usability
After I posted my blog entry on Treating User Myopia I got a lot of advice. Some useful, some not so useful. But the one bit of advice I hadn't anticipated was that we were not making good use of the area "above the fold". This
web development
From the dawn of the web – at least since Netscape Navigator 4.x – it has been possible to resize the text on a web page. This is typically done through the View menu. This was fine in the early, primitive days of the web, when page layouts were simple and
data visualization
In the spirit of Jennifer Tidwell's excellent Designing Interfaces book, there are a few great catalogs of data visualization emerging online. Start with the oft-cited Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. There's another excellent collection at Data Visualization: Modern Approaches. If you're looking for visualization
design principles
Khoi Vinh, the design director for the New York Times, explains how essential grids are to web design in his SXSW presentation with Mark Boulton, Grids Are Good (Right?). So much web design work relies on establishing a grid and the constraints on that grid: ad sizes, display size, browser
advertising
While reading Larry O'Brien's latest column in SD Times, I couldn't help noticing that the article text was dwarfed by the advertisements. I was curious exactly how much of the page was dedicated to advertising. There's a clever technique used in the
design
In Never design what you can steal, I praised this amusing guerilla redesign of Jakob Neilsen's useit.com-- which is widely derided by the design community for its radically bare-bones layout. Well, the design guerillas are at it again. This time, they've set their design eye
user experience
Seth Godin showed this slide during a recent presentation at Google [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294]: > Users don't care about YOU. What's the biggest web design mistake of 2004? [http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/biggest-web-design-mistakes-in-2004.html] > 1. Believing people care about you and
web development
Every few years, Jakob Nielsen takes websites to task with a Top Ten Web Design Mistakes article. Although things have clearly improved since the original 1996 list, I'm particularly concerned that in the competitive frenzy to get all JavaScripted up for Web 2.0, we may be defeating
software development concepts
The 69 page e-book Client vs. Developer Wars documents one web design company's struggle to formulate a rational development process: Up until the middle of 2000, Newfangled's development process was much like that of every other web development company. The process started with the "planning/
blogging
Jakob Neilsen may not be today's hip and trendy Web 2.0 fixture, but he's still dispensing solid advice. Check out his Top Ten Blog Design Mistakes: 1. No Author Biographies 2. No Author Photo 3. Nondescript Posting Titles 4. Links Don't Say Where
ui design
The Top 8 reasons user interface design is in the stone age is more of a rant than a reasoned argument, but it's still worth reading. If UI design is in the stone age, why are there at least two sites which document known UI patterns? 1. UI
usability
Philipp Lenssen recently conducted an interesting experiment in usability minimalism where he visually deleted all the unused elements from the web pages he visits every day. Viewing some of Philipp's native German web pages, I was reminded how powerful conventions can be; the page layout and formatting are