Page speed and load times are the foundation for a positive user experience on the web. Let’s face it, if your page fails to load in time, all the effort put towards information architecture, content strategy and interaction design will be for naught. During my formative front-end coding days, I did a fair bit of assuming that as Internet connections transitioned from dial-up to DSL I’d be able to make compromises. Piling sprite-less PNGs upon redundant CSS upon tons of HTTP requests became commonplace,… Read More
“Elements that rely only on mousemove, mouseover, mouseout or the CSS pseudo-class :hover may not always behave as expected on a touch-screen device such as iPad or iPhone.” A few days after Steve Jobs announced the release of the iPad, I read that sentence in Apple’s Reference Library: Preparing Your Web Content for iPad, and started to realize the drastic implications the evolution of multi-touch would have on interaction design. Anything we design for the web that requires a hover state has an uncertain… Read More
Browsing Habits Part of user-experience design is considering how elements on a web page compete for attention. We spend so much time prioritizing the prominence of items within a page while making little consideration for what else people are doing. What if users rarely devote 100% of their attention to a web page? To learn more, I surveyed 83 of my closest friends on their browsing habits: On Average, how many browser windows do you have open at once? One 33% Two 36% Three… Read More
The CMS Cycle So, an organization spends tens of thousands of dollars to build a website upon a full-access Content Management System (CMS) platform. Over the coming months every department head is issued an administrative login, which is passed on down the line to other employees. Pretty soon, 50 people have updated the website adding page upon page with 50 different writing styles and 50 different online agendas. 12 months later, the organization is left with a mangled site map and is forced to… Read More
