Apps, websites and other softwares should be available to everyone regardless of their abilities; a system should work equally well for a sighted person using a standard mouse and screen, as it should for a blind person using a Braille output or screen reader. There are other issues too; audio cues won’t work for deaf people, features that… Read More Recognising Accessibility Issues
Responsive design is great but there are some things that can be a real pain to deal with. The first is font sizes. Since fonts don’t respond to the browser size we need another solution and the easiest to add and manage uses a tiny bit of javaScript: document.body.style.fontSize=(window.innerWidth / 100)+”px”; When this piece of… Read More Fonts, borders, and Rounded Corners for responsive sites
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 What’s so great about Pattern Libraries?
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 Best Practice For Buttons
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 Brown M&Ms and The Importance Of Small Details
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 On Morality and Multi-screen
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 Accessibility Testing: Visual Impairment
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 Not-hover
Lea Verou has, rather masterfully, created a large library of CSS animations here: http://leaverou.github.com/animatable/ While this is undoubtedly an excellent way of showing off the capabilities of CSS I would still strongly advise against simply rushing out and plugging as many as possible into any site you may be working on. Libraries like this tend to make us all think… Read More CSS Libraries
Forms are an integral part of the internet – they’re interesting things too. Forms can be used to help people engage more with your site/application ranging from requesting an email newsletter to signing up for your shiniest, most expensive membership deal. The problem is that so many people get it wrong when they design and… Read More Improving Form Engagement
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