Curing the Navigation-itis Syndrome. More and more content is being published everyday and site owners need to find ways to categorize all this content. And with more content and categories comes greater navigation problems. Sometimes navigation becomes a problem when there are simply too many options. Thus, it’s of great importance to cure the navigation-itis syndrome and make website navigation user-friendly and easy to navigate. This article offers tips on how to approach navigation design. These tips can help you solve website navigation issues and provide a clearer user experience. But first, here are the tips… Tips on How to Approach Navigation Design When we started working on this article, Jon (SpyreStudios founder) and I exchanged some ideas, and came up with a basic set of rules as to where the navigation could/should be placed, how it should look, work and behave: 1.
One navigation menu is often enough. 2. Make it obvious what the choices are using clear and easy-to-understand text. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 1. 2. 3. Android User Interface Design: Working With Fragments. The new Fragment API for Android, introduced in Android 3.0, allows for easier dynamic user interfaces. In this tutorial, learn how to convert a two-screen ListView to WebView workflow into a single screen workflow designed for large screens, such as those found on tablets. Subsequent Changes to Techniques & Software Certain aspects of applications or techniques used in this tutorial have changed since it was originally published. This might make it a little difficult to follow along. Android SDK: Using Fragments The pacing of this tutorial is going to be faster than some of our beginner tutorials; you may have to review some of the other Android tutorials on this site or even in the Android SDK reference if you are unfamiliar with any of the basic Android concepts and classes discussed in this tutorial.
Introducing Fragments Before we get started, let's define what a Fragment is, at a high level. Step 0: Getting Started Step 1: Redesigning the Screens Step 3: Creating the Fragment Classes. Ayatana overlay scrollbars: something truly Natty. A wit said of Google Wave “if your project depends on reinventing scrollbars, you are doing something wrong.”
But occasionally, just occasionally, one gets to do exactly that. Under the Ayatana banner, we’ve been on a mission to make the desktop have less chrome and more content. The goal is to help people immerse themselves in their stuff, without being burdened with large amounts of widgetry which isn’t relevant to the thing they are trying to concentrate on. And when it comes to widgetry, there are few things left which take up more space than scrollbars. For example, I spend plenty of time in a full screen terminal, and it’s lovely to see how clean that experience is on Natty today: …but that scrollbar on the right seems heavy and outdated. We took inspiration from mobile devices, and started exploring the idea of making scrollbars be more symbolic, and less physical. Of course, since the desktop isn’t often a touch device, we need to think through pointer interactions.
Just use a (native HTML) button. Many User interface widgets can be developed using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, in some cases developers build custom versions of native HTML controls because they cannot achieve the exact look and feel or behaviour they desire with a native control. Where ever possible it is recommended that native HTML controls be used over custom controls as their accessibility support is likely to be more robust and it’s much less work. However, if you do have a need to develop a custom control there are a number of steps you will have to take to ensure it is accessible. In HTML5 it is conforming to use ARIA to help in the creation of an accessible custom control. A standard button (input type=”button”) code: Example requirements for creating an accessible custom control Note: The following is a demonstration of the steps to create an accessible custom button.
Starting with an image For other users there are problems: 1. An accessible label can be added to the image using the alt attribute. Code: Reference: The User Experience And Psychology Of Colour. There is a lot of psychology in colour, and while I don’t claim to be an expert, every now and then I come across something that seems to be rather counterintuitive. I suppose there are some cultural influences on colour as well, and people need to take these sorts of things into account when designing sites , but there also seem to be some ideas that cross over cultural lines. Today I want to take a quick look at the colours that I would assume we’d all connect with a certain response – say the colour of success, the colour of failure, and what colours you expect to see in form fields when you are doing things right or wrong.
