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In 1998, usability expert Rolf Molich (co-inventor with Jakob Nielsen of the heuristic evaluation method) gave nine teams three weeks to evaluate the webmail application www.hotmail.com .
The Myth of Usability Testing
Updated: December 18, 2012 The Design Tidbits section offers a growing selection of articles centered around UI and graphic design. Recent Additions Responsive (Web) Design
Design Tidbits
Setting Up Photoshop For Web, App and iPhone Development « Smash
Most people who have designed websites or apps in Photoshop will, at one point or another, have had issues trying to match colors in images to colors generated by HTML, CSS or code. This article aims to solve those problems once and for all. Color Management to Match Colors Across Multiple Devices In the print world , color management typically involves calibrating your entire workflow, from scanner or digital camera to computer display to hard proofs to the final press output. This can be quite a tall order, especially when the devices use different color spaces — matching RGB and CMYK devices is notoriously hard.
iPhone App Design Trends « Smashing Magazine
For the past two years, the elegant iPhone has housed some of the most poorly designed applications you could imagine. The hype surrounding iPhone has prompted many designers across the globe to try their skills with the new mobile medium. The result are literally thousands of various iPhone-applications that are often hardly usable and counter-intuitive. However, some designers invest a lot of time and efforts into creating usable and original user interfaces (yes, there are usable and creative UIs). This article explores the ways in which designers use graphical elements and screen interactions to create iPhone-applications that are easy on the eyes and mind . The aim of this article is to display common trends and design approaches in iPhone app design – please notice that they are not necessarily optimal ones from the design or usability point of view.Can a brand exist by user interface alone? When it comes to internet search, Yahoo is about to find out. Yahoo's recent announcement that it would cede its infrastructure for web search to Microsoft was met with a healthy dose of industry skepticism. Carol Bartz, Yahoo's new CEO, justified the deal by outlining a strategy that allows the company to succeed by focusing on its user interface. Innovating there, she reasons, will enable Yahoo to compete with Google and Bing, while harnessing the technical might and infrastructure of Microsoft. Critics, foremost among them Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, openly challenged the strategy, loudly proclaiming: "User Interface Changes Won't Let Yahoo Compete In Search."
UI Matters: How an Interface-Lift Can Make or Break a Brand - Ad
Over the last couple of years, mobile devices have managed to gain mainstream popularity. With iPhone, making mobile Web applications finally usable by broad masses, web design can now be applied to mobile applications as well. In this post we are focusing on designs that are specifically optimized for mobile devices, in particular iPhone.
Showcase of Designs Optimized for iPhone « Smashing Magazine
Is your Web site primed for any viewer? How do you know? The nicest thing about a usable Web site is that it’s just a good thing to do for others so they can easily read your online information. The other side to usability is that it can increase your search engine standings so more people can find your Web site.
Usability.Edu: 25 Incredibly Useful Usability Cheat Sheets &
writings » Blog Archive » Introduction to Good Usability
Over the past year I have written a few posts about design guidelines. They have also proven to be the most successful ones. I have therefor decided to put a few of them together, add some more and bundle it as an ebook. So without much further ado, I present: Introduction to Good Usability (pdf) Licensing:
15 Valuable Usability PDFs You Never Heard Of
Here’s a list of 15 valuable Usability Papers in PDF form that you might not have heard of, but should know and can use: I thought I’d list a few helpful papers I use from time to time when going about my usability work. Some of these you may have heard of, some not. I think you’ll find these very helpful from time to time. This list is not meant to be comprehensive, rather, it’s the list of the most thumb-worn papers I leaf through when needed.Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites. 1. Form Labels Work Best Above The Field
10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines « Smashing Magazine
Effective Twitter Backgrounds: Examples and Current Practices «
Smashing Magazine has been on Twitter for about a year now ( @smashingmag ), and it turned out to be a great medium to communicate with our audience, build connections, discuss design-related topics and give away some nice prizes. However, even a year later, we still don’t have a Twitter background page and now is a good time to change that. So because we decided to create our own Twitter page, we wanted to first find out how other designers do it and what tips and techniques they use to create a truly outstanding, beautiful Twitter page. Your profile page is the only place on Twitter where you get opportunity to showcase your visual brand and possibly communicate additional information that can last longer than a tweet. You can customize your profile page by changing background, text and link colors.Wireframing is one of the most valuable parts of any web design project. It can save a designer tons of time by hashing out the details of a site’s architecture, functionality, and content prior to actually starting a visual design. But if done inefficiently, it can end up costing more time and can even create bigger headaches for both the client and the designer.
35 Excellent Wireframing Resources | Developer's Toolbox |
Posted on 13. Aug, 2009 by Bradley Hebdon in Features Using the Web can still be a very annoying experience! We’ve come a long way on the web today. Or have we? While we’ve innovated in many areas, we’ve also continued to disregard pre-existing issues.
The 65 Most Annoying things about the Web Today | UXbyDesign.org
iPhone Apps Design Mistakes: Over-Blown Visuals | How-To | Smash
The development of iPhone applications has recently become a hot topic in the design community; everybody tries to come up with some creative idea, port it into a stylish iPhone-alike application and sell it to thousands of users through the iPhone app store. However, many of these applications are poorly designed and therefore miss the chance of providing users with a truly useful product that users would find worth recommending to friends and colleagues. We want to take a closer look at the design of iPhone applications and showcase some good and bad examples, best practices as well as useful ideas and recommendations for your next iPhone app design.According to Nielsen Online, social networks and blogs are now the 4th most popular kinds of online activities. 67% of the world online population are now visiting them and the time they’re spending on them is growing by three times the overall growth rate of the internet. Social networks are now visited more often than personal email is read . Some social networks have grown to such enormous proportions that they rival entire countries in terms of population—if Facebook, for example, was a country, it would be the fifth-most-populated in the world (right between Indonesia and Brazil). There’s a lot of variety out there in the realm of social network design.