSH into linux guests from the host. Since then changes in the newer versions of VirtualBox have seen the addition of a virtual interface on the Host by default. This post details how to utilise this to allow communication from your host to your guests by simply configuring a second network interface on the guest. Note: the same result can be used by using one bridged interface to a physical network interface. However, I prefer to do it this way as I’m using a laptop and I don’t know at what point I’ll be…

• 2009

  Stuart Colville

  31 Dec 2009 | 10:14 am

  So that was 2009! It seemed to go by very quickly by all accounts. Here’s a few of my highlights from this year. Birth of our third child The most incredible thing that happened in 2009 was the birth of our beautiful daughter Molly in January. It’s been amazing this year watching her grow from being a tiny baby to having her own personality. Judging by how determined she is I’m sure she’s going to keep her Mum and Dad very busy over the coming months. Project Fondue Project Fondue a side project with former colleagues Ed Eliot and Cyril Doussin kicked off properly at…

• Unicomp Customizer Keyboard Review

  Stuart Colville

  24 Dec 2009 | 12:18 pm

  If you’re someone who uses a computer for a living then having a decent keyboard is a very worthwhile investment. Earlier on this year I bought myself a couple of US layout “customizer” keyboards from Unicomp (one for work and one for home). Unicomp was founded in 1996 when they bought the rights to the “buckling spring” technology as used in the well-known IBM Model-M keyboards. The Customizer models are essentially modern manufactured Model M keyboards albeit with slightly different numbers of keys and of course a USB cable. Having had these keyboards for…

• Ubuntu: Changing the default java binary

  Stuart Colville

  5 Dec 2009 | 7:03 am

  Since upgrading to Karmic I’ve had a weird issue with Charles Proxy in that the windows for settings like rewrites seemed to get completely screwed up making it very difficult to see the boxes for entering information. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like broken. Karl von Randow the author of Charles was looking into the issue following my bug report and after he’d been unable to reproduce the issue in a fresh install of Ubuntu Karmic with a Java Runtime downloaded from the sun site he suggested I do the same, as I was currently showing that I was running the OpenJDK…

• 
  vanderwal.net Off the Top

• Good Bye Brad

  It was only four days into 2010 that the reality of life and its frailty surface to take the air out of my breath. It was the death of Brad Graham a very early blogger (BradLands) and host to the pre-SXSW warm-up Break Bread with Brad. As the article says, Brad died of natural causes at the age of 41. Brad was one of those wonderful people who seemed to preternaturally walk up to you and say, "I know you" and with in 15 seconds of first meeting him you knew he was right. Brad was a great host when he was on the road traveling, as I joined in on Break Bread with Brad in San Francisco…

• I Too Miss Blogging

  Ian said it best in the header for his post I miss blogging. There is so much good in Ian's brief post as well as the linked to Dan Cederholm post WoodPress. Before the thoughtless "15 ways to...", which rarely state anything worth reading. I am beginning to believe that the number lists are not meant for reading and only for SEO hits and ad revenue, which is not anything related to user experience but site owner's revenue experience. I repeatedly am finding things I blogged years ago in Google searches when looking for answers. Sadly, at some point I had the answer and was…

• I Love You Dad

  it is in this precious life of ours that we see the living the dying the loving the caring the sharing the bearing the seeing the believing the comforting the guiding and all of the grace we can embrace it is from these lessons most wonderfully shared from a father to his son that we do really see the greatness in life and the blessings within us to live each day as a gift not only to each of us but to all of us through the human bonds of love provided through everlasting grace

• Social Design for the Enterprise Workshop in Washington, DC Area

  I am finally bringing workshop to my home base, the Washington, DC area. I am putting on a my �Social Design for the Enterprise� half-day workshop on the afternoon of July 17th at Viget Labs (register from this prior link). Yes, it is a Friday in the Summer in Washington, DC area. This is the filter to sort out who really wants to improve what they offer and how successful they want their products and solutions to be. Past Attendees have Said... �A few hours and a few hundred dollar saved us tens of thousands, if not well into six figures dollars of value through improving our…

• Catching Up On Personal InfoCloud Blog Posts

  Things here are a little quiet as I have been in writing mode as well as pitching new work. I have been blogging work related items over at Personal InfoCloud, but I am likely only going to be posting summaries of those pieces here from now on, rather than the full posts. I am doing this to concentrate work related posts, particularly on a platform that has commenting available. I am still running my own blogging tool here at vanderwal.net I wrote in 2001 and turned off the comments in 2006 after growing tired of dealing comment spam. The following are recently posted over at Personal…

• 
  Ordered List Blog

• Stop Being an Idiot

  Steve Smith

  3 Feb 2010 | 10:00 am

  I hear this phrase a lot, and even recently, out of my own mouth: “Users are stupid, so we have to dumb this down to the lowest common denominator.” Stop it. Just stop it.Our job, when designing features and interfaces, is to make them powerful, usable, and understandable. Not to cater to those people too lazy to think. Our job is to make things intuitive. But intuition still requires an individual to want to understand something. It requires an attempt to understand. It requires thought, even subconsciously. We have little power over people’s desire to succeed. We can only…

• Stop Blogging

  Steve Smith

  12 Jan 2010 | 11:00 am

  I mean it. All of you people are writing fantastic, useful articles about code, methods, and technologies, but you’re putting them in blog posts — a date-based format that encourages us to leave things as they were, historically.And with any blog post about technology, it gets stale. It gets outdated. And in the worst case, several months or years later, it’s just absolutely wrong. As a content consumer, sometimes we can tell. Some of us might pay attention to the post date, some of us might be deep enough into the subject to tell outdated information from fresh. But…

• A New Look, a New CMS

  Steve Smith

  7 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm

  We’ve been focusing our efforts on building Harmony the past few months, but we recently carved out some time to give our site some much needed love and attention.This design has been waiting in the wings for a few months, and now that Harmony is able to handle most everything this site needed, we’re ready to make the switch. We’ve reorganized and replaced some content, so I’m sure a few things will be broken. If they are, just let us know. Also, this design uses some pretty advanced CSS3, so things might not look quite the same in older or less capable browsers.

• Harmony Documentation

  Steve Smith

  18 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm

  We’re finally revealing the tip of the Harmony iceberg in the form of a nearly-complete documentation site that will fuel our beta testers, and help future customers hit the ground running once the CMS is released. I say ‘tip of the iceberg’ for two reasons. One, Harmony has been in the making for 18 months now, and has been under constant revision, refinement, and improvement the whole time. It’s was clear when we started Harmony that we knew what direction we wanted to go, but had no idea what it would become, specifically. But more importantly, reading about, and…

• Building Evented Single Page Applications

  John Nunemaker

  13 Sep 2009 | 2:59 pm

  Today I did a presentation on what Steve and I have been working on behind closed doors for the past year (or more it seems). It is always fun to share the exciting things we have been up to and this was no different.I promised those that were at the talk that I would post my slides, so here you go. I don’t know how helpful the slides are without my incredible, booming voice, but hopefully you find value in them. Since people were curious, I have also pasted some of the code online. Right now it is quick, dirty and relies on an older nightly version of jQuery, but hopefully some will…

• 
  Putting people first

• New Philips phone for the elderly

  Experientia

  9 Feb 2010 | 5:40 am

  Philips reports that its new Lifeline Cordless Phone System has been designed “to enable the frail and elderly to maintain independence, despite their changing physical needs.” “The Philips Lifeline Cordless Phone System is a cordless home phone with a medical alert communicator. It provides a Personal Emergency Response Service (PERS) for frail, elderly seniors allowing them to maintain their independence and continue living independantly. The Lifeline service solution consists of a wearable personal help button and a PERS telephone base station. It provides subscribers…

• Designing financial services for the poor

  Experientia

  9 Feb 2010 | 1:21 am

  The Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at the University of California, Irvine, headed by Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology, aims to foster a community of inquiry and practice on new forms of money and financial technology among the world’s poorest people: those who live on less than $1 per day. IMTFI awards fellowships to researchers in the developing world to conduct 12-month projects, many with a strongly qualitative component. “We seek to create a community of practice and inquiry into the everyday uses and meanings of money, as well as examining…

• Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium 2010

  Experientia

  8 Feb 2010 | 2:23 am

  For the past four years, Microsoft Research (MSR) has sponsored a symposium on social computing that “brings together academic and industry researchers, developers, writers, and influential commentators in order to open new lines of communication among previously disconnected groups.” The theme of the 2010 symposium, held at ITP at NYU, was “The city as platform”, which revolved around various sub-topic such as urban informatics, the city as a social technology, pervasive games and government infrastructure/data. Participants included Genevieve Bell, Julian Bleecker, Ben…

• Live at Interaction’10: day 2

  Experientia

  7 Feb 2010 | 9:21 am

  Niklas Wolkert & Brad Nunnally provide their second report on Johnnyy Holland on the Interaction10 conference in Savannah, Georgia – this time focused on the second day. “After a night of some great parties, and even better conversation, the second day of Interaction 10 began with a preview of the new IxDA.org website redesign. The team doing the redesign covered all the great new features that are coming, and went into detail on how local groups will be able to leverage the new site for their own networks and events. The excitement from yesterday was easily carried over, and…

• Live at Interaction’10: day 1

  Experientia

  6 Feb 2010 | 1:46 am

  Niklas Wolkert & Brad Nunnally report on Johnnyy Holland on the first day of the Interaction10 conference in Savannah, Georgia. “If one thing had to describe the overall theme of the first day it would be the importance of providing meaning in the work that we do. Below are recaps of the opening and closing keynotes, as well as some of the sessions from the day.” Check their review on presentations by Nathan Shedroff, Dave Gray, Nate Bolt, Matt Cottam, Kendra Shimmell, Nicolas Nova and Jon Kolko. Read full story

• 
  Reaction!

