Get ready for a suicide mission: On this blog, we will remove our spam filter completely for one day, December 15th. Today we got our spam comment number 500,000. Pretty scary to think how much energy, computer power, network traffic is wasted on a completely useless activity: To spoil the content with irrelevant comments. Currently […]
Today is a great day. At least if you ask Jesper and my self. I just got a call from Jesper who was out shopping with his family, wishing me a happy birthday. Today it’s exactly two years ago that we postet our first post on Justaddwater.dk and we are still going strong. We would […]
More visual HTML tags inspired by Neatorama’s “Visual HTML joke” that got digged recently.
I was asked today on which best practices exist in documenting user interfaces. Especially with focus on documenting how and where the user interface (GUI) communicates with backend services. The format I usually use is: Screenshot Description Preconditions Postconditions Explanation: Screenshot of the entire page or content area Description of the page purpose. Primary action […]
I conducted a little research today on our intranet. We have a links list that can be personalized to your preference. It turns out that 88% never use it. Of 4,264 users, only 524 people have edited their links list. That’s 12% that uses (or at least have used it at some point). I am […]
Perfect wallpaper for any project room. The Bad Usability Calendar from Norwegian company Netlife Research. At UI 11 last week I was fortunate to meet Eidar (photo) from Netlife Research. His usability firm made a Bad Usability Calendar, which is absolutely fantastic. I’m putting the link here directly, as their pages are in Norwegian. Bad […]
Yousif Al Saif of Tredosoft is probably best known for the IE7 standalone browser installer that can run isolated on a Windows machine without disturbing the version already installed. I wrote about this in “IE7, web standards and css support“. Now he posted an article that makes it dead simple to run multiple Internet Explorers. […]
Recently I’ve been working on a plugin for Ruby on Rails that help me out when creating new Rails applications in Danish. Previously, when we’ve created Danish prototypes for our customers all the default Rails error messages were still written in English.
I generalized it for use with any language, and currently (with the help from contributors) it’s now available for download on rubyforge.
Jakob Nielsen discusses screen resolution and page layout in a recent Alertbox article. As usual, Jakob offers some decent facts and clear guidelines on which screen resolution to design for.
I have the deepest respect for Jakob Nielsen and the work he does to make usability easier to understand and use for everybody. There is just one problem: Findings should focus on browser window size and not screen size.
Since last time I wrote on the various definitions of user experience, Bryce Glass, Mike Kuniavsky and Thomas Baekdal have made excellent points on the subject of providing a single, clear understandable definition of user experience. Also, I attended Jesse James Garrett’s seminar (“defining the user experience” – my notes) last month, and got a […]
After reading “Pick a Format (Any Format)” by Nick Bradbury (tip by: Jeremy Voorhis on Octoblog) we must say that we totally agree. The point in the post is simple: I keep running across sites that offer the same exact content as an RSS feed and an Atom feed. What’s the point of this? Making […]
Today is the time for my ten minute presentation at Reboot. I have ten minutes between 16.45 and 17.30 to give my talk. Topic: Prototype driven development with Ruby on Rails, and demo of the application we made at Capgemini with the Danish public Agency of Companies and Commerce. Presentation (Powerpoint format) for download here: […]
We’re arranging a meetup for Ruby on Rails geeks in the Copenhagen area. Thursday, June 29, 2006 at 20.30
Ruby on Rails might be the perfect match as a prototyping tool. It delivers consistent productivity gains compared to any other prototyping tool. Very few lines of code makes it easy to change. Here is why we use it at work as our preferred prototyping tool.
I got a question from Kimberly, one of our reader, in the Sensible Forms: A Form Usability Checklist post where she asks where the best place to display the asterisk indicating a required field in af form is: […] I’d like to see the askterick appear before the label so that a user isn’t forced […]
After a tip from Ars Technica I found that is was possible to cheat Google into letting you test their new front page design (you can do it too!). Click on thumbnail to see larger screenshot As far as I can see the only difference is that they now display their categories (Images, Groups, News […]
If you are a frequent reader and take a look at the front page sometimes, you might have noticed that we updated the layout quite a bit. The new layout is the first of many steps we will take to make the life easier for blog readers.
Do you remember this fish?
Since this blog is primarily about web standards and and usability, I thought this would be a good time to give you sort of an anti-webstandards, anti-usability insight. It’s a journey ten years back into time, where no web standards existed, and I learned how to make “killer websites“.
As a followup to my earlier post “AJAX performance stats, ROI, and business value“, I decided that I’d share with you some considerations on a recent project I was involved in. I can’t give you all the juicy details, and I might never be able to show you the final solution or tell, who the […]
Ever heard of pogosticking? Until recently, I had experienced it a lot, but never heard of “pogosticking”. Here is how to avoid unnecessary navigation and extra clicks that occurs because pages do not match the information users need to find what they are looking for.
Trend: Live search will gradually replace traditional search in web applications. As mainstream programs such as Windows Vista matures up to release, and live search is deeply integrated, we can expect more web pages implementing live search. Apple’s Spotlight and MSN Desktop Search uses the same Live search paradigm that we’ll probably see a lot […]
Did you know that up to 25% of all visitors on your website have some kind of accessibility problem. Some of your users may be blind, deaf, dyslectic, has learning disabilities or motoric disabilities such as schlerosis, parkinson’s disease, etc. A so-called functional disability.
But how about users with a technical disability: Wireless devices, slow internet connections, old browsers, feed readers, etc. These should be considered as well, as there are probably more people with technological disability than functional disability.
How do you build a system that can deliver and update content to 100,000 people simultaneously? Via Ajaxian.com I saw this article from MacRumors on what traffic they got when Steve Jobs delivered his keynote on MacWorld a few days ago.
Also in this post: Ajaxinfo (the guys behind AJAX usability metrics), AJAX ROI faceoff, where a traditional webapp is compared to an AJAX webapp. For the visually oriented, there is a video comparing the two applications.
Blog frontpage that increases user experience and improves findability of content. The key is the mullet. The idea is to have a long tail of many older entries that represent previous content.
It’s important to use video clips to make your points, as I argued earlier. In usability, video clips document research and guidelines. Ironically, video clips are hard to find (if available at all). However, one exception shines in the dark night of publically available usability videos.
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