How to Deal with Images on the Web - Web Design Usability Guide. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. True or not, images are an important part of any website we create. Since it is so easy to embed an image in a website (even the process of creating your own images is very easy), most websites are filled with them. There are some very good examples out there on how to deal with images in a website from different points of view, but most of the websites do not showcase positive examples. And while this is not entirely dangerous for a design, it might decrease your chances to sell, in case you have a call-to-action page, or the chances to create good reading flow. It is more a matter of details than a matter of important principles, but dealing with images should be something designers understand and apply better.
Jakob Nielsen, the expert in webpage usability, together with his company NN/g, did an eye tracking study and concluded it with an article posted on their site, titled Photos as Web Content. Quality and relevance Guiding the user. The 30 Best Web Design Gallery Picks of 2012. We’re well past the half way point of 2012, and it’s been an absolutely amazing year for web design.
CSS3 and HTML5 are at the height of their game, responsive design is the poster child of modern web practices and we’re beginning to wrap our minds around new concepts such as serving up retina quality images to high resolution devices. With all of this great stuff happening in the industry, the Design Shack Web Design Gallery is positively bursting with awesome new inspiration and I think it’s a great time to highlight the best sites that we’ve seen in 2012 so far. Read on to see our hand-picked selection of the thirty best sites submitted this year. Quarter Rest Studios A great site for a collaborative music design studio based in Brooklyn, New York. I particularly like the minimal layout and the use of imagery. When was the last time? A intriguing site that aims to challenge you and ask questions. Riley Cran A simply superb portfolio site for a designer and illustrator in Vancouver, BC. Top 10 Free Responsive Image Galleries/Slideshows. If your website relies heavily on images, then having an image gallery is a great way to showcase your content on your website.
Having said that, this idea may also backfire if visitors are coming from a mobile or touch device. Mobile users deserve some love too, hence the purpose of today’s post. There are a variety of responsive image galleries, slideshows and sliders to better manage your photos, screenshots and other forms of images on your site. Some incorporate transition effects, fade-in, fade-out and other effects, as well as thumbnail views of the gallery for faster access, flexibility and ease-of-use to view your site in full all-out browser mode and palm-sized smartphone screens. To make it easier for you to find the right pick for your website’s needs, we have put together a showcase of the best 10 galleries, slideshows and sliders we know of. FlexSlider – [demo | download] Elastislide – [demo | download] Responsive Image Gallery – [demo | download] wmuSlider – [demo | download] 34 Free and Useful Mac Apps for Developers.
You know Apple has opened Mac application store a few months ago and you can buy many paid and download free Mac applications from the store.Unfortunately, it is really hard to check all the applications to find free ones but today we bring them together for developers which we think these Mac applications will make a developer’s life easier. I’m sure you know most of them and probably already using on your Mac but there may be a few worth checking it out.Here is the collection of free Mac applications especially for developers.
LittleIpsum Latin text generator for OS X.Option to wrap generated text in HTML tags.Generates words, sentences or paragraphs Navicat for MySQL Lite Navicat for MySQL Lite is a powerful database administration and development tool for MySQL. It works with any MySQL Database Server from version 3.21 or above, and supports most of the latest MySQL features. MobDis Unretiner A tool for iOS developers to easily resize their @2x or -hd cocos2d images in seconds! NovaBench. Lorenzo Verzini. FullCalendar - Full-sized Calendar jQuery Plugin. Typetester – Compare fonts for the screen. Proto app - A new touch app that makes wireframes and prototypes.
I ♥ wireframes - The ultimate source of inspiration and collection of resources for wireframes. Complete Beginner's Guide to Design Research. It actually begins the moment we learn about a project, whether we acknowledge it or not. We ask questions. We take notes. We learn everything we can about our client and their audience—and that’s before we even begin! Let’s explore the (purported) method to this (seeming) madness, known as design research.
Design research is an integral part of the oft–misunderstood user–centered design process. This process, employed by user experience designers, is both iterative and cyclical. Design research, as described in this article, assumes the reader follows a user–centered design process. Back to topWhat is design research? Design research describes any number of investigative techniques used to add context and insight to the design process. Design Research techniques can be incorporated before, during, or after the design solution is established.
The diagram below provides an overview of user–centered design techniques, highlighting research activities in red. Young, Indi. 2008. Purpose Ethnio. User Research. Customer Journey Maps – A ‘Quick And Dirty’ Technique To Create Them A Customer Journey Map (CJM) is a very helpful tool that represents the whole interaction with a product or service in a transparent manner. It clearly points out the strengths and weaknesses of each stage of the interaction – particularly those that affect the user experience. In addition to this, Customer Journey Maps also show the possibilities for improvement. However, creating a Customer Journey Map is a very resource-consuming process. In this article the author introduces to you the approach they took for one of their clients. The technique that we applied allowed them to quickly create a Customer Journey Map in a quick and cost-effective manner. Customer Journey Maps – A ‘Quick And Dirty’ Technique To Create Them How Pocket Built a Research Lab for Mobile App Testing in Just a Few Hours You’re ready to run a user study for your product.
How Pocket Built a Research Lab for Mobile App Testing in Just a Few Hours. Mobile Site Design in Adobe Muse | Muse-Themes.com. Everyone is talking about responsive design, however there’s certainly still a number of sites that use separate mobile versions to improve the browsing experience for those users. Here’s a great link from the Google analytics blog comparing the benefits of responsive vs. mobile sites. An understanding of this helps to make sense of the following post: How does a separate mobile site work? When a visitor lands on the desktop version of your site, a small piece of code (often using Javascript, PHP, etc.) detects the visitor’s device or browser size and redirects them to another location. For the purpose of this demonstration, I’ll be using a redirect to a different location (essentially a separate website). Step 1 - Setup your Mobile friendly website in Muse I’ve never come across a mobile site designed completely in Adobe Muse, so I took that as a challenge.
Make your thumbnails tiny like the site above! Example: UX Foundations. Glenilen Farm.