Category: User Experience
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Good Design
Good design is subjective and can’t necessarily be measured. In the late 1970s, Dieter Rams attempted to express what he believed to be the most important principles for design. Here is a brief overview: 1. Good design is innovative Design is constantly evolving and part of that evolution is adapting to new technology. Technological innovations…
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Design Fail: A cascade of bad decisions
Design failures usually aren’t the result of one bad decision but rather a chain of mistakes that lead to an inevitable conclusion. When I see something in a design that doesn’t work I try to trace it back to the decisions that caused it.
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Accessible Custom Checkbox
In an earlier post I explored custom styling of form selects. In this article I discuss how to make accessible custom checkboxes to match your interface styling. The same technique can be used for radios.
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Lose My Number
iOS has a handy built in feature: automatically sensing phone numbers and making them active links. When you touch them you get a dialog to make a call to that number. Unfortunately this can cause problem with your layout and your pages.
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Office Depot’s Mobile Website Gets a Perfect Score
A recent article by Internet Retailer states that the Office Depot m-commerce website “exhibits spectacular performance”, citing our first-place ranking in Keynote Systems’ weekly rankings, in which the Office Depot mobile website achieved a perfect score of 1000. There are two main components in this performance rating: uptime and page load speed. The uptime is the…
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Progressive Degradation
By now you’ve probably heard designers throwing around the terms “progressive enhancement” and “graceful degradation” when discussing their web designs. I’ve come to realize that most designers and even some developers are misusing these terms. They are using them as excuses for designs that never tried to be universally accessible. I’ve begun to call this…
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The Cost of Bad Design
We’ve all seen what we would call bad design on the web, and we usually base this judgement on our personal aesthetic preferences. I have a new definition of bad web design that goes beneath the surface: If your “web design” doesn’t actually work on the web you’ve failed.