• An HD video tour of the International Space Station

  9 Feb 2010 | 1:31 am

  An incredible walkthrough of the International Space Station. [via Gizmodo]

• Big Pecker

  9 Feb 2010 | 1:08 am

  Aitken & Hodge's Big Pecker is a "scaled up replica of the small toys that peck their way down poles".

• Tokyo Sky Drive

  9 Feb 2010 | 12:54 am

  These stunning videos - from cat252jp - are worth watching in full-screen HD...

• Touchy Tips round-up

  8 Feb 2010 | 5:06 am

  In case you missed 'em...Over the course of the last two weeks, we've posted 10 wacky video-based tips aimed at helping you get the most out of your iPhone/iPod Touch. Head on over to our Etre Touchy blog for a round-up!

• Tips for better ideas

  8 Feb 2010 | 3:00 am

  A nice little promo vid for The Rethink Scholarship at Langara College: [via narrylikes]

• 
  Shane Morris: UXB

• My last Microsoft blog post

  shanemo

  12 Jan 2010 | 11:10 pm

  Well, after three and a bit very enjoyable years it’s time to sign off from Microsoft. Back in 2006 when Frank Arrigo hired me as one of Microsoft’s first User Experience Evangelists, we had a simple, exciting, and challenging, mission: To make Microsoft relevant to designers, and to make design relevant to Microsoft developers. Since then we’ve made some great progress. Back in 2006 Microsoft’s designer toolset featured Microsoft Paint :-). Now: We are up to the third release of Expression Studio Sketchflow is being widely adopted as we speak There have been three (almost four)…

• UXpod Interview: Microsoft Surface and multi-touch interfaces

  shanemo

  11 Jan 2010 | 4:09 pm

  Late last year my good friend Gerry Gaffney interviewed me for his UXpod podcast. We chatted about Microsoft Surface, the Lonely Planet project and designing multi-touch and tangible UI’s in general. It was great to chat with Gerry, and an honour to be included in such prestigious company! Read the transcript or download the audio here: UXpod: Microsoft Surface and multi-touch interfaces - an interview with Shane Morris

• OZCHI Next Week in Melbourne

  shanemo

  19 Nov 2009 | 2:24 am

  OZCHI is Australia’s annual Human-Computer Interaction Conference, where academics and practitioners get together to share the latest research and thinking around all things HCI. I went to my first OZCHI back in 1993, and my second Melbourne OZCHI will be next week from 25-27 of November, with workshops and tutorials in the two days beforehand. Keynote Speakers We have some amazing keynote speakers: Bill Moggridge, Co-founder of IDEO Patrick Hofmann, User Experience Designer, Google Australia Yvonne Rogers, Director, Pervasive Interaction Lab, Open University, UK   Industry Day We also…

• Surface SDK now available to all

  shanemo

  19 Nov 2009 | 2:15 am

  If you’re dying to try your hands (get it?) at developing for Surface, then you’ll be please to know that The Surface SDK Workstation Edition is now available to all at surface.com. Also, a bunch of information is appearing on MSDN, TechNet, Download Centre etc. But, why paraphrase when I can copy and Paste? Microsoft Surface SDK Workstation Edition Now on Microsoft Download Centre! At PDC this week, we announced the broad availability of the Microsoft Surface SDK Workstation Edition. Now anyone interested in developing collaborative, engaging massive multi-touch, multi-user experiences…

• What does Microsoft have to offer Digital Agencies? Microsoft Innovation Days

  shanemo

  8 Nov 2009 | 9:23 pm

  In December DPE (where I work at Microsoft) and the Partner Team are getting together to run a series of “Innovation Days” in five Australian cities. Innovation Days are a rapid tour of some of the latest goodies from Microsoft, with a focus on how they can benefit your business. We’ve divided the day into two halves: The first half of the day focuses on technologies related to user experience and the web. This half will be especially relevant to digital agencies and other organisations focussed on delivering great customer experiences. We’ll cover Silverlight, Expression, Sketchflow,…

• 
  Standard Web Standards

• Hiatus.

  Regnard

  15 Jan 2010 | 1:13 am

  Standard Web Standards will be on an indefinite hiatus starting today. I’ve mentioned in another blog of mine that I plan to focus on new and different things this 2010 and writing actively in this blog is one of the things I plan to do less of. I believe that the Web Standards war has been [...]

• Friendster Revamps: Now What?

  Regnard

  7 Dec 2009 | 12:07 am

  Friendster just launched a new look and feel that makes it look more like a site that belongs to the new decade. But is it enough? Friendster’s steady decline decline and getting leapfrogged by competitors MySpace and Facebook are well-documented and this latest move can be seen as a way to increase its value since there [...]

• Google Places Vote of Confidence on HTML5

  Regnard

  1 Dec 2009 | 3:11 am

  Chalk one up for Web Standards. Google has decided to retire Google Gears and is moving forward with HTML5. This isn’t really exciting news for the everyday web user but for the standardistas out there (*chirp* *chirp*), this is exciting news. Heck, HTML5 is still not even done a formal specification! With this development Gears has [...]

• Five Years of Firefox in Manila Done!

  Regnard

  22 Nov 2009 | 12:46 am

  The Five Years of Firefox in Manila event was held yesterday and it was  a great launchpad for the Mozilla Philippines Community. I, along with Community coordinators Ren-Ren Gabas, Allan Caeg, and Mozilla Campus Reps from Colegio San Juan de Letran Calamba led by Joell Lapitan, came at 12 noon to make the necessary preparations at [...]

• 5 Reasons to Attend Five Years of Firefox in Manila!

  Regnard

  17 Nov 2009 | 8:05 pm

  The Mozilla Philippines Community, Globe Telecom, and the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) will be hosting the Five Years of Firefox in Manila! event this coming November 21, 2009 (3pm-5pm) at the Fuller Hall of AIM in Makati City. This event is a get-together of Mozilla Firefox and Web Standards fans in the Philippines and here [...]

• 
  Subtraction.com

• D-Crit Now Accepting Applications for Fall 2010

  desk@subtraction.com

  6 Feb 2010 | 6:43 am

  The School of Visual Arts’ MFA in Design Criticism program, run by my friend Alice Twemlow, is gearing up for its second school year starting this autumn. There’s not another program in the country, to my knowledge, that gives students access to a wealth of critical design knowledge on this level: Create original segments in a radio and podcasting workshop with PRI’s “Studio 360” senior producer Leital Molad and host Kurt Andersen; voyage deep into 20th century design with design historian Russell Flinchum; learn investigative journalism techniques…

• Pulling Over and Asking for Directions

  desk@subtraction.com

  4 Feb 2010 | 6:34 pm

  All told, I think I did a pretty good job of ignoring “Lost” for years, in spite of all the raves and recommendations from friends. Mostly, it was out of self-interest; I couldn’t afford the time investment that another hugely complicated television series would require, especially one that seemed to inspire such obsessive fandom. But now, living with a “Lost” devotee as I do, I find I can no longer willfully ignore the persistent phenomenon that is J.J. Abrams’ labyrinthine television saga. I started watching a handful of episodes here and there last…

• We Love Patterns

  desk@subtraction.com

  3 Feb 2010 | 10:54 am

  Just clicking through this bevvy of gorgeous and incredibly fun pattern designs from the very talented, young, Argentinian illustrator Gastòn Caba (and others) is just plain joyful. I know everyone thinks I’m all about grids and minimalism and monochromatic palettes and being very serious (okay, guilty), but it doesn’t mean I don’t also find this stuff to be totally great, too.

• Notes on iPad

  desk@subtraction.com

  27 Jan 2010 | 6:26 pm

  It’s not as if I haven’t had a point of view on all of this tablet computing device stuff that’s been lighting up the Internets for the past several months, but for professional reasons, I’ve had to keep mum. Suffice it to say, I’m really excited about Apple’s iPad, announced today, and I’m even more excited about what can be done with it. However. I’m pretty sure that I’m in the camp that believes that this is not the salvation that most publishing companies have been looking for. Not that the device falls short in some way, but rather…

• The New York Rocker

  desk@subtraction.com

  26 Jan 2010 | 8:04 pm

  A small but excellent selection of covers from “the definitive music and culture publication in New York City in the early 1980s.” I’d never heard of it before, but then in the Eighties New York was just an idea and not a real place for me yet. These covers evoke that dreamland of my youth though: gritty, plausibly if not authentically punk, confrontational and exclusive (who the hell were Human Switchboard? Oh, that’s who).

