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
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/
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
We judge our past experiences almost entirely by their peaks (pleasant or unpleasant) and how they ended. A group of doctors were considering how to make colonoscopies less painful and uncomfortable but reached the conclusion that, while it was not actually possible to make it less uncomfortable because of the nature of the procedure and… Read More The ‘Peak-End Rule’
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’
I just read someone’s notes on Bill Scott’s “Designing for Mice and Men” – a pod-cast about multi-platform design and UX (http://thepam.blogspot.com/2011/05/my-notes-on-bill-scotts-designing-from.html). About half way through the notes is a bullet point that simply says: “The evolution of the scrollbar – it’s now an indicator more than a controller.” This made me think about another… Read More Scrollbars and ‘The Fold’
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
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