Human Computer Interaction
The Yahoo! Developer Network was updated yesterday with a veritable gold-mine of Exciting New Stuff, coinciding with the launch of the brand new Yahoo! User Interface Blog.
Here are some of the hig...
I stumbled across this today and thought it was just too good not to share.
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My second article for SitePoint has been published: Simple tricks for more usable forms. It examines a whole bunch of CSS and Javascript tricks for improving the usability of web based forms without i...
Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 make interesting reading this year, covering topics including undated content, incomprehensible thumbnails and overly specific forms. In previous ye...
We put together a bookmarklet today that allows our editing staff to jump instantly from looking at a story on one of our web sites to the interface for editing it within our current content managemen...
In an earlier entry about Usability.gov's Research based Web Design & Usability Guidelines I criticised them heavily for not providing an HTML alternative to the huge PDF file containing the guide...
Usability.gov's Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines lose instant credibility for being available only as a 39.2 MB PDF file [ Update: this statement is incorrect - see my correction ]...
I'm pretty sure I've never had RSI, but occasionally my wrists feel a little sore after spending time at the keyboard and I know enough about it to know that I really don't want it. This weekend I sta...
The CreativityGoblin dropped in on me today, and as a result I've been tackling the challenge of entering dates in to a web application. In the past, I've used DHTML calendar widgets for this purpose ...
Balancing visual and structural complexity in interaction design (via Column Two) is an interesting article that shows how over-simplifying a design can harm usability rather than helping it.
It'...
There's a great new article up on Sitepoint describing a technique for adding auto-complete functionality to normal HTML text input fields using Javascript. The code uses a whole bunch of browser-spec...
Adam Kalsey has kicked off Simplified, a new series on web usability, with some thoughts on creating usable web forms. The conversation continues on Paul Scrivens' blog, and covers a lot of interestin...
D. Keith Robinson:
I feel that all to often those of us who spend every day working, surfing, reading and thinking about the Web lose sight of the fact that it's still a new medium and there are ...
Let's talk about form validation. Here's what I would class as the ideal validation system for a form in a web application:
The form is displayed; you fill it in.
You submit the form to the se...
Bjørn Borud (a Senior Software Engineer at AllTheWeb) has recently started blogging. His thoughts on wikis make interesting reading. I also rather liked his description of something he calls th...
UIE debunk three usability "myths" (the three click rule, the idea that users give up on slow loading web sites, and the "5 to 8 test subjects should post most usability problems" idea). 37Signals do ...
I had my first ever Quasar (otherwise known as laser tag) experience last night with the Bath University Computer Science Society (BCSS). Due to various misunderstandings our booking failed to materia...
Matthew Thomas offers a fascinating example of usability gone horribly wrong (the explanation is provided here). Incidentally, while showing the above to my girlfriend she uncovered an interesting usa...
As the recent lack of updates demonstrates, I've been getting stuck in to a pretty time consuming new project. It should have launched several days ago but I made a right royal hash of the DNS setting...
Jakob Nielsen: Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002. This is an astutely observed list, although I would add "relying on Flash for navigation" as one of the biggest modern mistakes (for some reason Jak...
Someone, please, tell me UsabilityNet is a joke. Spotted via an article on hebig.org, UsabilityNet (apparently recently redesigned) claims to be "a project funded by the European Union to provide reso...
Matthew Thomas lists 21 usability problems with the Opera 7 beta....
Acts of Volition: What's wrong with MSN Messenger 5.0. I rarely load up MSN (I like to browse in peace) but I'd like to add a few points, aimed at Messenger in general rather than any particular versi...
Uzilla (via SurfMind) is a commercial product built on top of Mozilla:
The Uzilla suite is a set of tools for web based usability testing. It decreases the time and effort required set up and do ...
Graphical User Interfaces
This course covers HCI with a heavy emphasis on implementation. We will be developing the interface/interaction components of software using Java, in particular the AWT an...
One of the things I really like about PythonCard is that it enables (and in fact actively encourages) you to completely separate the GUi of your application from the program logic. In PythonCard you d...
Flash MX and the Bigger Picture: Lightweight Internet Applications:
While I propose what may be a radical notion to some, with additional consideration the value of lightweight Internet application...
Dave Hyatt explains why Mozilla's tabbed browsing is different to (and better than) Opera's MDI model:Tabs are not a replacement for window management. They are an enhancement that can be used in conj...
Apple's Aqua Human Interface Guidelines (via a link on the Pinstripe Theme for Mozilla page). Interesting reading, and an excuse for a new category. I'm doing a course on HCI next term so I imagine I'...