• 
  The Web Standards Project

• A New Direction and a New Project

  agustafson

  2 Feb 2010 | 9:08 am

  A lot of you are probably wondering where the WaSP of the late ’90s or even the early ’00s has gone. Where are the actions? Where is the advocacy? Who should we be mad at today? The truth is that this organization is evolving. For the last two years, a large amount of our focus has been placed on education, realized in our creation of the InterAct curriculum framework and the birth of the Open Web Education Alliance. With the lion’s share of our talent and energy devoted to these efforts, things have been noticeably quiet on this blog, but that’s not an excuse…we can and…

• France and Germany call for the end of IE6

  agustafson

  20 Jan 2010 | 7:29 am

  As you may have heard, the “Operation Aurora” cyber attack that occurred in December has prompted the formal warnings from both the French and German governments about the use of IE6 (and 7 and 8, for that matter) because of its security vulnerabilities. This leads me to two questions: Will these warnings have an impact on the use of IE6 in France and Germany? What about the rest of the world? What do you think?

• Be a True Blue Beanie Supporter of Web Standards

  goodwitch

  24 Nov 2009 | 8:13 am

  Monday, November 30, 2009 is the 3rd annual Blue Beanie Day. Started by Doug Vos, Blue Beanie Day is a way to show support for web standards and accessibility. Excerpt from the 3rd Annual Blue Beanie Day Event Page: It’s easy to show your support for web design done right. Beg, borrow, or buy a Blue Beanie (or Blue Toque in Canada) and snap a photo of your mug wearing the blue. (Or get creative with Photoshop). Then on November 30, switch your profile picture in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, (and any other social network) and post your photo to the Flickr Blue Beanie Day 2009 group. Want to…

• Introducing The Open Web Education Alliance

  awalter

  29 Jun 2009 | 5:49 am

  The W3C recently announced an exciting new incubator group – The Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA) – that is certain to have a significant impact on helping web standards and best practices find their way into classrooms around the world. The mission of OWEA is to bring together companies, schools, and organizations involved in shaping the education of Web professionals to explore the issues around the topic of Web development education and create solutions for improving it. Many organizations like Opera, Adobe, Yahoo, WOW, and WaSP InterAct have been diligently working to…

• Interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification.

  blawson

  13 May 2009 | 3:19 am

  You’ve heard it’s coming in 2012. Or maybe 2022. It’s certainly not ready yet, but some parts are already in browsers now so for the standards-savvy developers, the future is worth investigating today. Ian “Hixie” Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification, hopes that the spec will go to Last Call Working Draft in October this year. Accessibility Task Force member, Bruce Lawson, interviews Hixie on how the specification for the next generation of the Web’s markup language is shaping up. Disclosure of affiliations: both work for browser vendors—Bruce…

• 
  UsabilityBlog

• The Nirvana Phone: Can I Have One Now Please?

  Paul Sherman

  4 Feb 2010 | 9:18 am

  Yesterday I posted about a discussion Jared Spool and I had about the import of the iPad. I made the claim that the handset would continue to be the innovation driver, and as soon as it had the computing horsepower to drive a large LCD monitor and run productivity applications, it would be the primary and dominant computing platform. Several smart commenters weighed in as well, so check out their comments here at the post’s permalink. Anyway, it turns out I’m not much of a prognosticator. It’s already being done. Check out the video to see Citrix’s Nirvana phone…

• Tablets Are (Probably) Superfluous

  Paul Sherman

  2 Feb 2010 | 7:28 am

  I really thought I’d be able to resist bloviating about the iPad. But then I read this tweet from Jared Spool: Is nobody else talking about the iPad’s interesting facet? It brings the gap between phone & computer manufacturers closer together. It got pushed to his Facebook as an update, where I flippantly responded: And that’s a good thing why?? :-) Graciously, Jared ignored my dumbass comment and persisted, writing this: Seriously, I think there’s going to be some really interesting synthesis here. Nokia, LG, and Motorola really haven’t done anything scaled…

• Ling’s Cars: It Works

  Paul Sherman

  1 Feb 2010 | 7:01 am

  (Click to view full size) Here’s the thing about LingsCars.com: It works. Yes, it’s ugly as sin, an affront to the design sensibilities of practically everyone. And this picture doesn’t do it justice. Go to the site, you need to see the seizure-inducing blinky-blinky. But it works. It really does. Let’s unpack that a bit. What do I mean when I say it works? It’s simple. The site fulfills the goals of the business, which I’m guessing are: To lease cars to customers. To create a memorable experience and make Ling’s Cars top-of-mind for UK people who…

• The First Thing We Do, Let’s Keep The Lawyers Out Of The UI

  Paul Sherman

  31 Jan 2010 | 10:47 am

  (Click to view full size) Old-school readers of UsabilityBlog may remember my (ranty but well-reasoned) diatribe against EULA’s and how they’re presented in software user interfaces. (Also check out my follow-up posts here and here.) This picture I took the other day  reminded me how easy it is to corrupt and degrade the user experience with obtuse and unfriendly language. In this case, I was at the bank setting up an account. The rep handed me the account agreement, and then told me that the bank didn’t require me to sign the actual forms anymore; they’d recently…

• So Bad It’s Good

  Paul Sherman

  15 Jan 2010 | 4:22 am

  Click to view full size Check it out now. Today. Go on, you know you want to. And here’s the scary thing: IT’S STILL BEING UPDATED REGULARLY. How scary/awesome is that? Here’s the URL: http://www.Havenworks.com. I should also post Ling’s Cars. I’ll get around to that this week. In the meantime, enjoy HavenWorks, and try not to have a seizure. (And if you do, it’s not my fault.)

• 
  User Centered

• Usability Design Errors that Cost Lives

  2 Feb 2010 | 4:12 pm

  This is speculation so I leave you to make your own judgment. You may recall the Buffalo Crash last year that killed 50 people. One of those being a man in his house on the ground. What's interesting here is they are starting to release their findings and while training and fatigue are critical. So to is the design of the safety system used for command-and-control of the plane. The system, in the event of an imminent stall (based on computer calculations, not sensed-data), shakes the control stick used to control the altitude of the plane. Then, if a stall does start to take place, the stick…

• Trickey form flow

  6 Jan 2010 | 2:18 pm

  I would design this login form to respect the "flow" of the fields with the eye. The "go" button is visually disassociated with the name/pwd fields, compared to the "why login on function" I would swap 'em. (if you follow the link, you just gotta check out Petey and Pokey! Best mascots EVER!)

• Best way to ensure consistent results in your survey

  6 Jan 2010 | 2:11 pm

  Jeff Harrison found this screen while taking a survey for JC Penny's:

• Future magazines and photobooks

  31 Dec 2009 | 8:19 am

  A hybrid proposal of several very good user interactions. ...

• User Centered Design...HTC HD2- ringer shuts off when it's picked up!

  4 Nov 2009 | 12:27 pm

  It's a simple matter that just about any modern smartphone can do, but it's the fit & finish that make a great user centered experience. The HTC HD2 (which I'm impressed with) uses its accelerometer to silence the ringer when the user picks up the device. Great for those that fumble around in their purse or computer bag because they forgot to switch to vibrate (use Locale on the Android platform!)

• 
  Veerle's blog: full articles

• Create a flag from a brush stroke in Illustrator

  veerle@duoh.com

  3 Feb 2010 | 1:38 am

  Last week I talked about the logo design for Visit France. Looking at this logo again, I thought this would be a good opportunity to explain a bit more how I created the flag. No special tricks were involved though, a lot of Pen drawing and tweaking work was needed to get the result I wanted. It’s time to brush up your Illustrator Pen tool techniques. Blue part of the flag We'll be building the flag starting with the blue part, secondly the red part and last the white part with a 'ribbon' effect. Starting with a brush stroke I started from a Brush Stroke that I found in the Artistic…

• Logo design for Visit France

  veerle@duoh.com

  23 Jan 2010 | 2:25 am

  Not so long ago we had the pleasure to work together with the mighty Andy Clarke from Stuff and Nonsense. He was working on a site called “Stay in Wales”  and his client needed a logo for this project. Visit France Andy's client liked the logo very much so we had the pleasure to design another logo in a similar style for a project called "Visit France", a site that is specialized in finding accommodation in France. Thinking process As you have noticed, both sites use the same design, and so it was very clear from the start that this logo should use the same design style and…

• Twenty Ten + sneak peek of Veerle’s blog 3.0

  veerle@duoh.com

  8 Jan 2010 | 6:46 am

  The break between Xmas and New Year was over before I even fully realized that two weeks have past. I’ve made some great progress working on my new blog during that break. Work has been in full swing already so I hope that I can spend my weekends working on it further. I started sharing some random bits on my Twitter feed. If you follow you’ll understand why it is taking so long, plus I don’t like half work ;) Twenty Ten In other news, partner of this site Authentic Jobs is running a sweet campaign. Regular readers will know that there is this yearly promotion. This year…

