Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 73
May 4, 2011
The Philosophy of UX
In her presentation at An Event Apart in Boston, MA 2011 Whitney Hess talked about a universal set of design principles for creating great user experiences….
LukeW | An Event Apart: The Philosophy of UX.
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May 3, 2011
Now You See Me…
SHOWING AND HIDING CONTENT using JavaScript-based page manipulations for tabbed interfaces, collapsible elements, and accordion widgets is a common development pattern. Learn how your choice of hiding mechanism can influence content accessibility in assistive technologies like screen readers in an excerpt from Aaron Gustafson's Adaptive Web Design.
A List Apart: Articles: Now You See Me.
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Animatable | Create CSS3 animations
Animatable is the easy way to create CSS3 animations and advertising for Webkit browsers on any platform or device — including Android, BlackBerry, iOS and WebOS.
Animatable | Create CSS3 animations and advertising (Webkit and Firefox Aurora).
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All Our Yesterdays
In his All Our Yesterdays presentation at An Event Apart in Boston, MA 2011 Jeremy Keith outlined the problem of digital preservation on the Web and provided some strategies for taking a long term view of our Web pages. Here are my notes from his talk…
via LukeW | An Event Apart: All Our Yesterdays.
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More Meaningful Typography
TIM BROWN in A LIST APART: A MODULAR SCALE is a sequence of numbers that relate to one another in a meaningful way. Using the golden ratio, for example, we can produce values for a modular scale by multiplying by 1.618 to arrive at the next highest number, or dividing by 1.618 to arrive at the next number down.
By using culturally relevant, historically pleasing ratios to create modular scales and basing the measurements in our compositions on values from those scales, we can achieve a visual harmony not found in layouts that use arbitrary, conventional, or easily divisible numbers.
Read More Meaningful Typography at A List Apart, for people who make websites.
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Jared Spool: The Secret Lives of Links
… The back button is the button of doom.
The user clicks the back button when they run out of scent, just like a fox circling back. But foxes succeed 'cause rabbits are stupid and they go back to where they live and eat, so the fox can go back there and wait. Users hit the back button hoping that the page will somehow have changed when they get back.
Pay attention to the back button. The user is telling you they've lost the scent.
Another behaviour is pogo-sticking, hopping back and forward from a "gallery" page with a list of links to the linked pages. Pogo-sticking results in a failure rate of 89%. There's a myth with e-commerce sites that users want to pogo-stick between product pages to compare product pages but it's not true: the more a user pogo-sticks, the less likely they are to find what they want and make a purchase.
Users scan a page looking for trigger words. If they find a trigger word, they click on it but if they don't find it, they go to search. That's the way it works on 99% of sites, although Amazon is an exception. That's because Amazon has done a great job of training users to know that absolutely nothing on the home page is of any use.
via Adactio: Journal—Jared Spool: The Secret Lives of Links.
Thank you, Mr Jeremy Keith, for live blogging Day 1 of An Event Apart.
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May 2, 2011
Ethan Marcotte: The Responsive Designer's Workflow
A responsive site isn't flipping between a set of fixed layouts. It's liquid. Breakpoints that you haven't thought of will still work.
You have to figure out what is the most appropriate experience for what device. Stephen Hay wrote a great post called There Is No Mobile Web. His point is that the rise of mobile should encourage to revisit our principles of accessibility and progressive enhancement for everyone.
When responsive design meets Mobile First—starting with the narrowest width and building up from there—what you're doing is progressive enhancement. You'll even see this layering in the way that the stylesheets are structured.
The basic experience is still very attractive. The next step is enhancing for browsers that support media queries …and Internet Explorer. They get an enhanced stylesheet.
There are other things you can test for: are touch events supported, for example. So an iPad has the screen size of a laptop but it also supports touch events. They get some enhanced JavaScript functionality.
A really tricky question is "is this key content, or is it simply an enhancement for some users?" Web fonts are good example of this grey area. For the Boston Globe, they decided to make a hard cut-off point and only serve up web fonts to viewports above a certain size. …
Adactio: Journal—Ethan Marcotte: The Responsive Designer's Workflow.
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Luke Wroblewski: Mobile Web Design Moves
A few years ago, Morgan Stanley published a report in which they predicted that somewhere in 2012 more mobile devices would be shipped than PCs. Well, it happened two years earlier than predicted. As Eric Schmitt has said, everything to do with mobile happens faster. There's been a 20% drop in PC usage, with the slack taken up by tablets and smartphones. But as Luke points out, the term PC—Personal Computer—is actually better suited to a mobile device; the device you have with you on your person. The way we interact online, email, etc., is shifting to mobile devices.
But is all this usage happening in native apps? No, as it turns out. 40% of Twitter's traffic comes from mobile, of which 78% is from the mobile website. Mobile browser users increased over 300%. What people forget is that growth of native apps also drives growth of mobile web use.
In a nutshell, more people are going to be accessing your websites with a mobile device than with a desktop device. Find one study of mobile usage that doesn't show exponential growth.
Even if you have native apps, like Gowalla with a client for iOS, Android, Blackbery, etc., people will still post links in your native app and where does that take you? To a browser.
Anyway, it doesn't have to be either a native app or a mobile web site. You can hedge your bets and do both …so you're protected if Steve Jobs pulls the rug out from under you.
…
Adactio: Journal—Luke Wroblewski: Mobile Web Design Moves.
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Veerle Pieters: The Experimental Zone
The next speaker at An Event Apart in Boston is Veerle Pieters. I'm going to try liveblogging some of what she's got to say.
Veerle's talk is called The Experimental Zone and it's all about experimentation in web design. People often ask her how she comes up with, say, certain colour combinations but she doesn't really have a straightforward answer—a lot of it is down to experimentation. So it's good to learn how to experiment better.
Pablo Picasso said: Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
…
Adactio: Journal—Veerle Pieters: The Experimental Zone.
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