What’s so great about Pattern Libraries?
Humans have become extremely adept at recognising patterns. Long ago it would have been a survival trait: those who could spot the tiger before it attacked would survive. Pattern recognition isn’t often needed in that capacity any more but we still have the skill and it’s so hard-wired into our system that most of the time we … Read more
Uh-Oh! Microsoft has another go at social media
so.cl (pronounced “Social” apparently) seems doomed to failure. Aimed at the notoriously fickle student market this is a social tool to share your search results complete with some sort of video sharing system that they’re refering to as ‘Video Parties’ – anyone want to guess how long it will be before it becomes the best … Read more
Best Practice For Buttons
Caroline Jarrett has written a great piece over on the UX Matters site: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/05/7-basic-best-practices-for-buttons.php For those of you with short attention spans here is Caroline’s own summary: Make buttons look like buttons. Put buttons where users can find them. Make the most important button look like it’s the most important one. Put buttons in a sensible order. Label … Read more
Brown M&Ms and The Importance Of Small Details
There is a, now infamous, story of a famous rock band who demanded several bowls of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed and refused to perform if they found even one brown M&M. The story is true. The rock band was Van Halen whose shows relied on extensive power requirements, intricate stage constructions and … Read more
Cognitive Overload
Back in the 1970’s, 3 friends clubbed together to buy themselves a TV for the house they shared. Each of them managed to save £10 for the TV so out they went. Eventually they came across a shop that had, in the window, an excellent model with 3 preset channel buttons plus 1 spare. It … Read more
On Morality and Multi-screen
In my twitter stream this morning I found a link to a page full of examples of responsive design (http://thenextweb.com/dd/2012/02/01/10-beautiful-examples-of-responsive-web-design/) While these are undoubtedly beautiful and well-crafted examples of responsive design, I’m not sure how relevant the ‘responsiveness’ is to each site’s audience. Curiously, as available bandwidth increases for most users, the amount of bandwidth … Read more
Accessibility Testing: Visual Impairment
I’ve been doing some accessibility testing recently and came across WebbIE 3 If you’re testing against visual impairments then it’s worth checking WebbIE 3 out. In their own words: “WebbIE re-presents the information from a web page in an accessible format suitable for a screen reader.” Basically, this browser will strip pages down to just the content … Read more
Not-hover
As I’ve been saying for quite a while now, ‘hover’ needs to be demoted to the status of ‘extra frill’ rather than forming an core part of our UIs. In terms of front-end development I’ve been adding a parallel ‘focus’ trigger alongside my ‘hover’ triggers in CSS for about 8 months. I did this to … Read more
Found: Eye tracking results for social media
I just found this page with some interesting data on eye tracking and Facebook courtesy of Mashable.com http://mashable.com/2011/11/30/social-profile-eye-tracking/