• SLV Rent web site

  veerle@duoh.com

  11 Dec 2009 | 5:50 am

  Time for a bit of design background of this recent project we just launched. SLV Rent is a company specialized in sound, light, and vision. Duoh! also designed the logo, business cards, invoices, and advertisements for them. This project seemed the perfect fit to try something we didn’t to use before. One Page Sites This project was an interesting case to see what we as a designer could do with just a single page. The fact that our client wanted to differentiate himself from his competitors played an important role in the decision to opt for a one page site. As far as we could tell from…

• Update on what is going on

  veerle@duoh.com

  24 Nov 2009 | 11:17 am

  Here is a little update on what is going on over at Duoh! HQ. The new blog is coming along slowly and I am almost at the stage of adding content. Currently I need to work on the archive page and my about page. Those are still two big pages that I need to finish. When these are done I can concentrate on getting some content in there. Slowly moving forward I hoped I would be further along by now but life and work got in the way. A few weeks ago I was in Leiden for EECI 2009 and we recently had some friends over from the US that we showed around. Since it is only during the weekends that I can…

• 
  The Work•Play•Experience Blog

• Theatrical tools for service experience - an overview

  29 Jan 2010 | 3:07 pm

  Top practical tipsTheater can give you powerful - and long proven - tools for service design and experience work. Our customers at Work•Play•Experience love them, and I've written about them over the years on this blog. Here are links to some of the best...Rehearsal and service prototypingSetting up a safe space (forget this, and you can forget the whole thing)Running the session (why it's important to break the rules)Powerful rehearsal/prototyping toolsThe director's chairSubtext (top tip!)Experience structure and timingPerfect story structure (top tip!)Starting badly on purposeWorking…

• Different workspaces...

  4 Jan 2010 | 9:04 am

  ...how Work•Play•Experience gets down to businessWhen we are boldly going where no service design agency has gone before, Markus and I find it useful to have different spaces for different tasks.The BridgeAdam's loft office - light, airy, equipped with a big table, grand piano and much stuff. Great for big ideas, strategic planning and long term thinking.EngineeringMarkus' basement office - big screens, fast internet, mega printers and lots of toys. The ideal place to get down, dirty and into detail.Ten ForwardFor unstructured work and discussions, and for clearing up the bits and pieces;…

• Happy Holidays one and all...

  24 Dec 2009 | 9:49 am

  Silent nights...I'm having a quiet Christmas in Nuremberg (the Capital City of Christmas, or so they tell me) and taking it easy after a very busy few months.It's been an excellent year for WorkPlayExperience. Thanks to Markus for rowing his half of the boat so brilliantly, and thanks to Iomas Media, Ernst & Young and our (still anonymous) VeryBigCustomer for keeping us busy and giving us great times in 2009!The downside of our busy schedule has been a dearth of posts on this blog. Sorry! I hope to get more posted in 2010 - until then, enjoy this view of Nuremberg at Christmas and follow…

• Powerpoint, bras and twitter art

  19 Oct 2009 | 4:44 am

  Just for funArtist Johanna Basford asked the twittering world for ideas, and proceeded to incorporate every one in a drawing that could easily become the new wallpaper at Arkham Asylum.Of course, I tweeted in "Powerpoint and a bra", and the result is in there somewhere. Thanks Johanna!See if you can spot our contribution among the whales, badgers, monkeys and dinosaurs... here's the report.

• Top 10 Reasons why Powerpoint is like a bra

  7 Oct 2009 | 3:42 pm

  Yes, really. It drives me crazy when people think of their Powerpoint* slides as their "presentation". Really, truly crunchy-monkey-nut crazy. Today, I was so annoyed at this habit that I tweeted:The tweet rang bells with a few folks, notably Chris Atherton. Well, I do like to ring bells - so, for the list fetishists among you, here are...The Top 10 Reasons a Powerpoint Slidedeck is Just Like a Bra. (You can also have this list in Chinese, courtesy of ExcelPro.)10. It is often used out of habit or insecurity - but there are plenty of situations where it only gets in the way 9. It's possible…

• 
  Yu Centrik

• A Self-Educated Third World

  Jay Vidyarthi

  5 Feb 2010 | 6:44 am

  I recently returned from a month-long foray through India.  As the country from which both of my parents immigrated to Canada, the trip was enlightening in many ways.  Among the countless revelations lay a few economic and technological insights which I thought might interest our readers.  Are you a global traveler?  These thoughts are obviously anecdotal and I welcome your comments from your own experiences in other parts of the world. While the major cities of India have become increasingly “westernized” and the country’s reputation as a hotbed for technology grows,…

• The Virtual, the Ambient and the Minimalist

  jstemp

  13 Jan 2010 | 6:53 am

  During a recent reorganization of my apartment, while I was replacing my many CDs, DVDs and books in the bookshelves, I realized that at least a year had passed since I had listened to one of the CDs in my collection.  The same was true for one of the books I had in hardcopy.  I had no use for these things, nor any desire to continue owning them. As a matter of fact, the way I listen to music has gradually evolved from a physical CD to a virtual musical environment on my mp3 player and laptop, where I have also begun to watch television on Apple TV.  Over the last year, I have also begun…

• Merry Christmas!

  jstemp

  23 Dec 2009 | 7:12 am

  It’s almost the end of the year. Despite the recession, 2009 has been an exciting year full of challenging projects and hard work. We’re taking a short break and see you again January 4, 2010. From all of us Happy New Year !

• Emirates Ranks Highest In International Airline Web Site Localization Study

  jstemp

  26 Nov 2009 | 2:01 pm

  This year the User Experience Alliance (UXalliance), a global network of leading user research firms, celebrated World Usability Day by unveiling the preliminary findings of the first “Global-Local Monitor” conducted on airline Web sites The Global-Local Monitor assesses how well a site is localized or adapted to local language and culture.Localization is based on factors such as the proper use of local languages, character sets, weights and measures, currencies, dates and times, and culturally sensitive imagery. In this case, how well an airline’s Web site is localized could measurably…

• Handbook of Global User Research

  jstemp

  26 Nov 2009 | 1:31 pm

  Edited by Robert Schumacher, the Handbook of Global User Research is the first book to focus on global user research. The book collects insight from UX professionals from twenty countries and, following a typical project timeline, presents practical insights into the preparation, fieldwork, analysis and reporting, and overall project management for global user research projects. Learn more about this book. ———–

• 
  UI-patterns.com

• Blog post: 48 great ways to design lists in web design

  8 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  We’ve collected 45 examples of great list design on web pages. They all have great attention to color, spacing, background/foreground relationship, and general style. Some lists use icons, while some use other means of communicating and separating list items. Some are vertical, while some are horizontal. Some consists of boxes, while some are floating in free space. Either way, they are all elegant and beautiful. Enjoy the Lists screenshot collection!

• Blog post: 42 examples of Coming Soon page designs

  6 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  Are you building the next big web application? Then you want to check out these cool “Coming soon” page designs to inspire your own “We’re launching soon” page. Coming soon pages are a great place to create hype about your project that’s going to take over the world. Silverback did this a few years ago by creating a then groundbreaking splash page in terms of CSS use (visit the size an resize your window). Other websites merely display screenshots of the application under construction – giving investors, future users, and other stakeholders a sneak…

• Blog post: 33 examples of modal windows in web design

  2 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  Is the modal window the Web 2.0 version of the ever so annoying pop up window? It can be! However, if used cleverly it can provide the flow and ease-of-use of desktop applications. The modal window (or modal box) is a great way to hide things in order to give the user a great sense of overview and clarity of what he can expect from a user interface. Hiding things like contact forms, sign up forms, etc., can help unclutter an interface. Modal windows can also be used to hide away large versions of screenshots, or even embedded videos. Modal are most used for hiding away contact forms, login…

• Blog post: Web apps for usability testing

  6 Dec 2009 | 4:00 pm

  Once you start testing your web designs systematically and on a regular basis, it can be hard to find test subjects that still have a fresh mind towards your design. Exactly this need has been spotted by a group of companies that each tries to deliver online user testing in their old way. Free online user testing services FiveSecondTest is a free tool where you can upload your design as a screenshot and carry a series of different tests out on it. Online user testing services you need to pay for Usertesting.com has real people on their payroll, which you pay to carry out live user tests…

• Blog post: How to get better at UI design

  2 Dec 2009 | 4:00 pm

  In the quest of becoming a good UI designer, you can come a long way by reading books, attending conferences, formally educating yourself, trying out tutorials, or just experimenting on your own. However, if you want to go into hyper-speed in bettering your UI design skills, the best way to learn is to work with other designers. Find them at your workplace, hire them, or spend time online in the User Experience- or Interaction-Designer world. For learning on your own, I have collected a list of various resources that will help you on your way to becoming a good designer. However, before you…

• 
  Methink

• Users Are Not Always Right

  patcheung

  12 Jan 2010 | 9:45 pm

  A while back (on another UX blog), I posted about how it’s not always good to listen to your web users. I just wanted to reiterate that concept here, since lately we, at Methink, have been getting projects where we need to actually ignore what users would traditionally want. Sometimes, [...]

