IT Solutions Blog

• 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

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).

The Three-?-stick is going around … and and so it came around. Björn from the Webzeugkoffer (excellent webdesign blog in German) picked up the stick by answering 3 questions that I will answer now too:

The three questions

Which Editor do you use for (X)HTML and CSS?

I’m using Macromedia Dreamweaver. I’m still stuck at MX 2004, but I really got used to the color coding and other superficial things – it’s like toothpaste, once you are hooked you’ll never change again (don’t ask for the trade pls).

…and notepad

Which little tool became a true time saver for you?

Can’t live without Firebug – seriously, can’t live without it. That’s not a little tool? Ok, what about ColorSet, love that also.

Flash – what do you think of that technology?

Call me a purist, but I’m really into DHTML. Unless somebody convinces me otherwise I can do what I need to do with HTML a JavaScript library like jQuery, Dojo, YUI or even the Facebook JavaScript Library.
I disliked flash when it got into ‘mode’ a century ago and still think that flash intros should die. Accessibility is still an issue also.

On the flipside our company created a really powerful ArcGIS API for Flex for building Rich Internet applications on top of ArcGIS Server, our internet mapping server. I might need to reconsider some of my previous believes.

I forward the three-?-stick to

• Christian Heilmann, http://www.wait-till-i.com/
• Hannes Schmiderer, http://noox.at/
• Robert Nyman, http://robertnyman.com/

It’s clear that speed matters to the users. Page visitors are impatient and nasty, they expect the page to load fast, Google-fast. Peter Da Vanzo from seobook.com suggests that this constant threat of loosing users even justifies to sacrifice graphics and features in lieu of speed.

Yesterday Amazon released their new service called CloudFront which is aimed to enhance network performance (lower latency) through a network of edge location around the world.

Amazon CloudFront locations world-wide: (A) London, UK (B) Frankfurt, Germany (C) Amsterdam, Netherlands (D) Dublin, Ireland (E) Newark, NJ (F) Ashburn, VA (G) Miami, FL (H) Saint Louis, MO (I) Dallas, TX (J) Seattle, WA (K) Palo Alto, CA (L) Los Angeles, CA (M) Hong Kong (N) Tokyo, Japan

Pricing is on a per-per-use basis without minimum fees and might be a really good hosting solution for companies with an international audience who care about their users.

John Resig and his team from jQuery reported large improvements where latency has shrunk to a quarter of the usual times.

Send me your experiences and thoughts!