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February 2008
Viewing 15 Posts
The Benefits of Targeted Advertising
I don't mind targeted advertising. I mind being shown ads that I don't care about - and that's the way it's been for years. The fact that the Internet has become more social, allowing us to specify personal information about ourselves for public display and algorithmic analysis means that sometime in the future we can expect that during our time online, we will only be shown ads relevant to our lives.
When There's Too Much Color
When it comes to choosing colors for your website, there's a standard limit: three. Most things in the world come in three's: jokes, pigs, stooges, blind mice, space dimensions... But in terms of color on a website, you can think of the three being:
Promoting Yourself with a Good Resume
I know this seems a little off-topic for User Experience Design, but resume-writing IS a graphic art (printed medium typography) so it's worth discussing a little. I'm amidst a bunch of college seniors struggling to find jobs before we finish school in 86 days and I continually find that many aren't too sure how to make a decent resume. Don't be misinformed; it's not simply putting a list of the stuff you know and have done on a page and sending it off to several companies. There are several details of which a good resume writer should be aware.
White Space for Rent
White space is important when reading an online or printed document. It gives the reader some breathing room, a place for the eyes to rest. A lot of sites can overcomplicate their interfaces with too many colors, text and graphics and while this can be visually appealing, it can also be chaotic.
One Site to Rule Them All
With the rise of Google's OpenSocial initiative, it's becoming increasingly more likely that soon in the future we will see social networking sites which follow the same programming foundation. To those who aren't familiar with the concept, the idea is that if all the social networking sites out there use the same platform, it's easy for developers to create applications for a broader audience than for one particular site.
Apple Breaks The Consistency Rule
My friend Elliott informed me that there's a discrepancy between the MacBook Air multi-touch interface vs. the iPhone interface and it's quite fascinating. A major part of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines (Found Here) is Consistency. That is, ensuring that all applications for the Mac platform are consistent with each other both in functionality and interface design. Well that makes sense - users will get used to a specific functionality and should expect to see it all over the place (for example, expecting a program's preferences to be under the right button in the menu bar).
Press Enter to Submit
This is just a quick entry to mention that forms should always be allowed to be submitted using the Enter key. Sometimes when you want the form to do something special (i.e. some special Javascript/AJAX function), users will have to click the button because using Enter will still submit the form. The way around this is to write: <form onSubmit="return false;"> ... <input type="submit" value="Submit" onclick="doSomething(); return false;">
Always Coding Generically
I've been programming websites for a while now and though I often do things fast for prototyping purposes, I find myself wishing I coded in a more generic manner. Sure, it's easy to go ahead and write the code as you need it, but eventually you get to the point where everything can be jumbled up and it's hard to find what you're looking for.
Fishing for Feedback
It's really important to continually let your users know what's happening as they use your application. There shouldn't be any point in their user experience where they are confused as to what's going on. When you're in an elevator, the lights and 'dings' tell you as you move from floor to floor (regardless of whether or not they're actually correct). Imagine having to ride an elevator 30 floors and never knowing how much you've progressed... that would suck.
Switching from PC to Mac
It's no secret that the Windows OS interface is quite different than the Mac OS one, however much Vista tries to look similar. I recently convinced various members of my family to get iMacs and make the PC to Mac switch. The main reason, I said, was that the interface was just easier to use.
Multi-Touch Interfaces
The multi-touch interface is emerging of late as the new interface for digital devices, what with the iPhone, Macbook Air, Microsoft Surface and others. With this comes a whole new way of human-computer interaction which mimics more real-world gesturing. This breakthrough in HCI can open the doors to a whole new array of human interface guidelines - we're still very attached to the mouse as the main interaction device with the computer, but perhaps the touchpad on the Macbook Air will help transition to using fingers.
The iPhone and Social Networking
Because of the versatility of the iPhone - email, web-browsing, photos, YouTube, contact information, to-do lists, etc. we now have the ability to have everything we need at our fingertips as we walk around the world.
Developing Tools For Specific Audiences
Our fundamental goal in creating software or web applications is to provide a useful tool for people that allows them to do something. Word lets us make documents, iTunes lets us organize and listen to music, Photoshop allows us to make images, etc.
Formatting File Names
In case you don't do this already, I wanted to point out the advantages of using some kind of format for naming all your files (or at least the images). It can easily become confusing to remember what you named your images when you've uploaded dozens to your site. So when this becomes the case, you may find it useful development-wise to come up with some kind of format for naming your images. Perhaps all start with a unique name followed by an underscore and some other keyword, etc.
Interaction Design: A Visual Command Line
Code is essentially comprised of a bunch of functions that achieve some task. In the old days of computers, users would utilize these functions by typing something in some kind of command line. Even these days when writing programs, users can "interact" with them by simply writing function calls like the following: > Cat c = new Cat("Muffin"); > c.meow() > int x = c.calculateExponent(4,7);