• Beyond Intuitive

  patcheung

  14 Dec 2009 | 12:43 pm

  One of the core goals of UX design is to make websites as intuitive as possible. We accomplish this by following web conventions that users are accustomed to experiencing. For example, to let users know about a required field on a form, many sites place a red asterisk (*) next [...]

• User Experience is Simple

  patcheung

  10 Dec 2009 | 4:34 pm

  A lot of times, when people hear that we practice User Experience Design, they respond by saying, “Excellent! So you guys must produce a lot of these flashy type sites. We want our site to be real flashy and exciting too!” Well…that’s not really what we do. If the context [...]

• Methink Moves To New Studio

  patcheung

  2 Dec 2009 | 1:28 pm

  We’ve moved, and we’re finally getting settled into our new Methink web development studio! Located in the heart of Pasadena, CA on Colorado Blvd, we feel this was the prime location for us to serve our clients around Pasadena, Orange County, Los Angeles, and Hollywood. Drawing from the design talent [...]

• Methink Rebranded

  patcheung

  16 Nov 2009 | 7:35 pm

  You probably noticed, our website just got a little facelift. Yes, throughout the past year, we’ve grown some…and we were long overdue for a site redesign to reflect our updated brand. Our team has been working hard to refine what we do, and we’re excited to officially announce several new [...]

• 
  Futile

• WPF Sonar application using Arduino and PING))) sensor

  I’ve been playing around with the Arduino more and more lately and really wanted to find a way to make it work with my other world of C# and WPF.   The idea was to make an application that changes the screen based on how far away the user is.  The only way that I could [...] Related posts:SEO for Silverlight Simple CSS based wireframe annotation Silverlight 2.0 Twitter Widget

• links for 2010-02-06

  SharePoint 2007 as a WCF host – Step #1, make a WCF Home | Sahil Malik – blah.winsmarts.com (tags: web development sharepoint moss webservice) Related posts:SharePoint Videos and Articles Adding Faceted Search to your Sharepoint links for 2009-10-03 Related posts:SharePoint Videos and Articles Adding Faceted Search to your Sharepoint links for 2009-10-03

• links for 2010-01-29

  Move Domain Between Accounts – DreamHost (tags: webdesign dreamhost tech hosting) Related posts:links for 2008-03-14 links for 2010-01-03 links for 2010-01-21 Related posts:links for 2008-03-14 links for 2010-01-03 links for 2010-01-21

• links for 2010-01-21

  Removing the Center Dash Trim – Scion xB Interior (tags: auto scion howto) Related posts:links for 2010-01-03 links for 2010-02-06 links for 2010-01-29 Related posts:links for 2010-01-03 links for 2010-02-06 links for 2010-01-29

• links for 2010-01-03

  Color Solid Ink Printing I'm learning more about the various types of printing solutions out there. Solid ink printing is really very interesting. (tags: printing, solid ink) Related posts:links for 2010-01-21 links for 2010-02-06 links for 2010-01-29 Related posts:links for 2010-01-21 links for 2010-02-06 links for 2010-01-29

• 
  Usability Counts | User Experience, Social Media

• Career Mondays: User Experience Intern — Costa Mesa, CA

  Patrick Neeman

  8 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

  I know the guy posting this (Brian Salzman), and this is a great position. If you are looking to break in the field, this is a good place to start. IBM in Costa Mesa, CA has an opening for a paid user experience intern. We are looking for students to start early in 2010 and to work for at least six months. We do not offer summer internships. IBM interns join multidisciplinary product development teams to design, prototype, and evaluate graphical user interfaces for IBM’s industry-leading database, business intelligence, and content management products. Interns collaborate with user…

• iPad? iDisapointed.

  Patrick Neeman

  8 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

  Stephanie Bergman is a Social Media and Product Management consultant friend of mine. She’s very sharp, a good compass of where to go. Here’s her opinion of the iPad, and you can find her blog here. And yes, I’ll have my own opinion. Earlier today, Apple announced the tablet computer the world has been waiting for. And it isn’t quite a tablet or a computer. It’s more of an entertainment device – a “third category” as Steve Jobs put it – and one I don’t really think the world needs. I’ve never been really excited about the idea of a tablet, so I was biased…

• Silly Saturdays: Bud Light Clothing Drive

  Patrick Neeman

  6 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

  Similar Posts: Silly Saturdays: Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought… Silly Saturdays: Beat Box Champion Internet Explorer 8: Beta, But Has Some Nifty Features Graphics Gone Bad: The Winners Of Bad Infographic Design Consultant Thursdays: Don’t Gather Requirements, Drive Them

• Silly Saturdays: Historic ‘Blockbuster’ Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past

  Patrick Neeman

  30 Jan 2010 | 12:00 pm

  Similar Posts: Silly Saturdays: You Tube In 1985 Silly Saturdays: Electronic News in 1981 Silly Saturdays: Amy Winehouse Cover In Yiddish Silly Saturdays: A Typical Day In An IT Company Silly Saturdays: Literal A-Ha Video

• Silly Saturdays: Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

  Patrick Neeman

  23 Jan 2010 | 12:00 pm

  Similar Posts: Silly Saturdays: Herding Cats More On Facebook Groups And Their Usability Silly Saturdays: Twouble With Twitter Silly Saturdays: I’m Getting Bored Of Facebook Silly Saturdays: Literal A-Ha Video

• 
  Patrick Dubroy

• An In-Depth Look at the User Experience of iPhone Safari

  Patrick

  28 Jan 2010 | 10:19 pm

  On stage Wednesday at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad as “the best browsing experience you’ve ever had. Way better than a laptop, way better than a smart phone.” Quite a claim. Of course, the iPad browser is Safari. And from what I’ve seen and heard, it’s more like the iPhone than the desktop version. John Gruber reported that “even though the screen offers the same pixel count as what was once the standard size for a laptop display, iPad Safari renders pages like iPhone Safari. The web surfing experience is all about…

• Thesis Update and Multi-Touch BumpTop

  Patrick

  1 Oct 2009 | 10:58 am

  It’s been a while since I posted a real update here — it’s about time I filled you all in on what I’ve been up to. Academia In April, I finished my master’s in Compter Science (Human-Computer Interaction) at the University of Toronto. My thesis was a study of how people use tabs in during web browsing, which I’ve written about several times. The best summaries are here and here, or you can check out all my research-related posts. I submitted a paper to CHI 2010, so hopefully I’ll be making a trip down to Atlanta next spring. So what have I been up to…

• Aaand…we’re back.

  Patrick

  19 Jul 2009 | 8:09 pm

  If you visited this site in the last day or so, you probably saw a 404. Sorry about that. I had to bring the site down for a bit to upgrade my woefully out-of-date WordPress installation. A few weeks ago, someone actually took advantage of the ancient version of WordPress I had, and filled up some of my posts with dirty words. I think I’ve got everything cleaned up right now, but let me know if you notice anything out of the ordinary. In the process, I also decided to switch my theme. Many thanks to MidMo Design for their awesome Clean Home theme. Over the next few weeks I’ll be…

• How many tabs do people use? (Now with real data!)

  Patrick

  13 Apr 2009 | 9:15 am

  For the past few months, I’ve been knee-deep in data from the tabbed browsing study that I conducted late last year. Now that I’m finishing up my thesis, I figured it’s about time that I share some of my findings. In this post, I’ll talk about one of the quantitative questions I was trying to answer in my study: how many tabs do people use? Measures The first thing we need to do is to be a bit more precise with the question. What does it mean to “use” multiple tabs or windows, and how should it be measured? There are few possible answers. We could simply…

• 301 Redirect for the search usability win!

