9 months ago
Jakob Nielsen occasionally drifts into utopian usability fantasies in which he tries to convince us that we should all stop using Flash and Photoshop. On the other hand, he occasionally publishes ideas that are valid.
I recently browsed a year-old article on Interaction Elasticity that contained this:
A path with 5 easy clicks is vastly superior to one with 3 difficult clicks. And a menu with 10 easily understood items is better than a menu with 7 obscure ones.
To put this in context, I was debating the use of a dreaded drop-down menu when I came across said article. For me, Nielsen's quote argued against things like drop-down menus, since providing a clear logical navigation path to subpages (even with 2 to 3 clicks) would be usable, clean and better for information architecture.
Note: I'm downplaying the traditional drop-down. I think rollovers that are more akin to widgets or what Nielsen calls a Mega Drop-Down aren't so bad.
1 year ago
David Bliss at Odopod recently posted a rundown of how his company handles Flash and SEO. He used the term "progressive enhancement" to describe the technique. According to Wikipedia:
Progressive enhancement is a strategy for web design that emphasizes accessibility, semantic markup, and external stylesheet and scripting technologies. Progressive enhancement uses web technologies in a layered fashion that allows everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, using any browser or Internet connection, while also providing those with better bandwidth or more advanced browser software an enhanced version of the page.
This strategy is something I've been employing for a while, but without the terminology to succinctly describe it. As Bliss mentioned, with SWFObject, SWFAddress and the Flash Search Player from Google, it's becoming easier and easier to confidently sell SEO and Flash together. Next time you pitch a client, wrap this process up as "progressive enhancement." It would be nice to make the term an industry standard.
1 year ago
One of my biggest pet peeves are "click here" links. It's the lowest common denominator method for placing links in content. I never really liked them, but I vowed to never use them and rally against the practice starting about four years ago.
Zach Dunn over at Built Internet! apparently hates them as much as I do and wrote an article to that effect. He makes the argument that "click here" links don't really mean anything in context and that if "the links are clear enough, a user should not have to be instructed where to click." Not to mention, "click here" does nothing towards improving search engine rank.
It's such a small issue, but something that's very easy to remedy. Take a few minutes to rewrite a sentence next time you find yourself linking with "click here." Think of it as providing the user with a brief description of what it is they're about to see.
2 years ago
I bookmarked a post on A List Apart earlier this year by the name of "Sign Up Forms Must Die." In the article, author Luke Wroblewski makes a great case for rethinking the placement and overall necessity for sign-up forms.
When planning a customer's initial experience for your web service, think about how you can avoid sign-up forms in favor of gradual engagement.
I've been brainstorming ways to skip the sign-up process for an upcoming project and I was reminded of said article. At the bottom of the page, Wroblewski provides a nice list of best practices to take away.
2 years ago
A while back, I stumbled across the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. In the world of usability and interaction, a pattern is defined as:
[An] optimal solution to a common problem within a specific context.
Yahoo! has essentially released internal design patterns, compiled from their own usability testing. The library covers many areas, including interaction, navigation and search. While Yahoo! doesn't represent the epitome of usability, the collection is worth checking out to inform your own design and organizational decisions. Basically, if you get stuck or wonder if there's a standard methodology you're missing, use it as a fallback.
Additionally, Yahoo! released a stencil kit for quickly mocking up interfaces. If you're building services for Yahoo!, it's invaluable. However, most of us aren't. At best, a developer could slap together an interface to better communicate an idea.
2 years ago
Back in August, Mozilla Labs introduced Ubiquity. As with most experimental prototype plugins for Firefox, I received the news of Ubiquity with a grain of salt.
One night a few weeks ago, I decided to give Ubiquity a test drive and installed the plugin on my laptop. Even though it's essentially just a proof-of-concept at this point, it opens a new world of functionality for browsers.
Ubiquity functions much like Enso from Humanized, which is no coincidence, since Aza Raskin joined the Mozilla team earlier this year. Basically, you launch Ubiquity with a key command and type a natural-language request (i.e., map Concord, NC). That's only the gist of the platform; to really experience the functionality, you should watch this video or just install the plugin.
Since Ubiquity is a platform, commands can be created using basic Javascript—check out the Command Author Tutorial. I'm definitely watching the development of this platform with great interest, because it could eliminate many of the needlessly repetitive actions associated with browsers and the web.
1 comment
