Molly Malsam

Lately, it seems I’ve been experiencing a rash of extremely uninformative and even appalling error messages on iPhone apps. The latest one, shown in this post, made me laugh out loud. “Bad User,” I was told. I felt like a 1950s Catholic schoolgirl getting rapped on the knuckles with a ruler. Bad User! It’s looking […]

I’ve been working with Axure’s 6.0 update for a few weeks, and so far I think my favorite feature is the addition of page guides.  Page guides make aligning elements so much easier, and since they are standard for most design tools, they were overdue in Axure. The guides are easy to use — just […]

Though I’m all for the ratings information people freely provide on various social platforms, I often wonder if at some point there will be so many things to rate, people will stop bothering. So I found the following site and video pretty entertaining: Jotly – Rate Everything In the video, the narrator reviews ratings on […]

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been looking over a number of books designed to teach X/HTML & CSS. It’s a bit overwhelming knowing where to begin with all the versions and types of web coding. I landed on a book that I really enjoyed: Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML. Of the […]

I’ve done this several times now, and I bet I’m not alone. I go a popular web site to look at used cars. My eyes scan for the first input area, which is how the majority of users who have a specific task in mind approach a page, and I immediately see a series of search […]

I’ve had this discussion several times in my career in the user experience field: Should this link open in a new tab/window (HTML link attribute target=”_blank”) or in the same window? My understanding has generally been that if the link goes to an external site or to a help or informational-type page, it should be […]

I recently listened to an interview with accessibility expert Derek Featherstone. He provided some of the following practical and valuable tips for Web accessibility. A site designed to conform to good usability, copywriting, and Web standards goes a long way to making a site accessible. Things like using the proper heading structure (H1 on every page, […]

Portals often have highly complex information architectures. A design pattern that has become popular in the past couple of years to deal with this complexity is the “mega menu”.  A mega menu is a large, often two-dimensional drop-down panel that is displayed for one of more global navigation items, in which options are grouped into […]

Today UIE’s Jared Spool posted an article criticizing mega menus. I’ve confidently designed a couple of these based on Jakob Nielsen’s assessment that Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well. I’m not convinced that “mega menus aren’t evil, just troubled” based on Spool’s article. My primary issue with the article is that five out of the […]

Did you ever think your smartphone would come in handy at a cemetery? The Seattle Times recently reported on the use of ‘living headstones’ affixed with QR codes. The destination site includes a history and pictures of the person’s life. The codes are offered by Quiring Monuments, who have sold about three dozen in the […]

Perficient UX team members often use Axure to create design prototypes. We prototype varying levels of fidelity based on the stage of the design process and the particular project’s needs, from basic wireframes to advanced interactive prototypes. A generated prototype includes HTML and JavaScript files as well as associated images. If you don’t have a […]

Just recently came across this comic and had to laugh. University web sites are notorious for not providing key information for their primary users. What’s on your home page, and is it the most relevant information for your audience or is it what your business wants to place there?