IT Solutions Blog

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.”

• 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

Every day I run into fantastic articles and stumble across hilarious and must-see web sites. I’m amazed how much great content is created and maintained hour by hour, day by day. I wish I had more time to read and learn more, not to mention synthesize and write about it.

That’s why I start this weekly thread that will summarize all the goodies & greats – in short: Highlights – of the week so you can skim through them during a spare minute on the weekend or first thing Monday morning.

I try to cover all my basic interests (UCD, Usability, Accessibility, Web development, Code samples, Business, Marketing, Social web, Technical news, Philosophy and whatever else I run into Feel free to share interesting links and bring special content to my attention – I’d love hearing from you.

So here we go,

Highlights for week 50 of the year 2009

• Hilarious illustration how a web design goes straight to hell (by Matthew Inman). According to my colleague Neal “that’s why you document strategy and scope of work and hire an account manager. The manager keeps the client in line, translates client needs into directions designer understand, and bills a change request every time the client demands something other than what was agreed to in writing. ”
• How to prevent design hell? Maybe Ben Gremillion has an answer: How to deal with feature creep.
• HOW TO: Manage Successful Social Media Promotions (by Ben Straley), use the social channel to deliver “exclusive” deals! Your friends will thank you by making purchases.
• Excellent article of an important but widely neglected subject, Comment Design: Considerations, Best Practices and Examples (by Cameron Chapman).
• Ok, this one is already two weeks ‘old’ but a goodie I wanted to share. Derek Sivers shows in the example of Let pedestrians define the walkways that business decisions are smartest taken as late as possible, when you have the most information.
• Very cool Silhouette Fadeins using HTML, CSS and jQuery (by Chris Coyier).