Exciting news: The book publisher has green lit my book. I am starting to write it now. It is about jQuery and how it empowers designers. I will give a better summary after I work on it for a little while. I get an advance and everything. The book will be made of physical paper…
Google has opened the “beta” of thier new Analytics interface. It looks nice visually. Alot of UI improvements. They use fmore flash now. Most of the charts are bigger, which is good. But I still think it lacks some “follow-through”. My main complaint stems from a simple action that I keep trying to take that…
Nice article about OK/Cancel Buttons. I was researching this because I had to make a decision on Marketo whether or not to put the OK before the Cancel or vice-versa. Apparently, as this study shows, MacOS X and Windows do things very differently. Should the OK come first or last? This is definetely an idiom…
UX stands for User Experience. We used to call this Interaction Design (IxD) and before that we called it User Interface Design (UI). Before that they called it Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Design. Additionally, people have called parts of it Information Architecture or Visual Design. Fundamentally, they are all the same discipline. I call it Design.…
I think I am starting to unravel a great mystery. Why do people who are not trained and not talented in UX insist on telling designers what to do? I pretended to be a business owner talking to a UX Designer. The UX Designer wants to do XYZ. I think to myself, “I worked hard to…
So after Danny slammed my style last time, I decided that commadot.com needed a refresher. First I started looking at WordPress themes. After alot of looking, this one caught my eye. I started hacking it from there. I changed the graphics, the text, the order of some things. Then I added jQuery and started messing…
Truth be told, I use GMail as my primary mail program. I have been happy with the Google UX lately using Google Talk, GMail, Picasa, Picasa Web Albums and sometimes Google Desktop. Gmail is very good for mailing lists like jQuery. Much better than anything I have seen from Microsoft (Hotmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Live…
DISCLAIMER: UX Judgements are harsh. Don’t get upset or defensive. Ignore them if you wish, but like Simon on American Idol, what I say hurts, but it’s true. The date picker in Google Analytics on the left is not obvious. The only way to make a custom range is to find a hidden icon no…
I have been a fan of http://www.Experts-exchange.com for a long time now. I registered in Sept 2003 and have earned 23,285 points. It is fulfilling to help people. I love that. And the whole structure is set up to easily ask questions and easily answer them. Recently (last year) they did a redesign which I…
I put the urchin.js file on commadot a month ago. It is a little file that tells Google everything that is happening on this page. It’s quite amazing actually. Really solid user interface. (Much better than AdWords) Great information. Nice use of Flash, where appropriate. Look at this image showing where commadot.com users reside. And…
I am trying to switch to the technique of 1 giant icons file. I didn’t like the opacity filter for the disabled elements. I really wanted grayscale. So I had to use duplicate images. I made a grid on my image so that the math was easy. See image here. So in my CSS, all…
From the legendary Bill Mirbach: …. so here’s today’s high-value trivia question. this “website” http://www.sigsmarketingsecrets.com/, if you can call it that, sells product. navigation …. not. is there anything other than the straight down approach that would sell more stuff? in other words, could you redesign this copy approach (including, i suppose, [a better picture…
I hope I answered all the questions correctly. 🙂 Speaking of Web Design. I had this minor problem. My code looks like: <body> <div style=”border: 1px solid red; display:inline; “> <span> <img src=”anyImage.jpg” mce_src=”anyImage.jpg” border=”0″ /> </span> </div> </body> What I don’t understand is why Firefox doesn’t display properly inline. It’s supposed to hug the content.…
These days there is alot of news about terror. Bombs in Bagdad. Nutballs in Virginia Tech. 9/11 and Columbine still seems fresh in my mind. I think about how people react during these terrible moments of fear. The students in Virginia Tech apparently froze. They hid under the desks while the nutcase walked methodically around…