  Patrick

  20 Mar 2009 | 3:31 pm

  This morning I read an article about CloudKick, a new Y Combinator startup that provides a nice interface for managing cloud computing resources on Amazon EC2 and Slicehost. It turned out to be a good lesson in how paying attention to basic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques can also give you usability benefits. After reading the article, I was looking for a bit more information on CloudKick. When I Googled searched Google™ for ‘cloudkick’, here’s what I saw: The CloudKick home page doesn’t appear until #5, and #4 is actually a separate page from their…

• 
  UsabilityPost

• The Laws of Simplicity

  Dmitry Fadeyev

  7 Feb 2010 | 12:00 am

  At the 2006 annual TED conference in Monterey, the New York times columnist David Pogue delivered a presentation about the importance of simplicity in business. The commercial success of Google’s simple search engine interface and Apple’s iPod music player show that simplicity sells. This idea of simplicity as a selling point clashes with the old thinking of constantly adding new features to your product in order to make it more appealing to your customers. Simple products are often thought of as dumbed-down, basic and inferior. But adding features doesn’t mean you get…

• Blogging Simplified

  Dmitry Fadeyev

  6 Feb 2010 | 12:00 am

  I’ve just finished migrating UsabilityPost to another blogging engine. Before, the blog was powered by the usual suspect: WordPress. The new engine is called Toto which was recently launched by Alexis Sellier, the creator of LESS. Unfortunately Feedburner has re-published all the articles to RSS again, so apologies to all the RSS subscribers for the confusion. Ok, so what’s Toto? Yet another blog engine? Not quite. Toto’s features are so compelling that I just couldn’t resist switching over. First of all, Toto doesn’t run on a database. The whole blog is…

• On the iPad

  Dmitry Fadeyev

  29 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am

  Wow, I’m seeing a lot of negative commentary on the new Apple iPad tablet from pundits all around the Web. People are already shouting that this will be a flop and that Apple have dropped the ball this time. A lot of criticisms: no USB, no multitasking, low memory, no Flash support, no camera, no full OS, and so on and on. Everyone seems to be missing the point completely. I am personally really impressed with what Apple have delivered and I have absolutely no doubt it will be one of Apple’s best selling products. Let me tell you why. One mistake people are making is assuming the…

• What's in a Name?

  Dmitry Fadeyev

  24 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am

  Gruber of Daring Fireball posted his take on a suggestion that the Apple tablet could be called “Canvas”. I agree that it would make a great name, and the artwork in Apple’s invitation does point towards it. This post gave me another thought though for a potential use for this device. Everyone is talking about reading stuff, watching movies and playing games on the device. It’s all about digital consumption, not creation. How would you write documents and manage spreadsheets on a small tablet device which likely doesn’t come with a physical keyboard? The answer:…

• E-books are Books

  Dmitry Fadeyev

  24 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am

  Today everybody is still using a misleading term: the e-book. What’s an e-book? An e-book is an electronic book. But what does it really mean? Essentially all it means is: “a digital book”. A book that’s not made from paper, ink and glue, but from bits and bytes. This is misleading. It’s misleading because the term ‘book’ doesn’t really refer to the type of materials used to realize written work — it refers to the format of such work. It’s all about distinguishing and categorizing a piece of writing so that readers know what to…

• 
  UIE Brain Sparks

• Ad Hoc Personas

  Adam Churchill

  8 Feb 2010 | 11:04 am

  Treat your team to a conference-quality seminar right from your own office. Join us for the next UIE Virtual Seminar, The Power of Ad Hoc Personas: Truly Practical Methods to Get Your Organization On the Same Page, with Tamara Adlin, Thursday, February 18. When you kick off a project right, everything is much easier. When that doesn’t happen, the team pays the price. We’ve all seen projects where, part way in, a well-intentioned executive derailed the team by changing the direction. To prevent this, we want to put everyone with the power to take the project off course, on to the…

• SpoolCast: Leveraging Search Patterns & Discovery with Peter Morville

  Brian Christiansen

  5 Feb 2010 | 10:11 am

  Duration: 36m | 21 MB Recorded: January, 2010 Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer [ Subscribe to our podcast via ←This link will launch the iTunes application.] [ Subscribe with other podcast applications.] Peter Morville is the co-presenter of one of our most popular UIE Virtual Seminars of all time, Leverage Search and Discovery Patterns. As is often the case, our audience came up with a heap of thoughtful questions, which we decided to break up into two podcasts. This is the first, and the second will feature Peter’s co-presenter Mark Burrell answering even more of your…

• UIEtips: Part 1 – The Apple Store’s Checkout Form Redesign

  Jared Spool

  5 Feb 2010 | 8:30 am

  It’s hard to have a conversation about great design without mentioning Apple. Usually, we’re talking about the design of the iPod, iPhone, or last week’s newly announced iPad. However, those aren’t the only interesting challenges Apple’s talented designers have tackled. They’ve done an amazing job with something that wouldn’t get a lot of attention otherwise: the web site checkout forms. In this issue of UIEtips, Luke Wroblewski dissects the newly redesigned Apple.com checkout process. As always, his critique is brilliant, providing a ton of great…

• SpoolCast: Escaping Navigation Hell with Hagan Rivers

  Brian Christiansen

  1 Feb 2010 | 2:20 pm

  Duration: 25m | 14 MB Recorded: January, 2010 Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer [ Subscribe to our podcast via ←This link will launch the iTunes application.] [ Subscribe with other podcast applications.] Hagan Rivers We turn to Hagan Rivers for insight on designing challenging web applications year-after-year because she just keeps coming up with better and better ideas. When we were talking with her late last year, she mentioned she had another innovation in her web app design workflow, which sounded a bit strange at first blush: she designs the navigation as a separate…

• SpoolCast: Stephen Anderson on Seductive Interactions

  Brian Christiansen

  28 Jan 2010 | 1:32 pm

  Duration: 36m | 20MB Recorded: January, 2010 Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer [ Subscribe to our podcast via ←This link will launch the iTunes application.] [ Subscribe with other podcast applications.] How can we design systems that encourage the behaviors we want? One of the bleeding edge ideas we’ll be talking about at the UIE Web App Masters Tour is adding motivation to web applications. How do you encourage user behavior through the design of your web app? It may initially sound a bit far-fetched, but there’s an industry that’s been shaping its…

• 
  Cone Trees

• What is Information Architecture (IA)

  ConeTrees

  6 Feb 2010 | 7:53 am

  Information Architecture (IA) is both the process and the product of organization of information to facilitate efficient access to that information by its intended audience. This is my definition for IA which is also my entry for the the Explain IA contest. Update: I won a copy of Peter Morville’s new book Search Patterns at ExplainIA. I am looking forward to receiving it since the sample chapter I read was promising.

• The best content at Cone Trees for 2009

  ConeTrees

  27 Jan 2010 | 10:15 am

  Out of the near 50 posts that were made at Cone Trees in 2009, here is a compilation of what was most popular with you, dear readers. You will also find my list of suggested readings for each section (except for the articles section, where there were only three posts I made in the year). Top 3 Articles Most popular Tips for effective DIY Participant Recruitment for Usability Testing Increase Conversions in Long Web Forms by Resolving the Accidental Back Button Activation Issue Guidelines for conducting Effective and Efficient Meetings Top 3 Blog Posts Most popular jQuery Masked Input Plugin-…

• I’m presenting a tutorial at the India HCI 2010 conference, IIT Mumbai, March 21

  ConeTrees

  15 Jan 2010 | 11:08 am

  I am pleased to let you know that my tutorial proposal for India HCI 2010 has been accepted. I will be presenting a slide based interactive lecture/ tutorial on ‘Tips for Effective Usability Testing in India’ in the morning on 21 March, Sunday at the India HCI 2010 conference and would like to invite you to attend it. Who should attend: Usability engineers and user experience practitioners who conduct usability testing of all experience levels, though this will be especially beneficial for those who work in a organization with an nascent usability engineering. or user research…

• Cone Trees Wallpaper #3- Birds on Tree

  ConeTrees

  4 Jan 2010 | 6:12 am

  I made this wallpaper out of a snap I shot at the Sultanpur bird sanctuary, which is a fantastic place to visit over the weekend from Delhi. Birds on Tree (brown)- 320x480 (downloaded 9 times) Birds on Tree (brown)- 1024x768 (downloaded 7 times) Birds on Tree (brown)- 1280x800 (downloaded 7 times) Birds on Tree (brown)- 1280x1024 (downloaded 9 times) Birds on Tree (brown)- 1440x900 (downloaded 7 times) Birds on Tree (brown)- 1600x1024 (downloaded 8 times) Birds on Tree (brown)- 1680x1050 (downloaded 8 times) Birds on Tree (brown)- 1920x1200 (downloaded 7 times) Birds on Tree (blue)- 320x480…

• Usability Spotter #6- The Twitter login page password revelation issue

  ConeTrees

  21 Dec 2009 | 6:31 am

  Summary On its login page, Twitter uses JavaScript to set focus on the user name text field so the user can sign in to the account with least effort possible. However, due to the incompleteness and the placement of the JavaScript, there is a possibility that the user’s password may get revealed (in the user name text field of the login form) if the user attempts to enter their account details before the login page completely loads. The description of the usability issue and solution are discussed ahead. Update (Jan 20, 2010): I informed Twitter about it and Anamitra Banerji from Twitter…

• 
  HFI Connect

• A Place at the Table

  Eric Schaffer

  Everyone is fighting for a place at the table. There was a time when we had no chance and we would sit off in a corner, twiddling our radio buttons. But those times are changing. The success of a program of institutionalization of usability does not hinge on brilliant design. You need brilliant design, but it is hardly the critical thing. It does not hinge on methods, and standards, and templates. It does not hinge on staffing or even knowledge management. All that is important. But the main thing is a seat at the table. Every organization has an executive team that determines what is…

• iPad UI Review - You think it will renders laptop entirely?

