A great PSA out of the UK about paying attention to cyclists. It’s an interesting lesson about focus and how it changes your view of the overall picture.
the source dothetest
-
/Categories
-
/Archives
-
/Bagel
The Page Paradigm, a.k.a. “users don’t care where they are in the website”
Matt / March 21, 2008, 4:41 pm
This is a classic blog post I rediscovered today. Totally worth reading, even if you’ve seen it before and even if you’re not an information architect.
Users don’t much care “where they are” in the website. So-called “breadcrumb links,” which show the user the exact hierarchy of the website as they click further down, are a nice but mostly irrelevant technology. It’s not that users don’t understand the links; it’s that they don’t care.
Let me say it again, Max Bialystock-style:
USERS DON’T CARE WHERE THEY ARE IN THE WEBSITE.
I emphasize this because Web developers often waste time worring about “where content should live.” Should it be in section B? If so, we need to put big links from Section A to Section B. And then the secondary navigation will list Sections A through C, which are part of category D, because users might need to see the relationship between C, B, and the sub-tertiary wormhole that just opened in the site map!
Meanhwile, the user is on the site thinking, “Do they have it in size three?” and ignoring every element on the page that doesn’t appear to take them toward that goal. All the site-organization links, so carefully consistent with their display in other areas of the site… totally ignored by the user.
Read this post in Safari 3.1
Matt / March 19, 2008, 11:59 am
Safari 3.1 (released yesterday) offers support for some new HTML & CSS features. There’s a demo on MacRumors.
One of the most exciting, I think, is downloadable font support — you can link to actual font files from the CSS instead of having to use the common “web safe” fonts.
All of these features are just eye candy until Firefox and IE support it, but it offers a little glimpse into the future of web design & development.
my new favorite firefox extension
Caleb / March 13, 2008, 8:33 am
I was recently viewing my friends list on flickr and was once again it was taking to long to load each page. In my frustration, I went looking for a firefox add-on to ease my pain and I found quite possibly the best add-on ever.
It’s an add-on for popular sites that use images – google image search, facebook, myspace, flickr, etc. – that searches on all the related images and loads in just the images. Although its taking over your entire screen is a little intrusive, it’s extremely fast, and that’s what I was looking for. Now when I go to my friend’s photos page, I can view all the photos at once.
The only thing I would like to see added is the ability to go to the page where it found the image or at least give some data on where the image is coming from.
Coding for the mobile web
Matt / March 13, 2008, 8:11 am
An Opera developer writes up a comprehensive overview of the state of the mobile web design industry. Let me summarize, since it’s a long article:
- The iPhone is one slice of a much larger mobile market
- Mobile browsers are divided into two categories: full-featured (Opera Mobile and Safari) and constrained (WinWAP, Pocket IE, Blazer)
- Javascript support on mobile devices is uneven, always provide a fallback
- Design for 240 x 320; assume you’ll have a limited color palette to use and limited control over typography
- Plan for two distinct user experiences: Don’t ever assume that your web-based user experience will be the same on a mobile device
- Build one site that degrades well on mobile devices instead of building a second website just for mobile users
- Make use of the “handheld” media type for CSS
Apple’s design process presented at SXSW
Matt / March 12, 2008, 1:44 pm
Via BusinessWeek. Many of Apple’s unique design methods are discussed in this article, but this one caught my eye:
Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, “seven in order to make three look good”, which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere. They’ll take ten, and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.
10!
Monitoring apache with god
Nathan / March 11, 2008, 3:37 pm
According to the site: God is an easy to configure, easy to extend monitoring framework written in Ruby.
While god is mainly intended for monitoring mongrels it is also a great way to keep an eye on apache itself. Below is our config for watching apache.
%w{80}.each do |port|
God.watch do |w|
w.name = "apache"
w.interval = 30.seconds # default
w.start = "apachectl start"
w.stop = "apachectl stop"
w.restart = "apachectl restart"
w.start_grace = 10.seconds
w.restart_grace = 10.seconds
w.start_if do |start|
start.condition(:process_running) do |c|
c.interval = 5.seconds
c.running = false
end
end
end
end
The code is pretty self-explanatory. We’re just looking to make sure apache is up every 5 seconds.
After gem installing god, save the configuration file anywhere you want and kick if off with this command:
god -c /path/to/your_conf.god
That’s it. To test, kill apache and in less than 5 seconds it will be back up and running.
css and rollovers
Caleb / March 11, 2008, 8:36 am
I’ve recently stopped using javascript to do rollovers when reasonable. It’s much nicer because you don’t have to write onmouseover or onmouseout events, and it works without javascript. It’s also prevents a weird ‘blink’ (especially in IE) when rolling over if the image isn’t loaded in cache.
The trick is to create one image that has both states and assign the background-position of the hover state.
Using the following image and css, you don’t have to worry about javascript.
a.seeMore {
background: #dce1e4
url(/images/icons/arrowFull.gif)
no-repeat top right;
}
a.seeMore:hover {
background-color:#4f5a62;
background-position:right -18px;
}
Interaction designers discuss the iPhone SDK
Matt / March 10, 2008, 11:27 am
Apples sniffed out an industry that was divided into two disfunctional factions. The carriers, who are making the exact same strategic mistakes they made as long distance providers 20 years ago, and hardware manufacturers – also repeating old mistakes. The carriers are still caught up in creating barriers for consumers to maximize profit. Hand set makers are driving with technology first, the user second.
The iPhone is fundamentally changing the functional, developmental, and the business landscape of the mobile phone industry.