Just because you can use the font that looks like it’s wearing bellbottoms, doesn’t mean you should.

-a list apart

Trying to eplain and convince people about UX can be a real battle, wither to a client or to your boss.  The a list apart team have done a great job here in creating a cheat sheet to help you answer those all important questions.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/can-you-say-that-in-english-explaining-ux-research-to-clients/

We’re big fans of A List Apart. They’re on our list of resource links for a reason, after all. We admire the goal of touching on as many aspects of the web as possible. This means that pretty much every issue will have something for us. A feature in particular that I like about the site is “Editor’s Choice”, a selected article from a past issue that is insightful as always, and usually very relevant, no matter how long ago it was originally published.

This article about Findability in particular drew my attention, as it represents an aspect of modern web project development so important, the fact that it’s still so overlooked boggles the mind. Findability bridges the divide between web design and SEO, something we’re pushing for ourselves with Smart Spark, and something that shouldn’t even exist in the first place. But it seemingly still does.

As the article indicates, there are many facets to a quality web project. It talks about steadfast elements like Project Management and Architecture, which are universal and permeate through any kind of project. It touches on elements that are often used to pitch ambitious web projects, such as Usability, Accessibility, Design, and even User Experience (often abbreviated as UX), the kind of sexy buzzwords that few may fully understand, but all “just have to have” in their corporate web presence. Just like Search Engine Optimization. And while Findability seems to be that perfect blend of web design and web marketing, it still gets lost in the shuffle.

Is it be cause the majority of the SEO realm is populated by professionals who are marketers first, and web professionals second, and they thus shy away from any aspect of a web project involving delving into the source code? And on the other side of the coin, is Findability shunned by the pure web professional because Optimization experts are viewed as virtual pitchmen or carnival barkers, sullying their pristine trade, and therefore dabbling in SEO is like sharing a pint with the devil? Either line of thinking is ironic at best, and destructive at worst. For the web to continue its evolution as a medium for information, interaction, and yes, profitability, the individual facets of any web presence need to become more intertwined, not more discrete.

Confession: I’ve been a bit enamored with the term Findability ever since I read it in Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards. Search Engine Optimization felt a little like a flaky marketing term, meant more to sell the service than to describe it. Findability always seemed more practical and robust. Optimizing a site involves constantly adjusting your aim, attempting to hit a moving target. Building Findability into a site brings that target in closer, making it easier to hit on a regular basis and with success.

I write another blog – Electric Cafe – and that is fun because I get to tinker with the design of the site, the functionality of the site and of course the content… One of my concerns has been how to get a decent print version of the blog – and this article in the e’zine A List Apart got me started in the right direction.

A List Apart has many good articles about design, layout, use of fonts etc etc – relating to the internet and electronic publishing.

I’m writing HTML, XHTML and CSS. My latest project is for a friend who has a yoga practice and studio. Writing the content and assembling the images for the site was my first task. It’s a small site – only about seven pages – so getting the content prepared took about a week. I’m still working on the images.

Once the copy was done I started doing some wire frames and creating all of the links. I developed a color palette based on the colors associated with the seven main chakras and converted them all to hexadecimal colors. The pages came together and l the links worked.

But then I started to bump into some problems.  I wanted to add a footer at the bottom of each page. It wouldn’t stay down at the bottom and often wrapped the content. I wanted to have a horizontal navigation bar but couldn’t find a way to make that work with CSS so I did a list.

I started re-reading all the chapters about CSS in my coding books. I read. And read. And read. Then I went online to “A List Apart” and found a bunch of articles about CSS. So I read all of them from oldest to newest. I took a lot of notes and now I’m really confused.

It’s been a week since I worked on the code and I’m getting a vague idea about just how powerful CSS and how much I have to learn. And then there’s JavaScript. And “web standards” design. And how different browsers handle the code. And how images read and how charts work.

I need to let this stuff settle. So instead of wading deeper into CSS I’m going back. Back to the beginning of my first HTML book. I’m starting from scratch and will complete all of the HTML exercises with all of my recent reading my in mind – including the “tables” exercises, even though everybody seems to hate tables these days. I’ll be taking notes while I’m doing these exercises and then hopefully I’ll connect the CSS stuff with the basic HTML stuff.

