When it comes to text link hovers, some people prefer underlines while others prefer no underline rather a color shift. Typically, the designer-minded friends of mine prefer color shifts rather than underlines because they say the underlines “look too messy”. Then there’s the Google-esque approach which uses a constant underline and a blue link (the [...]

I was reading this article on mega drop down menus and I came across the following two paragraphs that discuss a menu that opens on hover versus one that opens on click. Option 1: Hover Menu Basically, there are two ways to approach the drop-down menu: with either a hover or a click to activate [...]

So, I’m sure most of you have seen the huge changes with Facebook profiles. User statuses (“What am I doing”) took a major backseat in lieu of brief personal intros pieced together by the data you give Facebook. It’s like they changed the entire MO of the site. Instead of the recent status update being [...]

The internet has been around for almost 50 years and since its beginnings as a text-based system, it’s become an essential tool for nearly 2 billion people worldwide. The early 90s presented us with one of the first “modern” browsers: Mosaic. It was extremely mundane, but it allowed everyday users like us to access and [...]

In a digital age where videos are on demand and where information is merely a Google search away, we’ve grown to expect that access to content is a quick, instantaneous one-step process. Nowadays, if it takes too many clicks to get somewhere on a website, users simply click out of your site. In a usability [...]

Recently I had a client send a mockup/wireframe of her idea of what her new site should be like. Most of the time I get offended when clients send me stuff like this because I feel it’s my job to do, not theirs. I came from the school of thought that we the designers were [...]

If I were president of the United States of America there are some issues I’d address first and foremost. Here’s a just a few of those issues: Building number consistency Have you ever been looking for a specific building number only to end up passing it, then wondering how you passed it? We all know [...]

With the arrival of “Web 2.0″, proper form validation has become increasingly more important. Rather than just reading websites we are actively helping create them. We’ve become a community who shares information and contributes to our social networks on a daily basis. Sites like Twitter, Facebook and Myspace are entirely user-driven, meaning all of the [...]

I’ve been reading Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things and I must say I am thoroughly enjoying it. It was written a few decades ago so some of the stuff to the reader might seem funny. For example, Norman makes a big deal about computers – because they were relatively new at the time [...]

In any given situation, whether online or off, we all form models of how things are supposed to work based on our understanding of the objects we are manipulating. When our mental conceptual model differs from the system model, we misunderstand how to use the object or system and become confused. For example, when we [...]