Design is most effective when executed with knowledge of psychology. Knowing how people react to visual stimuli allows the crafting of an effective design, with out psychology you are guessing. Psychology itself is a vastly fluctuating and massive subject, but that doesn’t mean you need a PhD to use it in your design. There are […]
Logic and statistics drive many usability discussions. How many users accomplished a task? How long did it take on average? What labels caused delays? Likewise, emotion is often discussed in context of interactivity and aesthetics. Emotion and usability sound like separate topics but they closely intertwined, so much so they are impossible to separate. I […]
As a fan of Jakob Neilsen and a skeptic of the “every design should be responsive” methodology, I have been frustrated with the criticism of Neilsen’s stance on mobile websites. Recently I published my thoughts on the two sides (mobile specific websites and responsive design) hoping to cultivate a discussion on mobile design and why […]
I respect navigation more than any other element on a website. Little else commands the responsibility of navigation. Poor navigation leaves people dumbfounded, confused and frustrated. Great navigation effortlessly directs users toward the content or actions they desire and can reroute lost users while minimizing mental processing. Even the over glorified “call to action” is simply another […]
Most discussions of speed and websites focus on response time, download footprint and rendering performance. While all aforementioned elements are important, there is another aspect of site performance to be aware of— the speed of the human mind. It’s safe to say the human brain processes information faster than any computer, browser and of the internet, so it […]
Over the past fifteen plus years of designing websites for other people, I have received countless requests to remove elements from a design because they are “redundant.” The perception is that if something is included on the page once, especially in an obvious fashion, there’s no reason to repeat it elsewhere. Further baffling, it’s my […]
Few websites are designed with bad intentions. If the designer or stakeholders care about the project you can be sure every element on the page has been analyzed, reviewed and tweaked. This sounds obvious, but it should be disconcerting. Let me explain further. If most websites have had thought and care put into them, why are […]
Few words can describe the euphoria I felt upon learning of widespread @font-face support. The time and effort once required to make typographically pleasing websites would be reduced forever. The very notion of dropping tools like Cufon, sIFR and image replacement had me grinning ear for ear. And what of body copy? Designers could finally […]
I have shrugged off responsive web design for some time now despite it’s growing popularity. I first came across “the concept” four years ago; at the time, responsive design required Javascript and dynamically changed stylesheets based on viewport size. Suffice to say I have long been aware of the capability to adapt design based on […]
The four little words that make designers cringe, “make the logo bigger.” We joke about it all the time, sometimes with elaborate internet pranks like the make my logo bigger cream. Yet we get this request fairly often (myself almost every time a produce a design). So why is there this disconnect between designers and companies where […]