June 2nd, 2008 — Interface Design, Usability
Lana Kovacevic has a post on Builder.au enumerating Andy Budd’s seven aspects of a great user experience. Andy does a good job relating each principle to a real-world experience. Nothing really unexpected, but a good read nonetheless.
March 12th, 2008 — Usability
The usability section of DZone has an interview with Jeremy Sydik today discussing the design of accessible websites. Jeremy is the author of Design Accessible Web Sites from the Pragmatic Programmers and expands on several of the topics covered in the book.
February 27th, 2008 — Usability
Jeff Atwood has an interesting article this morning on Coding Horror regarding what kind of user feedback is useful. He isn’t saying to ignore the user all together, but rather use their feedback in conjunction with hard data collected by watching what the user is doing when using the application.
February 20th, 2008 — Interface Design, Usability
Jakob Nielsen has a top-ten list on his site regarding top application design mistakes. It’s a good list including things we’ve been hearing from usability experts for a long time now, such as Non-Standard GUI Controls, Inconsistency, and No Feedback. As a bonus design mistake, Nielsen aims at those reset buttons you see all the time on web forms.
February 15th, 2008 — Interface Design, Usability
Cathy Shive writes today about the balance between computer administrative debris and useful features in a user interface. Nice article with screenshots of applications with a large amount of debris contrasting with applications that get out of the users way.
February 11th, 2008 — Usability, Web Development
Coding Horror has a good writeup today regarding form focus in web applications. The gist being to setup your tab indexes correctly on your forms and provide some sort of focus information to the user yourself. The only browser that helps provide any sort of focus feedback to the user for you is Safari. This is another article of sage advice on something that even major websites still get wrong.
February 9th, 2008 — Conferences, Interface Design, Usability
Ben Galbraith has posted a transcript of Alan Cooper’s keynote at IxDA’s Interaction 08 on Ajaxian today. It’s a bit long, but overall an inspiring and worthwhile read. [For those of you who don’t know who Alan Cooper is, he is an authority on interaction design and the author of About Face and The Inmates are Running the Asylum.]
January 31st, 2008 — Interface Design, Usability, Web Development
Smashing Magazine presents the ten principles of effective web design today. Good advice that will come in handy during the foojam redesign coming up in the next few days.
January 25th, 2008 — Interface Design, Usability
UI-Patterns.com is a library of user interface design patterns. Each pattern has an explanation along with examples of the pattern from popular sites and a list of related patterns.
January 24th, 2008 — Books, Interface Design, Software Engineering, Usability
Too often, the usability of an application is either an after-thought or not considered at all. Smashing Magazine has a list of 10 recommended usability and interface design books. If you’re involved in the coding or design of user interfaces (web-based applications included), I would highly recommend picking up one or more of these.
