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Content Tagged with How-To + usability
Halo3: Flowmaps and Frag-Grenades, Part 1
Halo3 is one of the earliest—and definitely one of the highest-profile—mass-market videogames to benefit from the contributions of a dedicated interaction designer.
404 Error Page: Features and Implantation
Because many people stumble on your 404 page, it is important to know which features a good 404 error page should have. This article will also learn you how to implant your custom 404 error page on your blog or site.
How to automatically fade in all the pages of your website using jQuery, improving user experience.
This automatic page ‘fade in effect‘, is the result of a combination between CSS and JavaScript techniques. Basically you hide all the content of the page, and, when the page is completely loaded inside the browser, you trigger an automatic fadeIn().
Good Accessible Form using CSS
A form laid out using 100% CSS that looks good and implements good accessibility and usability practices.
10 CSS Tips for a Web Design that Sucks!
If your website doesn ’t have the expected success, it may be for a very simple reason: bad design. While professional templates are hard to achieve for a non-designer, these simple CSS tweaks can dramatically improve your design, make it more accessible and more efficient.
How to Convert a PSD to XHTML - video tutorial
This screencast will show you exactly how to take a psd website design and convert it to a work website using XHTML and CSS. There is about 90 minutes worth of training here!
You should never use flags for language choice
Flag icons are pretty (especially fam-fam-fam icon set). But flag represents a country, not a language. Isn't it obvious? No, it's obviously not! While I surfed the web yesterday I found several websites that use flags for language choice. Here are a few reasons why you'll never want to do that.
How To Make Your Portfolio Better And Get More Clients: Part 2
Now, there are an abundance of ways for freelancers to market their portfolio in order to get more exposure and ultimately get better clients. I’ve noticed that freelancers in particular don’t take time out of their usual schedule to come up with new, creative ideas on how to promote their portfolio. Here are a few ideas which you could follow to get more exposure as a freelancer.
The Return of Table-Based Layout (Well, Sort Of)
How many of you have lost countless hours while developing the perfect layout for your websites? How many have lost in fact money because of the extra time needed to complete a job? Not anymore.
How to use Selenium RC with Firefox 3
The current version of selenium RC does not support firefox 3, which can cause all kinds of headaches when you try to run FF2 & 3 on the same box. This quick hack will enable you to use selenium RC in firefox 3.
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: When to Use Which User Experience Research Methods
Modern day user experience research methods can now answer a wide range of questions. Knowing when to use each method can be understood by mapping them in 3 key dimensions and across typical product development phases.
Who Wants To Beat Google?
Google has been number one in search for quite some time. This article explains three things that an alternate search engine could do to take the search game to the next level. It proposes that Microsoft Live Search could be the next big search engine, however if Google implements these three key features, one would think they would be unstoppable.
Designing “Shorter” Web Forms
Long web forms could be scary for users and they could encourage clients to fly away from your site. Although that, it is difficult to make them shorter, specially if you need all that information you are requesting.
Remember Me’s with Rails
I recently had a need for a login system that needed a ‘remember me’ function. After hours of looking through countless blogs, I came to the conclusion that either (1) people don’t use a remember me function with Rails logins, or (2) they don’t write about it. In this article, I outline a simple remember me system using the cookie variable in Rails that will tack on to most custom authentication systems.
How to optimize your blog for code samples plus some cool widgets/tools
Recently I have been posting more and more code samples in my blog and wanted to optimize my blog for code snippets . After some searching I found these set of widgets/tools very useful. This post describes how to use
Blogger Syntax Highlighter to make your code snippets look nice, how to change the width of your blog, How to post an image in its original size to your blog, how to add a Tag cloud, how to add social bookmarking links, how to ping search engines and other ping services, how to add the dzone widget and how to track your visitors.
Almost all these widgets/tools are related to blogger expect for ones like statcounter and PinPoll-n-Ping.
How to convert selenium test cases to Tellurium test cases
The Tellurium Automated Testing Framework (Tellurium) is a test framework built on top of the Selenium test framework and it abstracts UI components to Java objects and does object to locator mapping (OLM) automatically at run time so that you can define UI objects simply by their attributes and write your selenium tests just like writing JUnit or TestNG tests. Since the framework constructs the actual locator automatically at run-time and it uses the Group Locating Concept (GLC) to exploit information inside a collection of UI components to help finding their locators, Tellurium is more robust, flexible, modularized, easier to maintain and refactor compared with the locator-based Selenium test framework.
If you want to convert your existing Selenium test cases to Tellurium test cases or want to use Selenium IDE to create tellurium test cases, you can find the solution here,
http://code.google.com/p/aost/wiki/HowToConvertSeleniumTestToTellurium
Use Whitespace to Indicate Relationships Between Content Elements
One of the most important tools in a designer’s toolbox is whitespace. Whitespace is just that — it’s space between various content pieces, like paragraphs, headings, buttons and so on. This space can be tweaked to achieve different effects — such as to separate elements apart from each other by increasing the amount of space or group related things together by tightening it.
The Function of Rounded Corners
What’s the function of rounded corners? We use them simply to add a bit of eye-candy and improve the overall aesthetic of our websites and applications, right?
