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 [...]

Part of the user experience is how well the site or application works and how easy it is to perform tasks. The design of the web site or application helps visually guide you in performing those tasks. So when then design throughout the site is inconsistent, you’d likely assume the usability would take a big [...]

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 [...]

I always strive for utmost simplicity with my work. Whether it’s designing visual interfaces, writing code, building wireframes or even taking notes, there is a level of cleanliness and simplicity that permeates it all. One of the things I love about my job is the ability to simplify, to reduce, and give more power and [...]

Such is the mantra of the Google design team and such is a good mantra to follow. I’ve always been impressed with Google’s steadfastness to simplicity. The worlds most popular search engine does’t need a glamorous, superfluous interface; it only needs to perform a search. I believe without any reservation that focusing on the user [...]

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 [...]

The above link is very obscure. The use of “click here” to designate links is far too prevalent on the web. Links should be clear and concise, not mysterious. “Click here” is mysterious and doesn’t give users any idea of the destination, especially when taken out of context of the containing paragraph – paragraphs that [...]