Oct 07

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.

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Sep 28

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.

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Sep 16

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.

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Sep 12

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 I believe that this preconceived notion should be challenged since many of the underlying reasons are out of date.

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Aug 22

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.

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Aug 10

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.

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Aug 01

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.

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Jul 19

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.

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Jul 09

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.

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