  Sharad

  Hey All, As usual with a large Apple product launch and becomes a talk of the town (.. as people like to talk about every new gizmos comes in to the market for showing their greater technical knowledge … :) ) , but obviously I am also feeling like other feels that ipad may soon renders the laptop soon, as it’s so easy to use, surf, watch video, read books :) etc., …. end yes, also seems that it will soon become very loving for people who have habit of reading news paper in restroom.. :), with all extra features of iphone, ipod that not other electronic books have…. Discuss and get…

• The Wave is Finally Here

  Eric Schaffer

  I've been waiting for ten years or more. And after all that time of so many of us pushing, and praying, and writing, and teaching, it has finally happened. We should probably have a party. But I for one don't have time. It's 4am in Dubai airport. I'm headed home to India for a week. Then a month in Bombay, Africa, and then Germany. At each stop there is a new phenomena - clients who have hired us for guidance in the Institutionalization of Usability. About time! I started work on my book,Institutionalization of Usability, in 2001. I wrote it because I realized that our field had to mature. We…

• Mobile Website – UI Design, Visual Design and HTML’s

  Ganesan

  Ux's Just want to share my knowledge about some guidelines in creating Mobile website with you all. I did some R&D for my last project. It’s an M-Commerce site for UK’s famous retailer. I have created User Interface, Visuals, HTML’s and integrated in JSP’s. Ok. Let me come to the article. Here I am going to discuss about the general guidelines we need to consider while doing Mobile website. There are increasing internet users accessing websites via phones and mobile devices. As a result, we need to be educated in this area and ready to design websites that accommodate this…

• Google Embraces Partners to Straddle Desktop-Cloud Divide

  bernertry

  sports nutrition athlete muscle building Google has unveiled plans today to allow Google Docs to store any type of files, and revealed a new tool from Memeo to enable users to access, migrate, and synchronize files between their desktop and Google Docs. These announcements signify a broader strategy by Google to help business customers bridge the gap between the desktop and the cloud. Google has been aggressively vying for business customers to adopt its various cloud-based products and services as alternatives to the traditional Microsoft culture: Gmail instead of Exchange and Outlook,…

• 
  Talkabout Design

• Apple Tablet Revealed!

  talkaboutdesign@gmail.com

  27 Jan 2010 | 7:22 am

  After years of speculations and rumors the moment Steve Jobs unveils the iTablet is here. But guys at Engadget were lucky enough to secure a few images of the upcoming tablet just hours before the event. Is this the real deal or just another fake? To be honest it looks very real to me, and being that this image leaked just hours before the presentation is more proof of that. Some of the interesting things to note about the image is that it's clearly running some version of the iPhone OS. There are indicators for WIFI and a (No Service) message in the top left corner, indicating some sort of…

• Qonversation

  talkaboutdesign@gmail.com

  11 Dec 2009 | 9:56 am

  Qonversation is a brand new way to join discussions on your favorite topic. Many people compare it to twitter because of the simple way that the topics and comments are structured. To me the major difference between Qonversation and Twitter is that you follow topics not people. This is an interesting way to connect with a much wider audience. If you are interested in joining Qonversation follow this link to the sign up page. http://qonversation.com/signup?code=superexcited

• Why Zune marketplace on Xbox means business

  talkaboutdesign@gmail.com

  8 Dec 2009 | 9:14 am

  While Sony keeps pushing Blu-Ray players into our homes Microsoft has another solution in mind. Streaming full HD 1080p movies over the network with the latest update to it's Xbox platform. Not only will you enjoy instant streaming in full HD, you will also be able to create a party and watch a movie with your friends. Add to that a dedicated Netflix application and you got yourself a hell of an entertainment system. Suddenly saying good-bye to your cable box doesn't seem so distant. Did we forget to mention that the interface is gorgeous? The only downside is that there is no dedicated…

• Stephen Wiltshire - New York from memory

  talkaboutdesign@gmail.com

  4 Nov 2009 | 2:47 pm

  This astonishing 18ft drawing of the world’s most famous skyline was created by autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire after he spent just 20 minutes in a helicopter gazing at the panorama. Read more

• The work of Lisa Chin

  talkaboutdesign@gmail.com

  4 Nov 2009 | 2:26 pm

  Check out the work of the super talented Lisa Chin, who is an Art Director from NYC. Her work includes Web Design, Print, as well as email campaign design. Portfolio

• 
  90 percent of everything

• Xbox controllers used in the millitary – life mimicking art?

  Harry Brignull

  21 Jan 2010 | 10:14 am

  If you’ve played either of the recent Call of Duty “Modern Warfare” games, you’ll be aware of the disturbingly realistic air attacks you can carry out on other players. Call of Duty 4 (Computer game): It seems that the grainy monochrome footage is easy to mimic on an Xbox 360 or PS3. The first time I saw footage like this was on CNN during the first Gulf war. It was horrible. Today, most kids will associate footage like this with harmless play, massively dissociated from reality. I really recommend taking a look at both videos – the similarities are staggering.

• “User experience is everything” – Evan Williams, Twitter CEO

  Harry Brignull

  20 Jan 2010 | 3:56 am

  → From Evan’s article Ten Rules for Web Startups (2005). → Found via InspireUX.com

• How tablet design can influence the potency of the Placebo effect

  Harry Brignull

  5 Jan 2010 | 6:16 am

  We all know that design influences people emotionally, but have you ever considered the possibility that possibility that design alone can actually influence the health of your users? This article by Steve Silberman on wired.com (August ‘09) discusses the psychology of tablet design and the placebo effect: “[...] the placebo response is highly sensitive to cultural differences. Anthropologist Daniel Moerman found that Germans are high placebo reactors in trials of ulcer drugs but low in trials of drugs for hypertension—an undertreated condition in Germany, where many people pop…

• The Sinclair C5 Story

  Harry Brignull

  14 Dec 2009 | 2:59 am

  This lovely image from a recent Erskine Labs blog post reminded me of the charmingly tragic story of the Sinclair C5. Spurred on by his immense success in the computing industry with the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX spectrum, Clive Sinclair set his mind to electric vehicles. He drew up the Sinclair C5. Everything looked perfect on paper. The C5 was electric and complemented by pedal power, making it a low pollution vehicle, narrow enough to drive between cars in heavy traffic, like a bicycle. To cut a long story short, Clive Sinclair woefully overestimated his ability to transfer his successes from the…

• Paul Graham on Simplicity

  Harry Brignull

  10 Dec 2009 | 1:07 am

  I think we all “get” simplicity these days, but nevertheless this quote from Paul Graham really sums it up: It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity. You’d think simple would be the default. Ornate is more work. But something seems to come over people when they try to be creative. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn’t sound anything like the way they speak. Designers trying to be artistic resort to swooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they’re expressionists. It’s all evasion. Underneath the long words or the…

• 
  Konigi

• Konigi Site is Back and Server Moved

  jibbajabba

  9 Feb 2010 | 2:47 am

  Sorry for the downtime. Konigi went down for most of the day yesterday because a spike in traffic caused the databases to be taken offline. So we've moved Konigi to a virtual private server, and now we're able to run our own database rather than share database resources and limit the number of requests we can make. These are all good problems, and the growing pains are to be expected. Again, sorry for the interrupted service yesterday.

• Gone snorkeling...

  jibbajabba

  3 Feb 2010 | 8:46 am

  I've gone south for the winter until mid February. I'll be around to handle stencil sales issues and to moderate entries occasionally, but for the most part will be swimming with the fishies. See you in a few weeks! -Michael (jibbajabba)

• The Right Way to Wireframe

  jibbajabba

  2 Feb 2010 | 1:05 am

  Will Evans shows us how he sketches and wireframes interfaces in this cool video, which is a nice preview of what you may see in his upcoming talk on "The Right Way to Wireframe" at IXD10. Incidentally, he's using OmniGraffle with our free wireframe stencils. Will says this about wireframing: Increasingly, as designers of interactive systems (spaces, processes and products for people), we find ourselves stretching the limits of communication tools to explore and document what it will be like to interact with the things we design. We describe wireframing as a form of design communication that…

• New Multi-touch Interactions on the Apple iPad

  jibbajabba

  29 Jan 2010 | 8:04 am

  Craig Villamor and Luke Wroblewski summarize the new interactions we'll be seeing in the iPad. During Apple's 90 minute unveiling of the iPad this week, a lot of new multi-touch interactions were shown off. But they went by fast. So as a service to digital product designers everywhere, we took the time to extract 8 minutes of new user interface demos from the iPad keynote. Now you can quickly just catch the UI in action on Apple's new native iPad and iWork applications. More at LukeW...

