an experiential adventure
Treating international address fields in web forms elegantly can be a major challenge with all the possible variants. Luke Wroblewski has offered up an excellent overview of our basic options to intelligently format them for greater usability.
Jakob Nielsen states the (almost) obvious, that right aligned text in menus is way less usable than left aligned text. This is because we track our eyes down that left edge to each new menu item, which in a right aligned menu is staggered.
An interesting article from British scientists using sophisticated eye tracking software about how we process information visually while we read. Sometimes our eyes are aligned on the same letter, sometimes they are unaligned and focused on different letters. And sometimes we’re cross-eyed.
Rosenfeld Media’s UX Zeitgeist deserves a bookmark for anyone involved in usability. I’m glad to see I’ve read at least 2 out of the top five recommended books.
Clearleft’s BETA application, Silverback, that caused so much curiosity from all of us has now been revealed to be a guerilla usability tool for low cost usability testing on OS X. Just as interesting about Silverback is Jon Hicks awesome guerilla icon and the impressive parallax technique developed by Paul Annett.
If you’re not a regular listener of the Boagworld weekly web design / development podcast then you need to subscribe to it. They’ve had a month off and are back with episode 116 and a new site redesign - don’t mention the cows because its the part Paul didn’t design and everyone mentions it. They also provide a full written transcript on their podcast page. And don’t mention Paul’s new way of referencing his supporting links in the podcast (in human non-friendly terms), we’re all smarter than that right. Ha ha.
Seriously, if you’re a professional in this industry this is a staple of your diet. Get to it.
Luke Wroblewski’s new book Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks is published by Rosenfeld Media and available in paperback or digital. Its also on my must read list for 2008.
Magus have produced the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 124: Defining, implementing and managing website standards. Its a hefty 85 pound price tag but for a company its small change when you think about it. (via Matt Robin)