IT Solutions Blog

Another week of fantastic articles! A little digging (or reading my blog ) will save you time and buying books hehe.

• 15 Desktop & Online Wireframing Tools (by Tom Walker) – I use Balsamiq Mockups, what about you?
• User Experience Books Free to Read Online (by Simon Whatley) – yes, free
• The Future of Wireframes (by Nishant Kothary) – in Nishant’s words: holy guacamole!
• Do’s and Don’ts of Usability Testing (by Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain) – my take-away: don’t jump to conclusions, that truly is a beginner mistake.
• How to Increase Conversions on any Website in 45 Minutes (by Andrew Follett) – improvement can happen in less than an hour, keep it down to the top 3 items!
• 43 Essential Controls for Web Applications (by Theresa Neil) – just being able to name them properly (not to mention program them) is a huge communication plus.
• How to Choose Right CSS Frameworks (by Joel Reyes) – a must read for any web programmer. Know at least one css framework really well.
• Why you only need to test with five users (explained) (by Jeff Sauro) – I mean, really well explained.
• Email verification – is your call-to-action strong enough? (by Harry Brignull) – it’s tough to lose customers that WANT to be customers. Consider lazy registration as well!
• “Call to Action” Buttons: Guidelines, Best Practices and Examples (by hongkiat) – Another really important article. Talks about size, color, labels etc.

• 10 unexpected online user behaviours to look out for (by webcredible team) – the really interesting thing is that they talk about “People” and not “Users”
• A Review of Consistent Designs on the Web (by Noam Almosnino) – a check list (like it) and visual examples (love it).
• Design Multilingual Website: A Beginner’s Guide (by Christian Arno) – often only a back-thought, but it shouldn’t. I18N and all the good stuff.
• uxurls.com: a user experience aggregator (by Harry Brignull) – Harry is collecting and presenting blogs about UX, 130 sites and counting…
• How to Build a Footer That Doesn’t Stink (by Ben Gremillion) – yes, this kind of footer
• 34 Outstanding Admin Panels for Your Web Applications (by Madalin Tudose) – more inspiration.
• My biggest mistakes (by Scott Berkun) – call it life lessons, call it learning from other people’s mistakes, call it a must-read…
• Web designers announce IE6’s ‘death,’ slate party (by Gregg Keizer) – Thank God, finally?
• So You Call Yourself A Designer? (by Niki Brown) – Niki illustrates which qualities/skills are needed to be a good Designer

Wow, what a week with truly amazing content which once more shows me how many talented and dedicated people are on the web. Thanks all for sharing your knowledge!!

• Vancouver Olympics Web sites are inaccessible to disabled people (by Joe Clark) – hope at least the website of the Special Olympics will be… Joe, wanna check?
• The Comprehensive Guide to Saving Images for the Web (by Joshua Johnson) – now this I call an essential read!
• E-Commerce Design Resources: The Ultimate Round-Up (by Cameron Chapman) – now this I call ultimate read!
• Life, Below 600px (by Paddy Donnelly) – or, “giving the fold the finger”.
• Information Gathering: a Roundup of UX Applications (by James Costa) – James reviews 4 really useful UX applications. Great overview!
• 14 Questions To Ask Your Clients Before and After a Project (by Joel Reyes) – always good to be reminded of the basics.
• Design considerations for article lists (by Anders Toxboe) – Do’s and don’ts of article lists are essential knowledge for every designer. Get a hang of it.
• 10 Essential Chrome Extensions for Web Developers (by Samuel Axon) – Firebug Lite, IE Tab, Resolution test and others, a must-see.
• Best Practices for Hints and Validation in Web Forms (by Kean Richmond) – Users hate forms but they are the only way to interact with an application so you better invest some more thought as did Kean.
• The Anatomy of Web Design (by Nishant Kothary) – “Smarter hires, more resources, more time, fewer managers, rational stakeholders, less overhead, stronger leadership, and sensible project management are intrinsic to creating great designs—but they cannot take the place of a strong mission and sense of purpose.”

• The Skinny on CSS Attribute Selectors (by Chris Coyier) – CSS attribute selectors are really useful and I’ve been using them for ages; here a nice summary by Chris.
• Common Misconceptions about Web Designers (by Shannon Noack) – working odd hours? When was the last time I’ve seen day-light?
• CSS files downloaded twice in Internet Explorer with protocol relative URLs (by Robert Nyman) – and Robert gives three nice (and trivial) examples on how to avoid it.
• Create a Clean and Professional Web Design in Photoshop (by Waheed Akhtar) – Step-by-step guide for Photoshop geeks. Really basic but a nice start.
• Is Web accessibility a human right? (by Vlad Alexander) – excellent article; and Ian Pouncey’s response: Accessibility is a human right.
• How to Make Your Small Business Geolocation-Ready (by Leah Betancourt) – jump on the train of geographically optimized interaction!
• The Browser Choice Screen for Europe: What to Expect, When to Expect It (by Dave Heiner) – Microsoft finally bowed to pressure by the EU (better late than never).
• 25 Beautiful Examples of “Coming Soon” Pages (by Tyler Denis) – get inspired; and Walter offers similar A Collection of “Coming Soon” Web Pages

Maestros, at this point a quick note that I will be back writing my own content shortly (have quiet some stuff in my queue). So long, the highlights of week 6/2010:

• Paper iPad – you don’t have the money for a real iPad? Make one out of paper
• Using a Pre-Launch Checklist for your Website (by Ben Gremillion) – building a website is fun and believe me, it’s funnier to follow a protocol. This one is a great start.
• Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy (by Derek Sivers) – Value your first follower, embrace him/her as equal, the rest will follow…
• If 1 of 5 users has a problem in a usability test will it impact 1% or 20% of all users? (by Jeff Sauro) – take observed usability issues serious, there are more than likely critical issues.
• Google Maps Get Labs With 9 Cool New Features (by Stan Schroeder) – nothing fancy when you work in a mapping company like ESRI, but probably a heck-full of work for google.

