51 articles
I’m a huge fan of light-on-grey designs. There just aren’t enough sites out there that use it. I have a feeling that we will be seeing an increase of this color scheme in the corporate world over time. Here are a few designs that have blown my mind recently: Veerle’s Blog (just redesigned… looks a […]
(I’m a little late on this one but I wanted to check the studies out for myself before commenting.) Sean Carton on the recent study by Carleton University about Web site aestheitcs. Researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa recently discovered that users make judgments about Web site design in as few as 50 milliseconds (a […]
Apple.com is one of my favorite Web designs. I’m not saying this to be cheesy, or because I am an Apple zealot (even though I am), I just think they have an incredibly clean, simple, beautiful, site that contains a TON of information. The Apple Online Store is especially impressive. Highlighting many of their products […]
An interesting survey was done at a University in Wales recently: Web site’s appearance matters (from CNN news) In a recent study at Glamorgan University Business School in Wales, test subjects rated the personal Web pages of 60 people for usability and aesthetics. Not surprisingly, male subjects tended to assign higher ratings to pages designed […]
DontClick.It is exploring a new method of user interface, clickless mousing. Basically it looks like they are treating “hovering” over an area as an insinuated click on a link. The area you mouse-over automatically opens, selects, “clicks” through to the next level. I don’t have any research to back this, so what I am offering […]
Asterisk has a helpful article with some thoughts to keep in mind when designing a site that will incorporate advertisements. Fortunately, I very very rarely have to deal with this. I primarily design for higher education Web sites, in which (IMHO) advertising is completely inappropriate. If I’m not doing that, I’m usually doing smaller scale […]
It appears that Amazon is playing with a redesign currently. It also seems to only show to random visitors. It looks like they have redesigned their tabs a bit. But the coolest part is what they are doing with their “See all categories” tab When you mouse over the categories tab, it pops up a […]
Similar to Fahrner Image Replacement, only with Select Boxes instead of text! Select Something New, part 1 (parts 2 and 3 coming…)
37 Signals A must read for Web application developers. “How to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points”.
Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering has some interesting commentary on What makes a design seem intuitive. The distance between current knowledge and target knowledge has a technical name: “The Gap”. (Subsequently, an entire chain of clothing stores was named after it!) The Knowledge Gap is where design happens. We don’t need to design to […]
The U.S. National Cancer Institute recently did a user study of screen reader users. The Communication Technologies Branch of the United States National Cancer Institute (part of National Institutes of Health and Department of Health and Human Services) has been conducting usability testing with people with disabilities, specifically blind and lowvision users, to * understand […]
I’ve seen this in a few places around the Web and in E-mail forwards. It’s a fun caricature of the frustrations of working with some clients. Note: I’ve never had a client that has looked like this (except for various University committees…) ————————————— Dear Mr. Architect: Please design and build me a house. I am […]