A great article that makes the concept of Experience Design a bit more understandable.

Some great design principles at Microsoft.

Just came across an article explaining what is white space and how to use it in modern web design. A must read!

If you need to display any kind of data, you should check out this post about data visualization and infographics resources for design inspiration.

For some reason, we personify our computers. We get angry at them when they crash or don’t do what they want. We call them names or even hit them.
Maybe this is so because our computers are rude to us. Making the programs more “polite” can help.

What is polite?

Politeness is not acting as programs do now and just adding “thank you” or “please”.
Neither is it when the programs act more human. Humans are more error prone, subjective and slow. We don’t want programs to be that.

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Nowadays, usability is a hot-topic. But a site, program or product needs more than just be usable. The whole user experience needs to be considered.
Therefore one should keep the user experience honeycomb in mind:

Each of these topics should be addressed when designing or updating how people experience your product.
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The amount of online services one uses nowadays is overwhelming! I just realized that by cleaning up my username/password database.

Almost every service has it’s own user data. To make life easier, most people use the same username and password for all of them. But from a security point of view, this is bad practice. So I use different passwords for most of the services I use, resulting in a huge list to remember. Once in a while, I try to clean up that list.

I start with unsubscribing the newsletters I don’t read anymore. This can easily been done. But then comes a harder part. How do you unsubscribe to all the services you signed up for? Most of them don’t have a “sign down” feature.

Now, there are pro and con arguments to this. A few pro arguments would be:

• The service doesn’t have invalid data. Information is important nowadays, but correct information is even more important!
• Identity theft is impossible. When the data doesn’t exist anymore, it can’t be stolen. On services that you aren’t using (or at least not often), you won’t notice if someone uses it and pretends to be you.
• A smaller username/password database to maintain (ok this is a personal argument, but I think quite a few other people have such a list in one form or another)

There are also con arguments. Probably the biggest being: With the internet interconnected and linking from one system to the another, deleting data can crash other systems. For example, a Flickr account that is deleted. Either only the user is delete and his/her photos are orphanated or the whole account is deleted and everyone that links to a photo from that collection has broken links on their site.

Still I opt for the “sign down” feature (at least for services that have to public available data, like e-mail accounts or personalised preferences of a service)

Today, when accessibility and usability play a huge role in the creation of a website or application, the power of color is sometimes forgotten. Although you can’t solely rely on color to make something stand out or to give it a different function (think about the different color of a hyperlink), the choice of color you make, can determine how your website makes the visitor feel even before he/she reads a single word.

The right color can give you a warm feeling (the colors from red to yellow, including pink, orange and brown will do that because they are associated with fire) where others can make you feel distant (the colors from green to blue and some blueish shades of violet will accomplish that). Not only the warmth of a color can make a difference. Also the color value (which is the measure of lightness or darkness of a color) plays a role. A darker or more saturated color will give more strength, more importance, but also more darkness to your object or text, while a less intense tint of the same color with give you more breathing room. It will seem less threatening and feel more inviting (beware that when you go too light, text can become harder to read if the contrast with the background isn’t outspoken enough)

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If you’re a webdesigner or an operating system developer, all those systems have users. Most of the users that will be utilising your software, won’t be as technically experienced as you. Yet we keep blaming the user when something is wrong. Here are some truths about those users:

• Users aren’t stupid. The system or application you designed just isn’t easy enough to use. This means that you need less complexity (preforable without losing functionality), simpler layout and better explain the user how to use it.
• Users aren’t lazy. Only very few users want to master the application they are using. Most of them just want to get their things done. So don’t expect them to know the system in and out. When they need an option that’s hidden away, why not point them in the right direction with some friendly text or a link?
• Users aren’t incompetent. As said before, most users aren’t technically experienced, so why not use ordinary understandable language? Words and phrases everyone can understand. The amount of errors that occurs (and frustrations that occur because of those errors) will also shrink when the user understands better what you expect from them. Why not even give them a hint? For example the format you expect a date to be in.
• Users aren’t perfect. There will always be errors that occur, maybe due to user input, maybe not. It’s the task of the developer to handle them and handle them nicely. Don’t be ashamed that something goes wrong and hide it. Tell the user if an error occured, why it happens and how it can be prevented (or when it will be fixed in case of a system being down for example).

So by keeping these 4 truths about users in mind, you’ll develop better software.

Here’s a nice article on the demise of Flash. Like the author, I too love flash sites. But there are also a lot of reasons why not to use it:

1. Annoying Flash Ads
2. Not search engine friendly
3. Bad usability (each flash site has its own way of operating it)
4. Not accessible to people with disabilities
5. Downward compatibility issues
6. Overburdening of the developers
7. No or bad internationalization
8. Not compliant with any open standard.

Two extra reasons I want to add, though: Since you need a plug-in to be able to see a flash site (over 50% of the internet users has one installed), you’re reliable on an extra piece of software which isn’t guaranteed to be available. So people might not be able to view your site at all. So reason number 9, you can’t be 100% sure your message reaches your target audience. And secondly, there is no way to enable tracking as you can with HTML sites.

Conclusion: Flash looks good and tempting but only use it as you would use an image, not as a complete site or for critical parts, like your navigation structure.