Design
Design Last Design
Agility comes from your ability to rapidly gather feedback about the software you are building, and to react quickly. This is especially true during your initial build phase.
Interface First Design
I’ve always been a supporter of Interface First Design. To your customer, the interface is the product. The customers needs are all defined by the way they interact with your product. This is why we have always encouraged designing the interface before writing any code. This keeps developers from over-engineering features and ensures the customer gets what they expect from you.
However, I often find myself over-designing. I waste a lot of time designing things that will be deleted in future iterations.
Introducing Design Last Design (DLD)
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with what I call “Design Last Design.” Essentially this means we sketch out a user interface in the beginning, as we always have, but we don’t pretty it up. We build the whole application in greyscale with standard fonts, and boxes, but nothing pretty. Near the end of the project, we wrap it all up with graphic design. The interactions are all still designed up front, but the graphic design is laid on at the end. We don’t waste time on graphical details which are not yet important.
Is Blue Still The Best Color For Links?
I set out to write a post which proves that blue links are not more user friendly than links of other colors. It is a topic all web designers have wrestled with at some point. Many of us, including myself, believe that links of any color can be equally usable as long as they:
- Are of contrasting color from the body text;
- Are underlined;
- Change color when visited;
However, when I began researching this article it became clear that the scientific evidence was against me. Articles, old and new, clearly prove that users find links significantly faster when they are blue, underlined and change purple after being visited.
How to Label Submit Buttons
Submit button labels are often neglected as part of form design. Clear actionable text on these buttons is key to a person understanding what happens when they click on it.
HTML uses “submit” as it’s default text, which isn’t ideal in any situation. We often find ourselves labeling buttons badly, just because it’s become standard to do so.
Photoshop Kung-Fu: Evenly spaced columns and rows
When mocking up a web design or creative of some kind I often find myself dividing areas into equal spaced rows or columns. This is a simple task when dividing into 2 parts, since your guides snap to the center of a selected object. Dividing into 3′s is a little more difficult. Dividing into 4′s isn’t too bad since you can just divide by 2, then subsequently split the divisions by 2. There’s got to be a better way, and alas… there is.
Note: This applies to Photoshop CS2. There may be a more prominent way to do this in newer versions.
50 Tips To A User Friendly Website
Here is a list of 50 things that I keep in mind on every website that I build. Some of these are secrets I have acquired from the best designers in the world, and some of them are standard every day practices. Either way, these tips will improve your visitors experience on your website.
Sharing the Grid
When it comes to design, I’m a firm believer in simplicity. Occasionally I’m criticized for being overly simple, but I take that as a compliment. In my design, typography, grids, color, imagery and especially whitespace all stand for themselves. They don’t need any fancy treatment or “web 2.0″ effects. They work because they are simple and beautiful in their natural state.
Grids are foundational to all my designs. I always sketch out ideas on a Behance Dot-Grid Book, (thanks to Garrett Dimon for sharing this a few months ago). While these square grids are perfect for sketching idea’s and concepts, they don’t work for fine-tuning your design.
Worldmapper – Trending the globe
I am fascinated by the different ways people represent data. We grow accustomed to displaying data in the same old ways. We start to glance over the mundane bar graphs we see everyday. We forget that the relationship between the data is more important than the specific numerical values. Graphs are for trends, reports are for numbers.
Worldmapper takes the same old data we hear every day in the news and dares to present it uniquely. I think it makes their point well.
IE8 – Trying to become a real browser?
Microsoft posted an article on their Internet Explorer blog earlier this week where they claimed Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 test. Internet Explorer has been the cause of many web design headaches due to blatent disregard for Web Standards. Microsoft may finally be feeling pressure from Opera and Mozilla to comply with Web Standards.
Amazon.com Redesigned for the better?
For many years I considered Amazon.com to be the epitome of great ecommerce design. About 2 years ago, I changed focus. Amazon started to do too much, in my opinion. Cluttering the interface with elements that, as far as I could tell, we rarely used.
A few weeks back Amazon redesigned their site and made a number of dramatic changes. Some were great, some are more perplexing.
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- Robert → “ I have to agree with the design of the site being great. I am more interested in how the website got ranked so high and some keywords land first page in searches when the page it lands on has no page rank.…”
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