The other day I was reading something that happened to mention Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was a 17th-century English philosopher. He saw humans as ego-driven, power-hungry machines whose seeming good intentions all mask entirely self-serving motives. The impact of this idea was so strong that even today, more than 300 years later, we still find it… Read More ‘The “Free” issue’ or ‘How 17th-century philosophy affects UX’
This is just a quick thought about the influence of broadband and any services that come after it on the design and development of websites and web-apps. As web designers and developers we’ve never had it so good. I can remember part of our testing process when I started in this business (A long time… Read More The influence of broadband on the future of design and development
This is not a post about using specific CSS properties. Nor is it a post about how to integrate CSS with HTML documents. This post is just about the best ways we’ve found to write useful, concise and reusable CSS. Selector Names Selector names are always going to be a tricky subject. Unless we build… Read More CSS Best Practices
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
Title tag The Title Tag normally sits within the head section of your HTML document and will look something like this: <title>Title tags and their usage – SEO tips – My Web Site</title> When you use this tag correctly, its contents will appear on the bar at the very top of your browser window (or… Read More Quick SEO Tips – It’s in your head!
I ran a short test to see how Google Analytics registers the Amazon Kindle web browser. This is the info I got back: Browser: Safari Operating System: Linux Colours: 32-bit Screen Resolution: 600 x 706 pixels Flash Version: (not set) Java support: No The colour range is a bit confusing since the Kindle uses a… Read More Kindle browser v Google Analytics
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
If you have more than one option and the choices are functionally the same then choose the simpler option.
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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