PUBLIC MARKS with tags lang:en & usability

People pay attention to graphics. They respond to graphics. They learn from graphics. If you want your readers/learners/audience to "get" something as quickly and clearly as possible, use visuals. And you don't have to be a graphic artist, designer, or information architect to put pictures in your presentation, post, or book. This post is my first attempt to categorize the kinds of graphics I do here, and offer tips for creating visuals that tell the story better and faster than words.

Amberjack is a lightweight Open Source library, enabling webmasters to create cool site tours. By guiding your site visitors, Amberjack tours can greatly improve the usability of your website.

When you design for the web, you don’t know what software people will use to experience your site, and you don’t know what capabilities your users (and their software) have. Flexible layouts and resizable type can eliminate a lot of worst-case usability and design scenarios, but it’s still extremely difficult to create page layouts that don’t break even if the user increases the type size by more than a few settings.

Thomas Baekdal is a Project Manager, a Change Advocate and an Information Architect. He wants to help create a better future. This site is created to support this vision and will focus on topics like management, branding, usability, standards and life in general.

This is the second interview of Design Inside Yahoo! This time, I interviewed George Oates, the UI designer at Flickr. I talked to George about Flickr’s beginnings at Ludicorp, its place in Yahoo!’s social media strategy and the Flickr design process.

Skilled in rapid prototyping interactive graphics and 2D/3D user interfaces. Extensive training in fundamentals of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Usability. Proficient videographer, productions include 3D Animation, Music Videos, Short Film Fiction, Documentary, Interactive Flash, TV segment and opening sequences, Advertisements, Visual Effects and Bluescreening.

inspired by Manovich's definition of information aesthetics, this weblog explores the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization, in an emergent multidisciplinary field what could be coined as 'creative information visualization'.

So far, this website features the beginnings of a free, open-content, peer-reviewed Encyclopedia covering terms from the disciplines of Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Design, Human Factors, Usability, Information Architecture, and related fields. By using the Creative Commons Copyright Licence, the Encyclopedia is in effect the property of the Interaction Design community, not of this specific website.

Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.

It’s not bragging (in fact, it’s probably a little embarassing) for me to say that I am an expert user of Microsoft Word. I can do just about anything I want with it, and I understand most of Word’s idiosyncracies and tricks. Still, the UI has always seemed to get in my way. For example, there are a ton of buttons I never use — so for kicks I decided to see just how many.

By radically changing the user interface in Office 2007, Microsoft made the riskiest bet in the history of commercial software. And I think they're going to win the bet.

I’m a graphic/web designer living in Belgium. My personal journal is an online source for topics ranging from XHTML/CSS to graphic design tips. I began my career in 1992 as a freelance graphic designer under the name of Duoh!. The first 3 years were mainly filled with print orientated work such as logos and stationary.

I am encouraged to read Mitchell Baker’s posts (part 1, part 2) about the usage of Stephen Horlander’s web feed icon which is seen in Firefox, IE7 and on an increasing number of web pages. She suggests that Mozilla should work with the web community to set usage guidelines for the icon. This is a great idea. Guidelines are necessary to avoid confusing web users about the meaning of the image.

The world of XML syndication is still a soup of acronyms and counter-intuitive terminology — RSS, Atom, XML, feeds, aggregation, ’casts, etc. — but at the very least, we’re inching towards visual standardization in how we represent it iconographically. Microsoft, in an uncharacteristic but laudable show of cooperativeness, agreed late last year to adopt Firefox’s orange RSS/XML icon — a rounded little square with featuring what might be best described as ISO-style broadcast waves — for its Internet Explorer 7 browser.

BBC Online Technical, Design & Editorial guidelines

Every time you make a layout decision - fluid vs fixed, scaled vs percentage, a few more people hate you. How do you make the right decisions and when?

Comics (BD) sur le User Friendly : tous les pb d'ergonomie et d'utilisabilité que posent les logiciels

Web forms. Everybody knows web forms. Each day we have to fill in some information in a web form, be it a simple login to your webmail application, an online purchase or signing up for a website. They are the basic (and pretty much the only) way of gathering information on the web.

Over time a standard seems to have emerged for denoting required fields: changing the style of the label making it bold and/or red, and often including an asterisk beside the input text form control. Often times this asterisk is placed to the right of the input box, and consequently after the text box when examining the source order.

Adam Greenfield interview : http://www.internetactu.net/index.php?p=5901

un gourou ?