I’ve got to start reworking that website at the same time. Wish me luck.

When it comes to web design sometimes it feels like we are wandering alone in the wilderness. Back in the good old days, if you can consider anything pre-internet as good, trained graphic designers created the majority of printed marketing communications. However, with the advent of the web not only did publishing become more democratic but so did the creation of the designs. Unfortunately, knowing how to code HTML did not mean that web designers had any clue about colors, proportions, white space and other critical items that make publications readable. Luckily, a great resource does exist for both professional and non-professional designers tasked with creating web pages. A List Apart is a comprehensive web design site with great articles, such as:

• Home Page Goals
• Human-to-Human Design
• Fluid Grids
• Designing for Flow
• In Defense of Eye Candy

These articles and hundreds more, are available for free so be sure to take advantage and get help that will make your websites that much better!

A small excerpt from a fantastic article on the relationship between good user interface (site design) and the need for importance for businesses to make intentional, conscious decisions about the personality of their products and services. You have the ability to shape your customer’s loyalty…

Can you trust me on this?

According to a 2002 study, the “appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size, and color schemes,” is the number one factor we use to evaluate a website’s credibility.

This makes sense. Think about how our personal appearance (our personal aesthetic) affects how people perceive us; or how product packaging influences our perception of the product inside.

Below is a gas pump near my house. Contrast that with the station shown on the right.

 

Photo (right) by Sean Munson

 

I’ve stopped filling up at the gas station on the left, even though it’s closer to where I live. Why? This kind of maintenance (or lack of maintenance) leaves me unwilling to trust them with my credit card information. Clearly, appearance does affect trust.

So, how do we create trust in our application interfaces, aside from providing the basics, such as reliable information and uptime? By being attentive to visual design, for one thing. Attention to design details implies that the same care and attention has been spent on the other (less visible) parts of the product—which implies that this is a trustworthy product.

I’ve seen many great design comps get butchered during development. Things such as inconsistent fonts, odd padding, line-heights, and over-compressed images plagued the final release. While this may never come out during functional testing, how might these sloppy UI details affect perceptions of your product?

For complete article, click here. Conclusion of article below.

Stitching it all together

Recent studies into emotions are finding that we can’t actually separate cognition from affect. Separate studies in economics and in neuroscience are proving that:

“affect, which is inexplicably linked to attitudes, expectations and motivations, plays a significant role in the cognition of product interaction…the perception that affect and cognition are independent, separate information processing systems is flawed.” [2]

In other words, how we “think” cannot be separated from how we “feel.”

Illustration by Kevin Cornell

This raises some interesting questions—especially in the area of decision making. In short, our rational choices aren’t so rational. From studies on choice to first impressions, neuroscience is exploring how the brain works—and it’s kind of scary. We’re not nearly as in charge of our decisions as we’d like to believe.

Consider what you’re doing with your interfaces to speak to people’s emotions? Industrial product design, automobile manufacturing and other more mature industries get this—with tools such as Kano modeling that have been used for decades. But user interface development is still maturing and catching up to what these other disciplines already know: the most direct way to influence a decision or perception is through the emotions.

So, is “pretty design” important?

When we think about application design and development, how do you think of visual design? Is it a skin, that adds some value—a layer on top of the core functionality? Or is this beauty something more?

In the early 1900s, “form follows function” became the mantra of modern architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright changed this phrase to “form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union,” using nature as the best example of this integration.

The more we learn about people, and how our brains process information, the more we learn the truth of that phrase: form and function aren’t separate items. If we believe that style somehow exists independent of functionality, that we can treat aesthetics and function as two separate pieces, then we ignore the evidence that beauty is much more than decoration. Our brains can’t help but agree.

To consider:

1. What is your product or service personality? How do you get your customers to identify and want to do business with you?

2. What are the 3 things about your offering that inspire trust?

3. How does your personal appearance (personal aesthetic) affect how people perceive you?  What about your product packaging?

Non ci sono solo quelli formulati da Daniel Pennac. Ce ne sono anche altri, che si riferiscono al diritto a uno spazio grafico accogliente, in cui gli occhi possano scorrere tra le righe in modo fluido e rilassato. E oggi, quando gran parte di quello che si legge non sta su una pagina ma sullo schermo di un computer, sarebbe importante usare la stessa attenzione che ha sempre caratterizzato il lavoro dei grandi grafici e tipografi nella progettazione di quelle pagine. Invece capita spesso di imbattersi in siti web costruiti apposta per distrarre il lettore.