Well, there is actually more to rounded corners than just appealing looks.
Persist and pass global FacesMessages over multiple page redirects
In a JSF Reference Implementation, passing global faces messages between pages doesn’t work. It’s not designed that way “out of the box.” Fortunately there is a way to do this, which will even support redirects between pages, forwards through a RequestDispatcher, and also through standard JSF navigation cases.
Make Google Chrome use less memory and run in a single process
Each tab in Google Chrome browser is an executable and takes huge amount of memory. You can reduce the memory usage and make it run in a single process. Here is how ...
Usability Tip: Turn Inline Links Into Padded Blocks for Larger Clickable Areas
There's a very quick usability trick you can do with the links on your site to make them easier to use. It's something that I don't see talked about very much, and a lot of sites don't implement it. Link padding and blocks — that is, increasing the clickable area of your links to make them easier to click on.
User friendly form validation with Wicket
By default Wicket shows error messages together in a single place in the HTML form. This has some drawbacks to usability, especially if you have long forms with lots of fields. Read further for a tutorial exploring possibilities to improve the location of the error on the page, thereby improving usability.
Using Java XML API
This article mentions about few small idiosyncrasies which one has to face while working with XML APIs. Describes few sample scenario of usage of DOM and Transformer classesQi4j: REST EntityStore and SPARQL EntityFinder = rich client web apps!
From my work on SiteVision I've become quite fond of writing rich clients using applets or JavaWebStart, with Swing, and then connect back to the server for state. I can understand why not so many others are doing it though, since you more or less need a decent framework to handle all the issues, and as far as I know there aren't any around.
Now I'm in the process of adding this functionality to Qi4j! There are two parts to using objects/entities on the client: finding them and loading/storing them. In Qi4j there are two interfaces EntityFinder and EntityStore which respectively deal with these things.Factories, Builders and Fluent Interfaces
Last week I started working on very short proof of concept with a team that I am currently coaching at a short term insurance company. We hit a very common design decision: when do we use a factory pattern and when do we use a builder pattern.40 CSS Web Form Style Tutorials For Web Developers
When developing a project it's important to have a good form input structure throughout, most commonly used forms will tend to be Login, Register and user Profiles. If you have taken the time to develop a custom template for your project more often than not the default appearance of forms you have created are not ideally suited to you designs overall look and feel. We have gathered together a great list of tutorials that should have your new forms looking great or breath life into your existing form design.Designing Information Dashboards
Information Dashboards could be defined as the interface for information systems, for example, displaying quality control measurments and the result of procesess. Here I am talking about the dashboards displayed on computer monitors, but keep in mind that dashboards could also be mechanical.Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: Tagline Blues: What's the Site About?
A website's tagline must explain what the company does and what makes it unique among competitors. Two questions can help you assess your own tagline: Would it work just as well for competitors? Would any company ever claim the opposite?Don't Make Them Think: How to Make a Usable Flash Game
“Usability” is a term used many times in web design and development. It basically means the ease of use or navigation that a website has. It also includes some other specifics like design conventions which we will touch on later. But for now, let us apply some of these usability ideas to flash games.Google I/O 2008 - Design Patterns for Enhanced Accessibility
HTML DOM+ JavaScript constitutes the assembly language of Web Applications. Access To Rich Internet Applications — ARIA — adds in a couple of additional op-codes for helping Web applications better communicate with adaptive technologies such as screenreaders. How do we now push the envelope with respect to Web applications and adaptive technologies such as screenreaders and self-voicing browsers in a manner similar to what we as Web developers have collectively achieved for the mainstream user?Using YUI to provide help for web forms
Users are more likely to complete your web forms if you provide a simple help system to answer common questions to complete each input. There are a couple of common techniques to provide help for individual form inputs and I've included a simple YUI class that I use to provide help for form inputs.Replace your commented code with readable, reusable code.
Writing comments is bad. Writing readable, reusible code is good! Here are a few good ways to make your code more maintainable.[Swing] Application Wide Hotkeys
I'm working on a Swing application and I need the ability to have application wide hotkeys. Basically that means no matter what I am currently doing in my app specific keystrokes always do the same thing. For example I am mimicing IDEA's CTRL+N functionallity. When CTRL+N is pressed a dialog opens with a textfield that allows me to type in a search string. As I type a list below the textfield populates with what my app thinks I am looking for.Top Screencast Sites for Open-Source Developers
While I appreciate (and read) many books and blogs, and even listen to several podcasts having to do with my favorite open-source technologies, I have become an increasing fan of "screencasts" -- tutorials that combine someone's voice with a snapshot of their computer screen. Watching a good screencast gives you the feeling that you are looking over the shoulder of a master programmer. The best screencasts are structured around a small project, and incrementally improve the project such that you can see how it grows. Screencasts often walk you through the author's (scripted) bugs and mistakes, allowing you to identify some of the most common errors, as well as see how to recover from them.Using Proper Header Redirects In PHP
If you use PHP on a regular basis, you've already used the header() function to perform a redirect. Have you considered sending in the proper status codes when doing so? Like a 404, 302 or 301? You should, and here's why.Secure Your OpenID
There are a lot of phishing vulnerabilities with OpenID, here is a solution.