Need help with responsive testing?
Jan2012
Resolution Test changes the size of the browser window for developers to preview their websites in different screen resolutions. It includes a list of commonly used resolutions and the ability to customise that list. It also gives users the option to turn on Google Browser Size, more info on that here. Read more By Ben [...]
Design the invisible to tell better stories on the web
Jan2012
For design to be meaningful we need to tell stories. We need to design the invisible, the cues, the messages and the extra detail hidden beneath the aesthetics. It’s all about the story. From verbal exchanges around the campfire to books, the web and everything in between, storytelling allows us to share, organize and process [...]
Designers behind facebook timeline: 5 keys to creating a UI with soul
Jan2012
Nick Felton and Joey Flynn say that when creating a page to tell someone’s life story, you have to throw out the UI rulebook and study how people recount memories. For most of computing history, interfaces have been about function. Word processing programs help you compose documents. Banking websites help you make transactions. Sites [...]
Dropbox’s attention to detail on their download page
Dec2011
Sometimes good UX is about being clever. Sometimes it’s to make the user happy or smile. However, when the success of your product depends on new, possibly inexperienced users successfully downloading and installing it, good UX is the difference between success and failure. I love what Dropbox has done here. I’ve noticed it for years [...]
Easier is better than better
Dec2011
In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz comes to an interesting conclusion involving human choice. “People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate.” Common sense would dictate that if you were given a list of choices, you would choose the one that is most important to [...]
The perfect paragraph
Dec2011
In 1992, Tim Berners-Lee circulated a document titled “HTML Tags,” which outlined just 20 tags, many of which are now obsolete or have taken other forms. The first surviving tag to be defined in the document, after the crucial anchor tag, is the paragraph tag. It wasn’t until 1993 that a discussion emerged on the proposed [...]
Content strategy within the design process
Dec2011
The first thing to understand about content strategy is that no two people understand it the same way. It’s a relatively new — and extremely broad — discipline with no single definitive definition. A highly informative Knol on content strategy defines it as follows: “Content strategy is an emerging field of practice encompassing every aspect [...]
Venturing into responsive design
Dec2011
A couple of weeks ago, I summarized a few thoughts on mobile web apps vs native apps. Responsive web design is one approach to making mobile web apps and web sites. In short, responsive design is essentially a way to make your website’s design fit across all sorts of screen sizes. When implemented well, your design [...]
The sketchbook of susan kare, the artist who gave computing a human face
Dec2011
Point, click. The gestures and metaphors of icon-driven computing feel so natural and effortless to us now, it seems strange to recall navigating in the digital world any other way. Until Apple’s debut of the Macintosh in 1984, however, mostof our interactions with computers looked more like this: How did we get from there to here? Read more By Steve Silberman [...]
Cool web animations
Dec2011
Paper.js — The Swiss Army Knife of Vector Graphics Scripting. Paper.js is an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and bezier curves, all neatly [...]