Sull’argomento ho appena letto una bellissima analisi di Mandy Brown apparsa sul sito A List Apart, di Jeffrey Zeldman, che nel settore web design, soprattutto di quello rispettoso degli standard, è un’autorità di livello mondiale. L’articolo si intitola In Defense of Readers, e vale la pena di fare uno sforzo per superare l’ostacolo della lingua, perché c’è davvero molto da imparare.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/elevatewebdesignattheuniversitylevel

I have bookmarked this with Delicious but I just wanted to draw some attention to it in a post.

One of the things I always regret about my Uni days is that the skills I learned on a couple of my courses I was never able to apply in a real life environment. One of these was the web course where, upon graduating, I had to relearn everything on my first job. Admittedly my skills increased exponentially, however I feel that the course should have provided current skills rather than the outdated stuff we actualy learned.

I have, for a couple of years, been contemplating moving into higher education as a career. Shout out in the comments; how valid do you feel that current higher education courses in web based skills currently are? What do you think is missing and how can courses be more forward thinking?

There’s quite a bit of evidence that many Web site owners (both individuals and organizations big and small) couldn’t care less about the content (i.e. writing) on their sites. Here are a few articles and essays that try to counter that:

-George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, written in the 1940s, but wonderfully applicable to the Web nightmare we face today.

-Writing Content that Works for a Living, by Erin Kissane on A List Apart.

-Finally, just about anything from Gerry McGovern, whose livelihood is in getting people to get their Web content right. See his latest post, Web content migration: disastrous strategy, on New Thinking .

“For people who make websites”
A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.

Some articles

• Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript
• Web Standards 2008: Three Circles of Hell
• Deafness and the User Experience

And much more. The new articles can easily be followed by using their RSS feed.

Boagworld

Boagworld was one of the first blogs I started to follow when getting into web design. Paul Boag and Marcu Lillington host this podcast for all of those people who are working with websites on a daily basis. Most of the blogging content is directly related to the audio podcast they also offer. I personally listen to the podcast and then read any articles that I feel need some more attention. Always a fun time listening to them baner.

A list Apart

While A List Apart doesn’t have as frequent a posting schedule as some other blogs all of the information provided is invaluable. From more theoretical discussions on the effectivness of zebra striping for tables technical topics on CSS Sprites2 there is always something to be gained from reading an article on A List Apart.

CSS-Tricks

Run by Chris Coyier, CSS-Tricks is an awesome resource for all those starting to tackle CSS. I know that CSS can feel overwhelming at times so the tools found here are very helpful for those starting to tackle it. CSS-Tricks contains not only a blog but also forums and screencasts. The forums are a great place to get help with code and the screencasts can even remind veterans of some of the simple shortcuts they forgot. For a great intoduction to WordPress check out the screencasts on Designing for WordPress.

NETTUTS

Another one of the envato family of sites run by Sian and Collis Taed this site bring you great coding tutorials each day. Topics range all over the web language spectrum so while you may not be really interested in the new Ruby developments you can always take a look back through the content and find something to learn or relearn.

i love typography

To many web designers today ignore typography on the web. At the very least it is often an after thought. With some of the new browser developments waiting in the wings though the days of ignoring beautiful typograpy are coming to an end. I Love Typography is a blog entirely about fonts and beautiful typography. An absolute must for those designer who need to beef up their knowledge of typography in general. Without a good knowledge it is much harder to judge what is worth doing for the web.

Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.

Possibly the most important invention of the past century, the web is undeniably one of the most robust engines of knowledge transfer, political and social change, artistic endeavor, and economic growth the world has seen.

Remove the web, and billions in trade disappear. Websites enable people who can’t walk to run to the store. They bring knowledge and freedom of thought to places where such things are scarce; make every person with a connection a citizen of the world; and allow every citizen to be heard.

A List Apart – The Survey, 2008 for people who make websites

A List Apart
A very interesting site that could be the ultimate resource for anything to do with web design. There are many articles on all topics of web design and will be very handy in the future.