Siolon

Navigation and IA Navigation is without a doubt one of the most essential elements of any interface, and as a result adequate time and thought is necessary to ensure your interface’s navigation is usable and comprehensive.  From the all important global navigation that stays the same throughout the site, to local navigation which changes based on the content of the page, to contextual navigation which exists within the content itself.  They all work together to form a powerful navigation experience. Information Architecture as an Extension of Web Design - features some good points on navigation and IA. Information Architecture Deliverables: Site/Navigation Structure - (read more...)

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...)

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...)

Laying out forms with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a complex topic. In light of many developers doing their first overall CSS layouts they often bail when it comes to laying out forms with CSS and avoiding both tables and line breaks. The code example shows the following: Well-formed, semantic markup CSS for layout and presentation Ensure that the form is both usable (easy to read/use) and presentable No tables or line breaks To avoid the line breaks we simply use the CSS “clear” property. This property says: “clear all floated elements to the x side of me”. So for clear: (read more...)