http://www.usabilitypost.com Design and usability blog Sat, 03 Jan 2009 20:45:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Over the past couple of weeks I've been working on a new project called Logospire. Logospire is a logo inspiration gallery. You can browse logos, upload your own logos, rate logos and leave comments and feedback. While there are a few other logo galleries out there right now, I found that ... http://www.usabilitypost.com/2009/01/02/announcing-logospire/ There is a curious design element in the new WordPress 2.7 admin dashboard. The 'Right Now' box shows a collection of latest statistics about your blog, such as the totals of all your posts, categories, tags, comments, spam and so on. Here's what it looks like: Now, the left columns isn't ... http://www.usabilitypost.com/2008/12/29/slip-in-wordpress-dashboard-interface/ Just updated the Usability Post design. The old design, while perfectly usable, felt a little bland and boring. I could have made further updates to it, but I felt the basic structure and feel wasn't right. So here we have a new redesign from scratch which I'll be improving over ... http://www.usabilitypost.com/2008/12/22/new-design/ I've received an email from a reader, Bogdan, a couple of days ago, where he pointed out a usability issue he constantly faces. It's an interesting problem and it's to do with the file hosting service iDisk, which is part of Apple's MobileMe services. iDisk allows you to share files with ... http://www.usabilitypost.com/2008/12/18/usability-of-the-idisk-web-interface/ There is certain anchor state in CSS that I don't see used very often -- actually, it's something I haven't really used myself, but something which I now realize can be very useful. I'm talking about the "active" anchor state. The active anchor state is the state an anchor (a link) ... http://www.usabilitypost.com/2008/12/16/pressed-button-state-with-css/ I find that when you're working on a web design -- or even any other project involving typography and layout -- it helps to squint or look at your design from a distance. What you want to do is to squint or go far away that the content would start ... http://www.usabilitypost.com/2008/12/11/take-a-step-back-to-see-the-big-picture/ I know you may be getting tired of me always using Apple as an example, but please bear with me for this post. I've recently been thinking about how Apple markets their products, and this somewhat ties in to my yesterday's post on the Nokia N97.  I think what Apple is ... http://www.usabilitypost.com/2008/12/04/interface-features/ Nokia has just announced their new phone, the N97. It's a very capable phone that looks like a direct answer to Apple's iPhone. If you just look at the feature list, it blows the iPhone away. Here's the key ones: 3.5 inch, 640x360 resistive touch screen QWERTY slide-out keyboard 3G, WiFi and GPS 32 ... http://www.usabilitypost.com/2008/12/03/its-the-user-experience-stupid/ A colleague of mine was recently trying to cut down on image usage when working on a web design project. He asked me whether it was possible to use one image for a vertically scalable content box that had both, a unique heading background, a border along the sides and ... http://www.usabilitypost.com/2008/11/27/scalable-content-box-using-only-one-background-image/ One of the nice things about the Mac OS X operating system is the attention and the little touches that may seem illogical at first but then make complete sense when you think about them.  One of these things is the scrollbar arrows. OS X scrollbars have two arrow buttons, up ... http://www.usabilitypost.com/2008/11/20/in-ui-design-the-obvious-solution-isnt-necessarily-the-best-solution/