Usually we get to see best practices and great ideas – it’s not often that we get the chance to see how UI/and UX can go wrong. econsultancy.com have published a great dissection of how UI/UX went wrong for the Waitrose site: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7406-waitrose-redesign-where-does-it-go-wrong?
As with most mornings, this mornings trawl through my twitter feed, emails and blog subscription turned up lots of stuff about accessibility, UX, design and web development but there was one thing that caught my attention more than everything else. http://uxmag.com/strategy/why-we-need-storytellers-at-the-heart-of-product-development Having skim-read this article one thing occurred to me – we don’t just need… Read More The importance of storytelling
Normally, as web developers, we only have access to what’s know as “the safe seven” fonts; Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Trebuchet and Verdana because we can guarantee the the users computer will have these fonts and that they’ll behave pretty much as expected. But what if you want to add new fonts… Read More Using @font-face
I just found this library of images showing iPad UI conventions: http://bit.ly/hlhBCl Useful!
Column layouts are a new addition to CSS – part of the CSS3 specification. Instead of contriving complex layouts to replicate columns that never flow correctly, you can now specify how many columns to divide an element into. We’ll need some HTML to apply this to first: <div class=”columns”> <h1>Multiple Columns using CSS3</h1> <p>The markup… Read More CSS3 Columns
Similar to ‘Interference Effects’, this is a measure of how much relevant to irrelevant content you have on a page. More ‘signal’ and less ‘noise’ is better.
If you have more than one option and the choices are functionally the same then choose the simpler option.
Mental processing in your user is similar to processing in a computer – the more processor you devote to different processes the slower and less responsive it will become. Try not to distract your user too much with flashing images and animations unless that’s exactly what they’ve come to see.
Hick’s Law states that the time is take to make a decision increases as the number of choices increases. If you give your user too many options then you site or application may become to time-consuming to be of use.
Be careful what you ask from your users – if you’re not specific enough then you could easily end up with the wrong result. Try using two fields for ‘First name’ and ‘Surname’ instead of just one for ‘Name’ – the results you’d get from the second option would vary too wildly to be of… Read More Basic UX Principles: Garbage In = Garbage Out
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