Category: User Experience

  • New edition of IA bible in the works

    Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville are working on a third edition of the “Polar Bear” book, aka Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (O’Reilly), and in preparation for this they have posted a brief survey. I filled it out: Question 1: What’s obviously new in IA? Over the past five years, what major trend(s)…

  • Firefox UI about to evolve?

    It looks like the user interface people on the Firefox team have some interesting ideas about prospective changes to the browser chrome. (The newsgroup post linked here is more or less illegible in a proportional font. I copied it to a text file and viewed it with a monospace font and then all was hunky-dory.…

  • The Daily Ajax

    Here are today’s Ajax links: advAJAX / AdvancedAJAX 1.0 My-Bic = Easy Ajax This concludes the daily Ajax.

  • Always wanted to learn Javascript?

    No? Me neither. But if yes, check out Javascript in Ten Minutes at the new infogami website.

  • If Microsoft redesigned the iPod packaging

    Well, I should have posted this when Todd first sent it around because now it’s all over the net, so let me be the one millionth person to add this link to a blog: YouTube – microsoft ipod packaging parody

  • D.I.Y. Media: Consumer is the Producer

    The title of this entry is also the title of a panel I’m moderating at the Interactive portion of the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, at 3:30 on March 14. The panelists include Phillip Torrone and Natalie Zee from O’Reilly’s Make magazine, Cameron Shaw from AOL, and Limor Fried from EYEBEAM (and late…

  • Google Analytics offers tips on traffic and conversion

    Google Analytics has posted a few white-paper type articles to its Conversion University section, grouped under Drive Traffic and Convert Visitors) (Link via Terry.)

  • AIGA relaunches GAIN journal of business and design

    AIGA, a designers’ professional association is relaunching its web journal, GAIN: The Gain journal is dedicated to stimulating thinking at the intersection of design and business. Through rigorous case studies and thoughtful interviews, the journal demonstrates how the process of design can be used to solve business problems, foster innovation, build meaningful customer relationships and…

  • A little CSS diversion

    Stu Nicholls has created a little web-native video game powered by CSS. It’s maddening, though. I can’t seem to win.

  • Web 2.0 as hype

    First of all, Web 2.0 is definitely hype. It’s a marketing concept whose meaning varies depending on who you are talking to. For some it means web-as-application-platform, for others it means social web (or living web), and for others still it means a new round of VC investment and rags-to-riches tales. So let’s get that…

  • Yahoo! Pattern and UI Libraries

    Yahoo! has really taken it to the next level in terms of reaching out to the developer community. As I mentioned earlier, there’s the new User Interface Blog and I coincidentally stumbled on the Graded Browser Support article around the same time. Digging deeper I found the Design Pattern Library which Yahoo! defines as “an…

  • Graded Browser Support

    Nate Koechley, Senior Web Developer for Yahoo! has written an interesting (if a bit high-level) article on what he’s calling “graded browser support”. Instead of using the more commong “graceful degradation” approach, Nate looks at browser support using a graded system. The system puts browsers into 3 seperate categories based on their distribution. See the…

  • Yahoo launches UI blog

    Since leading sites such as Yahoo and Google set expectations for users across the web, I’m glad to see that Yahoo is sharing their user-experience philosophy in the form of their new User Interface Blog.

  • IE7 to offer better CSS support

    Todd sent around this post from the IE team’s blog regarding the changes they made to CSS in IE7 Beta Preview, and this MSDN article that describes the changes in more depth, adding: I think the important thing to remember is that this isn

  • Wildly Appropriate IA blog

    I’ve been reading Dan Klyn’s blog, Wildly Appropriate (found it via his signature on an IA mailing list) recently and he’s a great source of valuable links and trenchant insights about user experience, findability, SEO, and related subjects. If I have one complaint about his blog, it’s that his Flash-font-replacement blog entry titles break my…

  • Greasemonkey gives the user more control over the UI

    Some interface designers may feel threatened by the idea of Greasemonkey scripts altering the intended look-and-feel of their web pages (at least in Firefox and Mozilla), but I like the idea of users getting more control over their experience (even if the scripts are brittle and sometimes hack-y), and in the best scenario I would…

  • Prioritizing your work

    David Seah’s Printable CEO Series incorporates some interesting paper-based tools for tracking and prioritizing your tasks during the day. His system assigns points to different types of tasks. Life-sustaining work, such as billing or signing new deals, earns 10 points. Work that provides concrete results that demonstrates your skills earns 5 points. Networking-related tasks are…

  • Ajax JSP tag library

    This should save some effort for JSP developers building out Ajax interfaces. This has been your daily Ajax link (via Dan).

  • Rethinking sitemaps and homepages

    Following up on the link to Derek Powazek’s article in a List Apart, here’s Keith Robinson has a similar take on the role of a home page in a site’s information architecture: Part of this problem stems from the idea that items on a Web site can’t live in more than one place within a…

  • IE 7 in public beta

    Todd tells us that Microsoft released the public beta of Internet Explorer 7 today, and he sent us this link to the Beta 2 developer checklist, including these items (among others): Verify your User Agent string detection detects Internet Explorer 7. Check your website for the use of CSS hacks that may have been turned…

  • Designing a site from back to front

    In Home Page Goals Derek Powazek explains why he designs the deepest pages of a site first before working his way back to the home page: Before I get into those goals, here