Archive for October, 2008
CSS Tip: Improve the Look of Your Headlines Using Letter-Spacing
There is a term used in typography called kerning. Kerning refers to the adjustment of space between letters. Fonts are generally fairly well calibrated by default, but at larger sizes you can begin to see imbalances in spacing between letters.
Kerning is used a lot in the print industry, especially for headlines and logotypes; but it’s something that’s not widely used on the Web because of the lack of control we have over fonts.
Should Arrows be Placed Before Link Text or After?
Sometimes we’d like to use an arrow character or icon together with the link text to make it look nicer and attract users’ attention. These are little arrows we see often by links such as “Read more…” at the end of blog post summaries or “Learn more” for products and services. The two variations look something like this:
Now, the question is, should these arrows go before the link text, or after? Let’s examine each one:
The iPhone App Store Buy Button — Foolish or Brilliant?
One interesting part of the iPhone App Store user interface (UI) (the one on the phone itself, not through iTunes) is the buy button. The button is the price tag. It looks like this:
On the left is the buy button you see when you load the application page. In this case the price tag on the button is “free”. On the right you can see what happens when you click on that button — it morphs into an “install” button. You then have to push (tap?) that again for the installation process to begin.
Does Your Website Suffer From These 7 Usability Mistakes?
I can safely say that usability these days on the Web is much better than it was several years ago. The Web is growing up and designers are learning and discovering optimal ways of doing things, as well as optimizing and re-working their current sites to make them better and better.
Yet there are still many sites today that make basic mistakes that have a very negative impact on usability and visitor loyalty. Sometimes it’s easier to say what you shouldn’t do instead of do, so here are my 7 usability issues to avoid when working on your websites:
Categories vs Tags
Content focused sites like blogs and online magazines have various ways to organize and sort their content. Sorting articles by date and by author is usually done automatically by the content management system. There are two concepts which can be used on top of that to organize your site’s content: categories and tags. While you can use both of them at the same time, it’s probably too much bother — so which one should you use and why? Let’s examine each one in turn.
CSS Tip: Remove the Mac OS X Glowing Blue Outline for Custom Styled Input Fields
One of the great things about the Web is that it’s cross platform. You can use your favorite system to browse the Web, be it Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. Some of these systems, namely Mac OS X, sometimes try a little too hard to control the user experience, and so you’ll find that things like buttons, drop down boxes and input fields look fairly different to those on other systems — even more so with the blue glow effect you get around input fields. This glow effect can cause problems if your input field is using custom images and CSS formatting.
Experience vs. Function — a Beautiful UI is Not Always the Best UI
A good user interface (UI) is essential if you want your product to be usable, but you must always be careful to not fall into the trap of focusing too much on that interface.
A good UI should fade away, putting content in the front seat — it should be transparent. Sometimes there can be too much ‘UI’ — controls and buttons that are too strong and distracting win over content in their battle for attention.
Usability Post Featured in Alltop
Some quick site news. I’m happy to report that Alltop are now featuring Usability Post in their User Interface section. Alltop is an aggregator of the top sites in various categories, like food, design, technology and sports. As well as listing their chosen sites, it also shows the latest five posts from each. It’s quite a nice resource if you want to find some new blogs on a particular topic.
Fighting Perfection
If you’re like me, you probably often find yourself never fully satisfied with your work — always making tweaks and changes, always finding things you don’t quite like and reworking them. This applies to a lot of creative endeavors — perhaps you’re working on an article for your blog, putting together a report or writing an important email.
The thing is, even after making changes, there are still things you can tweak, things which aren’t quite perfect yet.
How Usable is Your Copy?
When we talk about usability, we generally refer to the user interface (UI) — the layout of buttons, labels, tabs and so on. But there is one other element that should not be ignored as it alone can waste all the hard work you’ve put into crafting a beautiful UI. Copy.