(Via A List Apart.)

“those who lived through the browser wars of the ’90s might think that hell has frozen over, were it not for one small problem: Users still experience plenty of problems on the Web. “

(Via MacWorld.)

“After forms, data tables are likely the next most ubiquitous interface element designers create when constructing Web applications. Users often need to add, edit, delete, search for, and browse through lists of people, places, or things within Web applications. As a result, the design of tables plays a crucial role in such an application’s overall usefulness and usability. But just like the design of forms, there’s more than one way to design tabular data.”

(Via UsereXperience Matters.)

Everybody’s a scanner

It’s one thing if you’re writing a blog with a devoted following. But a corporate, nonprofit or e-commerce website doesn’t come with a readymade group of friends. If users can’t immediately find what they’re looking for, they move on.

Web users tend to scan information rather than reading it closely. One reason is physiological. Research—by Nielsen, Stanford University/The Poynter Institute and others—has shown that reading pixels on a screen makes eyes work harder than reading ink on paper.

Another impetus for scanning, I believe, is the web’s seemingly limitless content. It’s like being unable to enjoy yourself at a party because you might be having a better time at someone else’s house. Add the growing mania for speed (“This #%&* site is taking 20 seconds to load!”), and it’s clear that web writing has to pick up the pace.

Subheads built for speed

To make copy easier to scan, I break it up with multiple subheads. They act as visual skipping stones—an eye-friendly break from blocks of copy.

Ideally, the subheads can also convey the main points of the story all by themselves, so they can’t be too cute. And they must speak to the general reader, with no insider terminology that would cut the conversation short.

The em-dash is my friend

That little horizontal line is probably the most useful form of punctuation on the web. Commas, semicolons and colons don’t do a good job of visually breaking up information, and they’re hard to see on the screen. Parentheses have to be used carefully, because the words they enclose are understood to be less important than the rest of the sentence…

via AIGA | the professional association for design

The demand for low-end design has ballooned in recent years alongside the profusion of start-ups and small businesses. Conveniently enough, so has the supply of what we might call “low-end designers” (amateurs, recent grads and the like). According to Forbes there are 80,000 freelance designers in the United States alone. Most of these are, proverbially speaking, waiting tables.
Is Crowdsourcing Evil? The Design Community Weighs In | Epicenter from Wired.com

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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(Via Slashdot.)

A List Apart: Articles: Fluid Grids

Fluid Grids
by ETHAN MARCOTTE

Early last year, I worked on the redesign of a rather content-heavy website. Design requirements were fairly light: the client asked us to keep the organization’s existing logo and to improve the dense typography and increase legibility. So, early on in the design process, we spent a sizable amount of time planning a well-defined grid for a library of content modules.

Over the past few years, this sort of thinking has become more common. Thanks to the advocacy of Mark Boulton, Khoi Vinh, and others, we’ve seen a resurgence of interest in the typographic grid, and how to use it on the web. And frankly, the idea’s been a smash hit: a million CSS frameworks have bloomed, with sundry tools to complement them, each built to make grid-based design even more accessible to the average designer. And why not? Afte”

If you’re wasting time fighting with CSS — and we know you are — we’ve got just the tool you need.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

“You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

The only interesting way to design a demo is to make it a story. You have a protagonist, and the protagonist has a problem, and they use the software, and they… almost solve the problem, but not quite, and then everybody is in suspense, while you tell them some boring stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else, but they’re still listening raptly because they’re waiting to hear the resolution to the suspenseful story, and then (ah!) you solve the protagonists last problem, and all is well. There is a reason people have been sitting around telling stories around campfires for the last million years or so: people like stories.

Kottke adds: As with all advice, Spolsky’s rules should be tuned to your purposes but the ideas are solid for anyone who talks to groups of people.

(Via kottke.org.)