This article is a repost from: http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1353612 Curt Cloninger, author of Fresher Styles for Web Designers: More Eye Candy from the Underground, discusses the concept that ‘form follows function,’ with particular focus on web design. In his watershed 1896 essay “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” proto-modern architect Louis Sullivan famously declared, “form follows function.” [...]

Whitney Hess recently wrote a really great article about the top ten common misconceptions of the user experience. In it she explains what those top ten misconceptions are and details their truths using quotes from well-known UX designers. Here they are in synopsis form. For the full article see Whitney’s blog. User experience design is [...]

Jakob Nielsen said “To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not only what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior.” I think though, that this is only half of the challenge. The other half is a similar statement directed towards the designer. Since we are [...]

I went to school to be a graphic designer although I had no itentions of doing actual graphic design. I wanted to focus on interactive, but there wasn’t an actual interactive program. The university I went to graduates some of the best design students in the southeast. This is partially my opinion and partially fact. [...]

I wrote an article a while back on the ruination of the internet by this current SEO craze; how companies are so desperate to get high rankings in search results, that they slack off when it comes to usability. “Narrowly construed, SEO focuses on one problem: getting your site listed as high as possible in [...]

Interaction 08 was last week in Savannah, GA. I didn’t get a chance to go, however, the good ol’ faithful internet has blessed me with user uploaded videos of all the presentations. Having watched a few of the presentations and had a good conversation with a friend, we wondered what it takes to shift the [...]

Picture this: You’re lost in the forest at night with nobody or nothing around you for miles and your only tools are a flashlight and a map. You’ve got three days worth of food rations and water. Unfortunately you have no clue how to read a topographical map and you don’t even have a compass. [...]

We all have a cell phone and we’ve all seen the little bars in the upper section of the screen indicating signal strength. But what exactly do the bars mean? New Scientist had an article recently that brought up this question. Usability isn’t limited to the web and this was the perfect article to bring [...]

For regular readers you know I tend to talk frequently about Jakob Nielsen, a usability guru. I have contributed to the criticism of his stark and 10-year old website. In the end though he’s respected. I was reading some articles this morning which were mostly talking about Nielsen’s purposeful lack of images and really anything [...]

This article was written by Christina Wodtke. It is a repost. “You know when you’re on a website and you see a bunch of navigation choices to click on? I’m the one who decided what the choices are, what they are called and where they take you when you click” Yeah, I said that. And [...]