Website Usability Tips and Articles

Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow

Q. What technology do you need to build the next Flickr? A. Trick question. What you need to build the next Flickr is people. George Oates, a key member of the core team that shaped the Flickr community, shares lessons that can help you grow yours.

 

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Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?

Just because a design convention exists doesn't mean it works. Our field runneth over with design patterns, but is low on evidence of their utility. Jessica Enders drops some science on the widespread belief that zebra stripes aid the reader by guiding the eye along a table row.

 

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Creating More Using Less Effort with Ruby on Rails

The "why" of Ruby on Rails comes down to productivity, says Michael Slater. Web applications that share three characteristics—they're database-driven, they're new, and they have needs not well met by a typical CMS—can be built much more quickly with Ruby on Rails than with PHP, .NET, or Java, once the investment required to learn Rails has been made. Does your web app fall within the RoR "sweet spot?"

 

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Getting Started with Ruby on Rails

The "how" of Ruby on Rails: Hivelogic's Dan Benjamin prepares non-Rails developers, designers, and other creative professionals for their first foray into Rails. Learn what Ruby on Rails is (and isn't), and where it fits into the spectrum of web development and design. See through the myths surrounding this powerful young platform, and learn how to approach working with it.

 

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Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards

When designing interfaces for browsing data-driven sites, creating navigation elements that are also visualization tools helps the user make better decisions. Wilson Miner demonstrates three techniques for incorporating data visualization into standards-based navigation patterns.

 

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Take Control of Your Maps

It is now possible to replicate Google Maps’ functionality with open source software and produce high-quality mapping applications tailored to your design goals. Paul Smith shows how.

 

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Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry

Findability is to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as "web standards" is to "table layouts." In a web whose vastness exceeds comprehension, sites with findable content win. The good news is that everyone on your team can help make your site findable. Get a taste for this essential discipline from Aarron Walter, author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond.

 

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Sign Up Forms Must Die

You load a new web service, eager to dive in and start engaging, and what’s the first thing that greets you? A sign-up form. We can do better, says Luke Wroblewski, author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. Via a technique of "gradual engagment," we can get people using and caring about our web services instead of frustrating them (or sending them to a competitor's site) by forcing them to fill out a sign-up form first.

 

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On Creativity

As designers, we're wrongly perceived as custodians and exponents of creativity. This matters because business currently overvalues creativity. To avoid the inevitable backlash, we must lead our clients' perceptions.

 

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Design is in the Details

Stop worrying about how good a designer you are, and start worrying about the myriad tiny details that can elevate your work from passable to near-perfect.

 

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They Shoot Browsers, Don't They?

Version targeting will allow Microsoft to reach new heights of standards compliance where CSS and (especially) scripting are concerned. But to benefit from it, developers must explicitly opt in. That’s just not right, says Jeremy Keith. And it’s doomed to fail, because standardistas, by their very nature, will refuse to opt in.

 

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Version Targeting: Threat or Menace?

Version targeting shakes our browser-agnostic faith. Its default behavior runs counter to our expectations, and seems wrong. Yet to offer true DOM support without bringing JScript-authored sites to their knees, version targeting must work the way Microsoft proposes, argues Jeffrey Zeldman.

 

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Keeping Your Elements’ Kids in Line with Offspring

Alex Bischoff introduces Offspring, a JavaScript library bringing the power of advanced CSS selectors to browsers that can’t quite handle the real thing.

 

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The Rules of Digital Engagement

Jonathan Follett takes another trip down the "the long hallway":http://www.alistapart.com/articles/longhallway, looking at ways to collaborate, communicate, and manage conflict in virtual space.

 

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Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8

For seven years, the @DOCTYPE@ switch has stood designers and developers in good stead as a toggle between standards mode and quirks mode. But when IE7, with its greatly improved support for standards, "broke the web," it revealed the flaw in our toggle. The quest was on to find a more reliable ensurer of forward compatibility. Is version targeting the answer?

 

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From Switches to Targets: A Standardista's Journey

Grab your galoshes and walking stick and follow along with A List Apart's Eric Meyer as he considers the vices and virtues of version targeting as a standards toggle.

 

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A Preview of HTML 5

Who's afraid of HTML 5? Not Lachlan Hunt! As both a front-end web developer and a contributor to HTML 5, he tells us what we can expect from the emerging markup specification, whose goals include more flexibility and greater interoperability.

 

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Designing For Flow

Ask a web designer what makes a site great, and you're likely to hear "ease of use." Jim Ramsey begs to differ. Web applications in particular, he tells us, work best and engage most profoundly when they challenge users to overcome difficulties.

 

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How to Size Text in CSS

It's a tug-of-war as old as web design. Designers need to control text size and the vertical grid; readers need to be able to resize text. A better best practice for sizing type and controlling line-height is needed; and in this article, Richard Rutter obligingly supplies one.

 

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Understanding Web Design

We'll have better web design when we stop asking it to be something it's not, and start appreciating it for what it is. It's not print, not video, not a poster—and that's not a problem. Find out why cultural and business leaders misunderstand web design, and learn which other forms it most usefully resembles.

 

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