What colours come to mind when you think of a ‘ Success ‘ message? What colours come to mind when you think of doing something wrong? I’ve set up a very quick, very simple test to have a quick look at this topic. You can head here to take the test so we can have more than just my opinion on the topic. Why Colours? The Sites Gmail: Example : Gmail username, unavailable. Plugins and Resources for Improving User Interactivity with Wordpress | Speckyboy Design Magazine. If there is a sense of community and vibrant life surrounding a blog it tends to be successful and ultimately popular – that is a fact. So, if you own a WordPress blog and you are looking for an effective way to create a real sense of user interactivity on your blog, in this post, I highlight some fantastic plug-ins and resources, that you may not know about, that can be of great help in creating a sense of involvement amongst your blog visitors. Make Your Site Social The Gigya Social optimization plug-in aggregates authentication and social APIs from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn, AOL and other OAuth & OpenID providers, giving sites the ability to authenticate users via social network and OpenID providers and increase site traffic by allowing users to easily share content with their friends and followers.
The plug-in is scalable and secure, using a standard authentication techniques to prevent account spoofing. Make Your Site Social Resources & Tutorials Digress.it. Better Check Boxes with jQuery and CSS. Martin Angelov In this short tutorial, we will be creating a replacement for the default browser checkboxes in the form of a simple jQuery plugin. It will progressively enhance your forms but at the same time fall back to the default controls if JavaScript is unavailable.
The first step is to lay down the structure of the underlying HTML document. We will need a form with checkboxes which we will later be replacing with their enhanced jQuery versions. index.html <! The main container element – the #page div, holds our form. Notice the HTML5 data attributes, specified on some of the labels. And here is the markup of our replacement checkboxes: <span class="tzCheckBox checked"><span class="tzCBContent">ON</span><span class="tzCBPart"></span></span> When our plugin is called, it will loop through the checkboxes, and insert the HTML code you can see above after each one, while at the same time hiding the original.
Checkbox Replacements Explained Now lets move on to the styling. jQuery Conclusion. Everything you always wanted to know about touch icons. “Touch icons” are the favicons of mobile devices and tablets. Adding them to your web page is easy, and I’m sure you already know how this works using HTML: It’s a shame Apple didn’t just implement the standard <link rel=icon> and chose to come up with a more verbose proprietary link relation instead. Chrome v31+ for Android does support this syntax, though! Use it as follows: If no such HTML is found, Chrome for Android falls back to the Apple touch icons instead.
Apple iOS has supported touch icons since iOS 1.1.3. What’s weird is that Android 2.1+ also has apple-touch-icon support (with a few quirks). For web pages that don’t specify a custom touch icon, a thumbnail screenshot of the page is used instead. Fancy effects iOS automatically adds some visual effects to your icon so that it coordinates with the built-in icons on the Home screen (as it does with application icons). Rounded corners Drop shadow Reflective shine I’d recommend to always use precomposed icons. Different icon sizes. On negative hovers. 18 May, 2011 I’ve been mentioning moaning about something called negative hovers on Twitter for ages now, so it’s about time I wrote a quick post on them. At their most basic a negative hover is a link whose appearance is subtracted from on hover rather than added to.
This might mean they go from: Normal Dark colour Underlined A background On :hover Paler colour Not underlined No background Or any combination of the above. It is in my (and lots of other people’s) opinion that these are a bad thing. Spot the odd one out Hovering any of the links in the list or the paragraph removes their underline or background which puts them on the back seat, surrounded by the overpowering underlines/backgrounds of the other links surrounding it.
Hover any link on this page and see how hard it is to quickly see which one is hovered. Now compare that with this page. Imagine a user has tabbed to those link. Underlines are obtrusive Underlines are just plain ugly. Intuition The answer? Positive hovers, of course! Issues. Why Keyboard Navigation is so Awesome. One of my favorite recent trends in web design is keyboard navigation. Used correctly, it can greatly enhance the experience of a website. Using the arrow keys on sites like Thinking For A Living and Designspiration make the consumption of large amounts of content quicker, easier and more engaging. Google have also recently implemented keyboard shortcuts into their search results, allowing users to quickly browse through instant previews and find what they are looking for. I’ve also just finished development of a WordPress theme – Keybrdr, pictured above – that allows you to use sliding keyboard navigation on your own blog, website or portfolio.
So, what’s all the fuss about? For me, it’s all about engagement. There’s something about pressing a physical button and having a website actually react, rather than passively scrolling, that just feels nicer. It’s part of what makes the iPad such a captivating device – being able to manipulate what you see on screen with your fingers.