Designing the User Experience
When we think about the development of websites, we think of the back-end development, graphic design and semantic markup that are coded and combined into the finished website.
The user experience design is often overlooked. It is intangible, naturally vague and difficult to understand. However, making this user experience comprehendible is crucial to the design process.
It is very tempting to skip over the experience design and straight to designing in Photoshop. Perhaps our ego gets in the way, or we are scared of spending hours that, in the end, don’t return a tangible product.
In the end our user experience notes and research are transformed into wireframes, design comps and ultimately the finished website.
Functional Favicons
Traditionally favicons are used for branding. A tiny icon which represents who you are and is displayed in the browsers address bar, in your bookmarks and (in Firefox) in the tab of the page your are currently viewing.
For most, the favicon is purely aesthetic. However, in others it has become a useful piece of functionality.
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.
Clearing Gracefully
Clearing in CSS has always been a bit of a pain. The guys over at QuirksMode have let out a little secret used by the CSS experts to clear:both without an extra div or hidden content.
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- Adobe → “ The problems you are talking about are not Flash issues they are design issues . The problem is not Flash, the problem is that there are very few real designers around anymore. As for the plug in every browser for every platform save iOS has it installed when you download it. I am amazed how…”
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