Embedded Fonts – A Bad Idea
Embedding fonts in your website through CSS has been a widely anticipated feature. A recent post at A List Apart has brought more light to this issue recently. The excitement behind this revolves mostly around removing creative limitations and improving readability through better typography.
However, I anticipate the use of embedded fonts will make things much worse, before they get better. Stephen Coles and I are in much agreement on the issue.
New Browser Windows
When a user clicks a link on your (or any, for that matter) website, they expect the new web page to appear in its place. To navigate back to places they have come from, they click a ‘Back’ button on their browser. This has become normal for all internet users and is the experience they expect to have. Breaking the expectations of your users can lead to confusion and disappointment: two words usability experts despise.
It’s amazing to me that this is still a controversial topic.
Making CAPTCHA Usable
In today’s ever complex world of spam, Phil Haack has come up with a refreshingly simple solution for coping with blog and form spam which he calls Honeypot Captcha.
No javascript, completely accessible and easier on your visitors.
Forget about the Fold
In design speak the “fold” is the location of the website at which the visitor needs to scroll to read further. “Above the fold” is a term commonly used by editors and web designers to prioritize important headlines to the user.
My experience shows that most web designers have a preconceived notion that any content of value needs to be displayed above the fold. I believe that this preconceived notion should be challenged since many of the underlying reasons are out of date.
Why Flash is Mostly Bad
Adobe’s animation and multimedia technology, Flash, distracts users from a websites sites core content, and introduces a myriad of design problems. While there are a few occasions where flash is acceptable, and can even add value, typically the use of Flash makes websites harder to use.
One of the largest problems with flash is Search Engine visibility, and accessibility to those with disabilities. While these problems are severe, this article’s focus is on usability, not accessibility.
Typography on the Web
Typography is fundamental to clean design, and paramount to content. Bad typography will drive users away from your content, while good typography will keep things legible and draw your readers eye to important sections. Your content should be easy to skim for those in a rush, and also easy to read more deeply.
Typography on the web should stem from print media. People are used to reading newspapers, paperbacks, and other paper documents. Study these and keep your web pages consistent with these.
Reasons to Validate
Validation is the process of ensuring that your web pages (XHTML, XML and CSS files) meet the standard set aside by the w3c, the organization responsible for these markup languages. Validation is similar to running your documents through a spell checker for errors, ensuring that the data sent to the web browsers is well formed and syntactically correct.
Web Form Fundamentals
The form is the heart and soul of your application. After all, it’s the point of entry for the data in the system. Yet, time after time we stumble across confusing, and time consuming forms. Here are a few of my pointers and pet peeves when it comes to designing these forms.
Design Is Communication
Great applications carefully orchestrate the building of complex data situations, architecting models to interact with data, and lastly designing an attractively useful web interface. While well engineered source code is absolutely essential to these applications ultimately the user interface – the layout and look & feel – is where your clients spend their time. It’s where they learn what an application has to offer, and how it is to be used.
Search
Popular Posts
- 50 Tips To A User Friendly Website
- My Favorite Pomodoro Timers
- How to build a Gantt Chart with the Google Charts API
- Why Flash is Mostly Bad
- Sharing the Grid
- Why You Should Outsource Usability Testing
- 10 Tips to Better Google Wave Conversations
- The difference between User Research and Usability Testing?
- How to Label Submit Buttons
- Our New Development Process
Latest Comments
- 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.…”
- Etienne Segonzac → “ Hello everyone ! I would love to have a chat with other Pomodoro users (and the mailing list is quite slow). The thing is for me the main takeaways of the technique are the rhythm + the motivation of visualizing my progress. BTW, the Navel Labs app is quite gorgeous (and the compliment is coming from a concurrent…”
- some guy → “ Nice work! Thanks...…”
- sirber → “ Is there a limit to the URL size? What if I want to create a massive chart?…”
- Randy Martin → “ I have used the classic 12 column grid for all my design tasks for nearly 15 years. 12 column grids came out of print, allowing one to set type full page, half page, quarter page, third page, sixth page, etc., extremely easy. More than that, keeping things on the grid puts elements in balance and…”