The Knowledge » User Interface

Best Practices for Writing Interface Text [Organizing Content #24]

TechDept — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:29:29 +0000

In this ongoing series on organizing content, we’ve shifted from organizing help outside the interface to organizing help inside the interface. Moving help inside the interface has many advantages, and there are plenty of best practices for style and format. But the biggest shift in perspective, which I argued in my last post, is to stop differentiating between the interface and the help content. The interface is mostly text. It is an orchestra of words on a page that users rely on to navigate and understand the application’s content.

The first step in organizing help content is to refine the existing words on the buttons, tabs, labels, and dialog boxes. When those words aren’t enough, you can supplement the interface with more text to help users achieve their goals. Some technical writers refer to this supplementary text as narrative text, others as instructional text.

By Tom Johnson for idratherbewritingwith.com, Aug 13 2010

Firefox 4 Beta 4 Introduces Sync and Panorama

TechDept — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:58:35 +0000

Mozilla has released Firefox 4 Beta 4, bringing two very interesting features to the table: Panorama (previously called Tab Candy) and Sync.

Panorama is a nifty visual tool that lets you overview all of your open tabs and group them into sets with a simple drag-and-drop interface. It’s activated via an icon at the right end of the bookmark bar, which takes you to your tab playground, where you can expand or delete your tab sets, create new ones and organize them around the canvas as you see fit.

I don’t see the need to organize my tabs in a way other than the default, but then again, I’m not an extreme tab user — I’ve seen people with 30+ tabs open at all times, and in such cases a feature like Panorama can come in handy.

Article by Stan Schroeder for mashable.com, Video by Aza Raskin for Vimeo, August 23 2010

Clickable video from Diesel

TechDept — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:07:05 +0000

Pleased to see the guys at Diesel picking up on clickable videos – which we have been talking about for a while

Really nicely done.

Watch here

MIMBO – Great WordPress Magazine Theme

TechDept — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:56:10 +0000

MIMBO is a clean, customizable magazine-style theme for WordPress. It’s also a simple framework which can be modified with child themes, discussed further down in the documentation. Read more about the latest features.

View site

By Darren Hoyt

40 Creative Navigation Menus

TechDept — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:57:15 +0000

One of the first things to do when planning out a new website is to work out all of the content that will be in the site. You then divide that up into sections and then into various levels of navigation.

The result is a boring list of links.

That list of links is one of the most important part of your website though, it goes without saying that every visitor to the site will be using them to get around.

In this post we’ve pulled together some of the best designed navigation bars (both horizontal and vertical) to help give you ideas to enhance your own.

By Tehseen, Pro Blog Design, 22 Feb 2010

Mega Collection of The Best Free Social Media Icons for Bloggers and Designers

TechDept — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:08:07 +0000

Social Media Integration is becoming a must have feature for every website and blog. It is crucial for a website’s success that this feature is not overlooked. One of the ways to get user’s attention is having nice social media icons because they are attention grabbing and easily recognizable. In this showcase we are presenting to you a mega collection of beautiful Social Media Icons that you cannot resist adding to your collection.

Note: Please respect author’s Terms of Service when using these icons because if it weren’t for them, we would not have this amazing collection.

From WP Beginner

Create your own Northern Lights

TechDept — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:42:30 +0000

Nice use of flash on this promotional web site for Norway – flick between day and night and everything!

See now

Why good checkout design is more important than trustmarks

TechDept — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:39:32 +0000

I wrote an article recently about the use of e-commerce trustmarks and how important it was for sites to display trustmark logos.

Though they may help some sites, trustmarks alone are not the answer, and factors such as brand trust, price, usability and good design all combine to reassure customers about making a purchase.

A recent post on the FutureNow blog makes this point, and argues that the need for ‘costly’ security indicators, can be avoided with good cart / checkout design.

The post cites the example of the Groupon checkout, which avoids the need for security logos, thanks to the overall experience, touches such as the insistence on capturing the card CCV code, visible FAQs which deal with any payment queries, and good form design.

I’ve been looking at some examples from UK e-commerce sites, with and without security logos, to see how they compare to Groupon...

By Graham Charlton, e-consultancy.com, 1 March 2010

Read the news through Doodle Buzz

TechDept — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:44:12 +0000

DoodleBuzz is a new way to read the news through an experimental interface that allows you to create typographic maps of current news stories.

View

By Brendan Dawes

iPad and the future of email design

TechDept — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:53:22 +0000

OK, I’ll admit it. I got up early Thursday morning Sydney time to watch Steve Jobs keynote on the mysterious new tablet concept from Apple. While I’m quietly excited about the change this device will bring, there was really only one part of the show that I got out of bed early for. How was thing going to handle email? It lasted about 90 seconds in total, but that was enough.

Since then I’ve had a few ideas stewing in my head that I wanted to share with you guys. What sort of impact this will have on how you approach email design, does this open any new doors or techniques to try? This morning I started throwing some of these together, and then stumbled across this great post from Paul Farnell of Litmus fame that generally summed up what I had to say. Go check it out and then read on for a few additional points I wanted to expand on.

From David Greiner @ Campaign Monitor Feb 4 2010