• Win 5 Copies of “Fluid Web Typography” (by WebdesignerDepot) – leave a comment with your favorite typography link for the chance to win a copy of Jason Cranford Teague’s book (I hope this trackback counts as a comment .
• Finding the current location by IP and with the W3C Geo API (by Chris Heilmann) – nice writeup on how to read the IP in PHP and call the API with cURL.
• Web accessibility myths (by Ian Pouncey) – accessibility isn’t a target to aim for, it is a goal to aspire to.
• 13 video player UIs in 24 hours (by Jason F.) – form follows function, or not? What do you think about these media players?
• There are always more than two options (by Derek Sivers) – couldn’t agree more. Counting choices means limiting yourself, like “all flights to Europe are too expensive therefore I cannot go to Europe” – how about taking a cruise?
• Resist the urge to punish everyone for one person’s mistake (by Derek Sivers) – another great by Derek, on how to stay positive when your thinking is clouded.

• Embedding User Experience in the Product Development Lifecycle (by Mike Hughes) – yes, users are not the only influencers during requirments.
• Tools for concatenating and minifying CSS and JavaScript files in different development environments (by Robert Nyman) – not much to add here…
• A Brief History of Eye-Tracking (by David Leggett) – really brief and easy to digest!
• Download Woven Fabric Social Media icons (by Jon Cavan) – if you love icons as much as I do you need to get these social media icons as reported by Webdesigner Depot
• The Simplicity of Helvetica (by Cameron Chapman) – what’s all the buzz about Helvetica? If you still don’t know a must read…
• 20 User Experience Books you should own (by Bradley Hebdon) – Excellent compilation and well worth a skim through.

Suggested reading:

Eyetracking Web Usability

Jakob Nielsen. New Riders Press 2009, Paperback, 456 pages, $24.99

• Does usability exist? How Usability is like Intelligence (by Jeff Sauro) – very interesting analogy to intelligence and a first approach to relating the three usability areas Effectiveness, Efficiency and Satisfaction and how (and how much) they contribute to Usability ‘u’.
• The Case Against Vertical Navigation (by Louis Lazaris) – While I think the argumentation in this blog article is mislead by current design trends and biased in some way, I find ’shaking our world’ good from time to time so we can re-think the way we’re used to doing things.
• Bad Usability Calendar 2010 – What would be the New Year without another one of their great Usability Calendars – Enjoy!
• Curating Comments Threads (by Chris Coyier) – interesting discussion and good points about how to make comments more meaningful.
• Live, Free webcast: Confessions of a Public Speaker – Probably you’ve heard already, Scott Berkun has his book out, and he’s offering a free, 90 min. webcast about it, don’t miss, sign up now.
• The future of UI will be boring (by Scott Berkun) – Scott seems to be on mushrooms lately judging by the level of activity. Here another really good read about the future of UI design, love the ‘rookie trap’.
• jQuery 1.4 has been released (by John Resig) – right in time for jQuery’s birthday, big news for a great JavaScript library, better iframe support, flexible events. My tip: get it!!

Suggested reading:

Confessions of a Public Speaker

Scott Berkun. O’Reilly Media 2009, Hardcover, 240 pages, $14.47

Happy New Year everybody! Hope you are healthy and fully motivated for a new decade of great things to happen. It’s going to be great!

If the last decade gave us wikipedia, digg, facebook and all the other fascinating apps based on web 2.0, collaboration and connection then we can truly be excited of what lies ahead of us – I am!

Highlights of week 01/2010

Here is what made me happy last week:

• Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why (by Steve Silberman) – Belief is power, color, shape and labeling are important triggers for effectiveness; good article on wired; applicable to web design as well?!
• WAI initiative: Speak up! Tell organizations if their website is inaccessible – Take a few minutes to encourage web accessibility. Your voice counts.
• Myths & Misconceptions About Grid Systems – I’m a big believer in grid systems, but is it a one fits all? Do grid systems benefit each and every development? Is a website less valuable when not based on a grid system?
• Simple Numbers, Complicated Dates: 49 Innovative Calendars (by Michael Poh) – Start the New Year with some creative calendars.
• Web Design Trends and Resolutions for 2010 – A good collection and reflection by designreviver.com
• More Like This: A Design Pattern (by Greg Nudelman) – Design Patterns like ‘More like this’ help to speed up development, define a common language and should be part of everybody’s toolkit
• Drop-Shadows and Gradients: Be Consistent in Your Visual Metaphors (by Nate Eagle) – How to design them correctly, please have a look, no excuses later!

Highlights of week 51/2009

• 7 Controversial Usability Predictions for 2010 (by W Craig Tomlin) is in my eyes not as controversial as stated and surely a good read for everyone working in this field.
• Seth Godin was kind enough to share his book What Matters Now as a free download. You’ll find more than seventy big thinkers, each sharing an idea for you to think about. Good Xmas read, thanks!
• LinkedIn announced its faceted search feature which is based on eight facets: company, past company, location, relationship, location, industry, school and profile languages. It really comes in handy when searching for people by location or friendship degree, something that Facebook is badly lacking still.
• URL shortening is big not only since Twitter hit the 140 character message limit. This week Facebook and Google announced their very own services, goo.gl and fb.me with bit.ly announcing its plans for Bit.ly Pro, a service that lets publishers create their own custom short URLs that use the Bit.ly platform.
• Menu Mind Games, really funny and quick read about the marketing tricks built into menus, for example, how something as simple as typography can drive you toward or away from that $39 steak.