• Diving deep into user behavior with Google Analytics, Event Tracking, and jQuery

  briancray

  27 Jan 2010 | 8:42 am

  In a default Google Analytics setup, the information you have about your users’ navigation behaviors and preferences is limited to which pages they viewed and where they came from. But what does that really tell you about how your users behave inside your web pages? Not much, and that’s where all the juicy behavioral insight comes from. Learn how to tap into your users' behaviors with Google Analytics, Event Tracking, and jQuery. URL:  http://briancray.com/2009/12/29/understanding-user-behavior-google-analytics-event-tracking-jquery/

• 
  Kristian Andersen + Associates

• Typographic Literacy: Part Two

  Joe Farquharson

  4 Feb 2010 | 1:46 pm

  Typographic literacy is on the decline, and subsequently a whole host of errors are now accepted as ‘the norm’. Below is an exploration of some of the biggest typographic faux pas, and the ways each should be corrected. Double Spacing This convention harks back to the days of monospaced typewriters where it was common practice to insert a double space to distinguish the beginning of a sentence from the surrounding single word spaces. When using proportional fonts this really isn’t necessary, and is, to be brutally honest, just plain ugly. ‘Dumb’ Quotes Typewriters are also…

• Typographic Literacy: Part One

  Joe Farquharson

  29 Jan 2010 | 2:48 pm

  Can you see what’s wrong with the statement above? Bad typography is everywhere. It can be found in magazine articles, outdoor signage, restaurant menus, billboards, newspaper and TV advertisements and all over the internet. Spend just 30 seconds looking it’s easy to find a whole host of typographic faux pas—incorrect hyphenation, ‘dumb’ quotes, double-spacing, widows, orphans, poor kerning… the list goes on. Typography is something every designer should deeply care about, which is why it pains me to see it abused so profusely. Typographic literacy seems to be on the decline, and…

• Radical Redesign: thesixtyone

  Nathan Sinsabaugh

  26 Jan 2010 | 7:55 am

  thesixtyone, a Y-Combinator funded music exploration community, launched in early 2008. The service began life as a pretty typical web-based social networking site. Over the last couple of years, it has gone through some interface updates and improvements, but for the most part it seemed to toe the social network line with its user interface. The image below shows the service immediately before the latest redesign. It was definitely clean, well organized, and functional. There are even some sweet keyboard shortcuts to make controlling the music easier! Last week thesixtyone distinguished…

• France & Germany Break Up With Internet Explorer

  Clay Reinken

  25 Jan 2010 | 9:48 am

  Surprise, surprise. IE6 is back in the news. After hackers exploiting a weakness in IE6 launched an attack on Google and at least twenty other companies in China last week, Microsoft has issued a “critical” patch for it’s dated web browser. Actually, this isn’t so much news or a surprise really. When is Microsoft not fixing vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6? We can probably expect this sort of thing to happen for the next 4 years, until Microsoft stops supporting its abomination in 2014 The reason this specific incident is making headlines this week is because…

• Intuitiveness & Familiarity: iPhone App Interfaces

  Joe Farquharson

  23 Jan 2010 | 2:06 pm

  In the last few months here at Kristian Andersen + Associates, we have become increasingly more involved in iPhone application user experience/user interface design. Our existing experience with UX/UI design for the web was a great jumping-off point, plus we’re all day-one iPhone users and are virtually tethered to them right throughout the day. Our most recent app engagement began in the usual way, collaborating with the client on multiple rounds of wireframes and process maps, dialing in the inner workings and structure of the app itself. When we started to move forward into the…

• 
  The UX Booth

• Telling Your Website’s Story with Sketchboarding

  Andrew Maier

  9 Feb 2010 | 6:30 am

  There’s been quite a lot of discussion recently on blogs that cover user experience, with some very unique vantage points. The overarching question: What methods drive the solutions that we present to our clients?On many projects to which design, development, and UX teams are assigned, the scope is myopic: project managers turn their blinders on and focus the attention of a team on one particular aspect of a system at any given time, instead of looking at the experience that that website or application delivers as a whole. As our websites grow ever more complex, this sort of problem is…

• Improve Conversions by Connecting with your Audience

  Aaron Griffith

  2 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

  Lots of people design sites based on what they would like to see. However, what makes sense to a designer may not make sense to their target audience. If designers seek to create a conversion-friendly web experience we’re going to have to learn about our audience and what makes them tick.As I write this I am sorting through old non-work related emails from employees at a company that hired me to do PR. Some of these emails are interesting or hilarious to me. These emails that engaged me or made me laugh are usually from people at the company that I know well and that are in my…

• A Q & A with the Speakers from UX London

  Andrew Maier

  26 Jan 2010 | 6:30 am

  Sometimes it’s important to take a step back from reading articles related to user experience and listen to the stories told by those at the forefront of our discipline. So to that end, we sent out a few questions to the speakers of the UX London conference asking them a couple of questions about how they got started and where they see our industry going. We’ve thus far received responses from Stephen Anderson, Dave Grey, Whitney Hess, and Peter Morville; which we’re thrilled to share. Even if you aren’t going to the conference, there’s plenty to take away from…

• A Brief History of Eye-Tracking

  David Leggett

  19 Jan 2010 | 6:00 am

  Eye tracking may be a trendy topic in this day and age, but its roots go way back.Ever notice how some websites seem to just flow, while others feel harder to navigate? There are many contributing factors in building usable web sites and applications, but one of the most interesting areas of research must be eye-tracking.Today, eye-tracking is used heavily by marketing groups to craft effective designs in advertising, and by usability researchers to define the optimum user experience. This technology is anything but new though. In fact, eye-tracking goes all the way back to the…

• Mashable redesign: what draws attention?

  Paul Veugen

  14 Jan 2010 | 6:00 am

  Click-heat maps show user response to page areas.Mashable made a fresh start of the new year by launching a redesign. The intention of which was to put more focus on the stories, remove clutter, and to divide the content into sections (Home, Social Media,  Mobile, Web Video, Entertainment, Business, Tech, and Jobs). In the past week more than 150 people commented on the blog post about the new design.Most reactions on Mashable seem to be positive about the new look and feel: ‘Fresh & clean’, ‘I like the sections’, ‘More professional’, and…

• 
  Mantia

• Flash Isn’t The Problem, Flash Design Is The Problem

  Louie Mantia

  1 Feb 2010 | 1:02 pm

  For the past couple days, people have been complaining and arguing over the absence of Flash on iPad. I’m wondering about a different problem. The situation seems to be that people are upset that Flash isn’t available on iPad to take advantage of all of the Flash content on the web: sites, games, videos, etc. As this definitely is an unfortunate circumstance, I don’t think it’s entirely Adobe’s fault. (Yes, Flash performance is still a factor.) The biggest concern that I have is the people designing Flash content. Take websites that are fully fleshed out in…

• Fett

  Louie Mantia

  27 Dec 2009 | 10:09 am

• Alliance

  Louie Mantia

  15 Dec 2009 | 7:15 pm

• Success and Jealousy

  Louie Mantia

  14 Nov 2009 | 12:43 pm

  Lately, there has been a lot of anti-App Store attitudes out there, along with anti-anti-App Store attitudes. I can certainly understand (and sympathize with) people being frustrated about Apple’s review process for moving your apps into the store. I am not here to argue about how some apps haven’t been approved or take forever to be approved. I am all for Apple improving or removing the approval process all-together. However, I think when it comes to success in the App Store, I think there’s quite a bit of confusion about how we should be measuring success. Disclaimer:…

• Horde

  Louie Mantia

  10 Nov 2009 | 7:26 pm

• 
  UX Passion - User experience, usability, IA, SEO, Silverlight & WPF tutorials and articles

• UX designer needed (full-time at Moody’s Wall Street Analytics)

  UXPassion.com

  15 Jan 2010 | 12:09 pm

  Moody's Wall Street Analytics has asked us to help them find UX Designer for a full-time, salaried position. If San Francisco looks appealing to you, and even more importantly if you are great UX designer, looking for challenges in the financial sector – then this might be your dream job. Expression Studio skills are strongly preferred.

• Design trends for 2010: Web design trends for 2010

  UXPassion.com

  12 Jan 2010 | 11:02 am

  From the visual and aesthetics aspect, web design trends in 2010 will be shaped by the influences from 2009. In this article 5 major trends regarding the web design are covered. From oversized headers which are serving as new kind of splash screens to minimalism which is being supported by typography. See what’s to come in 2010.

• Design trends for 2010: Web development trends for 2010

  UXPassion.com

  9 Jan 2010 | 8:21 am

  Trends appear and disappear. Here are some of web development trends that will dominate during the 2010. I’m covering 5 trends regarding the web development. From real-time web and collaboration to geo-tagging and RIA frameworks... See what is new and coming in 2010 and stay ahead of the curve!

• WPF / Silverlight tutorial: Visibility property and binding

  UXPassion.com

  6 Jan 2010 | 5:05 pm

  Visibility property is a very powerful and yet often overlooked property available in both WPF and Silverlight. It enables you to set Visibility of certain UIElement objects to different states like: Visible, Collapsed and Hidden (not supported by Silverlight). This tutorial shows you how to use it and how to bind to Visibility property.

• Google Chrome beats Apple’s Safari market share

  UXPassion.com

  2 Jan 2010 | 6:02 pm

  More than a year and half ago, I wrote an article here on UXPassion.com saying that we don't need another hero – and I was referring to the Google Chrome browser. Today, after I've noticed news reporting that Chrome has surpassed Apple's Safari market share, I might need to reconsider my previous claims.