Siolon

I’ve been doing UI work for almost a decade.  I’ve seen a lot and been through many fads (although I won’t claim them if asked).  For a long time I thought the most important part of designing interfaces was the way it looked, and I was caught up in the next DHTML fad that would come across my RSS reader.  Well, thankfully I’ve grown and realized what’s really important, and I’ve come to realize that an interface’s appearance is not the most important thing. Note: Please don’t think I’m saying that the way it looks is not as important, but is (read more...)

As I stated earlier, I have recently changed jobs. I have also decided to close down Siolon as was known as a web design firm/blog. I have have been fortunate to learn so much about web content management from WordPress, but it’s becoming more and more difficult to keep two professional tracks running. It was easy when I was working during the day as a designer to come home at night and do more design work. However, now I come home and study knowledge management, SharePoint, and enterprise content management. It’s a very different way of thinking, (read more...)

I have seen many professional sites for businesses/organizations, and there are a couple of design cliches to avoid. Stock Photos So many companies think that by adding some pictures of two employees (that don’t work for the company) sitting at a computer smiling will somehow make people more interested. Well, it doesn’t, and the abuse of stock photography in business designs has gotten out of control. Splash Pages Well, this one is for any site, but professional sites fall prey to have some ‘cute’ splash page with an animation or vision explanation. Writing for Microsoft Word and Not the Web It’s (read more...)

Here is my recent talk at the Day of .NET. A lot of it doesn’t make sense without audio, and I break from the slides in the middle to demonstrate a usability video. If you need more explanation then drop a comment. (read more...)

For all of you in the Ohio area, I’ll be speaking at the Day of .NET on April 19th.  My topic will be “User Interface Design for Programmers.”  I will explain the basics of usability, information architecture, user experience, etc.  It will be focused on explaining the concepts to people who aren’t and don’t think like designers.  I’ll make the materials publicly available after the talk. As an aside, MS is doing good stuff listening to standards developers.  They are no longer “evil” in the sight of standards developers.  From their concession on IE8, improved CSS support in IE7/8, and they (read more...)