Posts Tagged ‘UX’

In my last post, I discussed the value of design documentation. In this post, I share some practical tips on writing design documentation. The first part outlines general approaches. The second describes customizing annotations in Axure. Approaches to communication In my presentation on communicating design, I talk about four types of design documentation: Walkthrough presentation […]

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 have recently read a number of blog posts, articles, and commentary arguing that design documentation is no longer needed as UI prototyping tools become more sophisticated and commonly used. While I agree that eliminating a 250-page design document can be a positive result, it’s not that documentation is inherently bad or unnecessary. The problem is […]

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, […]

As I flipped through my idea notebook recently, Musicovery’s mood pad jumped out at me as a particularly fun and inspiring UI. Breaking with more conventional controls for web radio, the site creators realized that most people listen to music according to  their mood. They developed the mood pad to allow you to select music […]

Search Engine Optimization can be an almost infinitely complex subject. You can easily get caught up in all the fun details of latent semantic indexing, canonicalization, and c block hosting, but it’s much easier to focus on a simple holistic approach. One concept that has helped me learn most in this field is to look […]

You want your iPad users to be able to scroll your SharePoint 2010 site with one finger. It can be done with the two finger swipe but it doesn’t work as well and visitors may not know that. The solution involves using CSS to disable the – ribbon positioning system – so that the ribbon […]

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 […]

It’s almost redundant to talk about aggressive project schedules. The constantly evolving demands of markets, strong competition for market leadership, and increasing expectations for engaging user experiences require rapid delivery of products and services. While delivery may have to meet these schedules one way or another, true innovation rarely follows a Gantt chart so docilely. […]

Your iPhone native application has been extremely successful and of course, customers have been asking when a similar Android native application will be available.  So, you assign the design of the Android application to your user interface design person who in turn dusts off the iPhone wireframe documents.  But wait, where does your user interface […]