March 31, 2003
Humboldt Gets Rolled Over Every Other Day
Just 2 more days until my vacation! I'll be making my annual trek up to Humboldt for my reunion. Breakfast at The Alibi, bar crawls, hiking in the redwoods, real rain (it's in the forcast)....ahhhhh, relaxation at last.
March 14, 2003
Expanded Elements of UXP
George Olson has come up with an interesting expansion of Jesse James Garrett's Elements of User Experience chart.
George argues that Jesse did not factor in the idea of the web being an interactive medium that focuses on sensoral richness and immersions. Thus, there are really 3 dimensions to the user experience
Take a look at his play on Jesse's diagram (PDF
Moving to Modern Layout Standards
UIE, in preperation for their upcoming User Interface West Conference in San Francisco, interviewed Eric Meyer (of Cascading Style Sheets fame). He raises some great reasons why site designers and closet code junkies (like me) should be moving to a transitional XHTML and CSS based layout scheme and ditching those embedded tables.
Using some example sites that have recently undergone major redesigns as an example (Fox Searchlite, Wired) he makes a strong case for moving in the dirtection of style sheet based layouts. The end result of style based layouts is evident by the speed in which the page loads and the ease of altering the layouts in templates by editing a single file for the entire site!
Can you honestly say you have people coming to your site with <4.X browsers? If the answer is no, then there really is no reason to wait. I made the move to stylesheet based layout for this site last year.
March 13, 2003
How a Site Looks Matters
While user experience designers (myself included) are constantly working to design sites that are designed from the ground up with usabilty in mind, the visual design aspect still matters. In fact, a recent study concluded that how a site looks visually lends greater weight to it's credibility with users than it's overall usability.
The percentage break down worked out to something like this:
- 46.1 percent of those surveyed mentioned the site’s appearance in assessing it
- information design/structure, was mentioned only 28.5 percent of the time