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!
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?
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
Marti Hearst generously made her upcoming book “Search User Interfaces” available for reading online. She is definitely not a newcomer to the scene and the book for sure not a Best-Of compilation, moreover the book is written in an academic fashion that backs up its theses usability studies, log studies, or some other form of proof (like it!) – like Harry Brignull states: “Caution: actual thought may be required when reading this book.”
Contents: Search User Interfaces
The book has two main parts: search fundamentals (Chapters 1-7) and advanced topics (Chapters 8-12).
When writing content for the web it is essential to speak the language of your users. Become a word detective, use google trends. Words are the basic elements of links, get them precisely right to provide strong information scent. Identify trends, don’t invent them. Look at the evolution of language.
Get to the essence of the message! Stop ‘waving’ on your webpage (‘Welcome to the webpage of our company. We are proud to blah-blah…’).
Always remember that the user is in charge, the user is impatient, nasty, demanding, in a hurry and in control to spend its time somewhere else (according to Jakob Nielsen: ‘Users spend most of their time on other sites’). Online marketing is about giving attention (versus offline marketing is about getting attention).
Design Guidelines for Content
Make information easy to find with clear headings and meaningful sub-headings (not ‘clever’ ones).
Break up the information into manageable pieces.
Put the pieces in a logical order for your readers.
Keep your sentences short and employ one idea per paragraph.
Use the ‘inverted pyramid’ style: conclusion (context) first, results later.
Talk to your readers. Use “you”.
Write in the active voice (most of the time).
Put the action in the verb, not in the nouns.
Use your readers’ words.
Use half the word count (or less) than conventional writing.
Use bulleted lists where appropriate – for a list of items and for parallel “if, then” sentences.
