Category: User Interface

  • The Most Trivial Aspect of Designing Interfaces

    After a decade of UI work, the biggest lesson: how an interface looks is trivial compared to understanding how your users actually need to use it.

  • User Interface Design For Programmers

    Slides from my Day of .NET talk on user interface design for programmers, covering usability, information architecture, and user experience basics.

  • Day of .NET Presentation

    Speaking at the Central Ohio Day of .NET on UI design for programmers. The goal is explaining design thinking to people who don’t think like designers.

  • Post Information Plugin Updated

    Version 1.2 of my Post Information Plugin: switched to jQuery, added tag support, proper styling, and graceful degradation without JavaScript.

  • CSS Browser Reset

    The reset I arrived at after reading everyone else’s, with notes on where to place it and the universal selector that keeps it from working in IE6.

  • Form Layouts With CSS

    Developers who have made peace with CSS layout still reach for tables when they hit a form. A worked example that lays one out with semantic markup and the clear property instead.

  • HTML 5 vs. XHTML 2: The Future of Web Standards

    Slides from a talk I gave at the Dayton Web Standards Group comparing the two competing futures for markup, with the specifications and further reading I drew on.

  • jQuery: JavaScript That Doesn’t Suck

    I hated JavaScript until jQuery let me select DOM elements with CSS syntax. In this post I cover selectors, toggles, Ajax requests, and appending content, with code for each.

  • Economical Usability Testing

    Steve Krug convinced me to test even on a shoestring, so I tested this site’s redesign for sixty dollars with a Wufoo form and four Amazon gift certificates.

  • Objectives in User Interface Design II

    The W3C’s HTML Design Principles document covered two things my first list of UI objectives left out: internationalization and security.