Loud Dog Links

March 8, 2010

• PodCamp Nashville 2010 Presentation (Cameron Daigle Dot Com)
  Every day, your cursor protects you from unclear UI. It helpfully turns into a text cursor as you hover over textboxes, or a hand as you hover over a link or action item.
  
  iPad has no such thing. Bad UI will stick out like a sore thumb, both in apps and on websites. Your tappable areas had better look tappable. Your controls had better look controllable.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design, usability

January 19, 2010

• Crafting Subtle & Realistic User Interfaces (Flyosity)
  Realism has always been an important part of my UI design philosophy - it's easier to use something if it feels real. Here's a great tutorial on how to make things feel real without being cheesy.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: usability, webdesign

January 11, 2010

• The Case Against Vertical Navigation - Smashing Magazine
  In fact, designers and architects are increasingly creating user experiences focused so strongly on content that navigation starts to become indistinguishable from content. This type of seamless experience is more effectively created when a horizontal navigation bar is used because horizontal navigation does not intrude on the content area and it’s still easily accessible visually and otherwise.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: bestPractices, design, usability, webdesign

December 7, 2009

• Short-Term Memory and Web Usability (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
  The human brain is not optimized for the abstract thinking and data memorization that that websites often demand. Many usability guidelines are dictated by cognitive limitations.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: usability

December 4, 2009

• Google DNS makes the web faster (kottke.org)
  Google introduces a public DNS server to make the web faster. Why invest in making the web faster? Their research showed that speed was critical: half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: business, usability, webStrategy

November 19, 2009

• Form | Unwrongest
  I arrived at this page through another blog's article, and I began reading. It wasn't until later that I realized this was a category archive. I thought I had found the ultimate blog post on form usability, but was reading several articles in series. Regardless, a good find.
  by: Matt DeClaire | tags: development, forms, javascript, usability

November 5, 2009

• A List Apart: Articles: Can You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clients
  A cheat sheet that describes different UX techniques using plain, client-friendly language that focuses on the business value of each exercise.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: business, usability

October 20, 2009

• 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines (Smashing Magazine)
  I had many of these bookmarked already, but here's a nice compendium.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: usability

October 5, 2009

• Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
  Really cool post on different time intervals and what they mean with regards to the online user's experience.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: usability

September 24, 2009

• 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines « Smashing Magazine
  by: Matt DeClaire | tags: usability

September 21, 2009

• Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
  Users hate change, so it's usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: usability, webdesign

August 24, 2009

• Twitter Postings: Iterative Design (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
  I found this iterative design study interesting.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: copywriting, usability

June 23, 2009

• Stop Password Masking (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
  Yay! I hate masked passwords. It's such a pain in the ass. Nielsen even has a good solution for public computers: a checkbox that turns on masking.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: usability, webdesign

June 15, 2009

• Dear Dustin Curtis (Dustin Curtis)
  American Airlines UX responds to Dustin Curtis's redesign. I think the UX Designer's letter is more interesting than Curtis's following rant. Curtis is right in some ways, and he writes more about it on his blog.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: business, usability

May 29, 2009

• A List Apart: Articles: In Defense of Eye Candy
  Hallelujah for Stephen P. Anderson's article on the value of aesthetics. He's currently my hero.
  by: Jodi Wing | tags: aesthetics, design, interface, psychology, ui, usability, webdesign

April 28, 2009

• Loop11
  New online usability testing. Looks like it's in private beta now, but could be interesting.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: usability, userResearch, webdesign
• Let your links look like links (456 Berea Street)
  Don't make me think about where your links are! While you don't need to follow convention slavishly, keeping your links underlined helps users find them. The corollary to this is don't underline things that aren't links - people want to click on them.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: usability, webdesign

April 21, 2009

• In Defense of Eye Candy (A List Apart)
  Research backs up claims that aesthetics make a difference to a product's usability and success.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design, usability

April 12, 2009

• An Icon, Despite Itself (NYTimes)
  The glass Heinz Ketchup bottle represents the triumph of aesthetics over usability.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design, usability

April 7, 2009

• Design View / Andy Rutledge - Gestalt Principles of Perception 3: Proximity, Uniform Connectedness, and Good Continuation
  Go Andy! More design principles that we employ at Loud Dog with every project. It's nice to touch base on these and confirm that our internal dialogues are consistent with these fundamentals.
  by: Jodi Wing | tags: design, layout, usability, webdesign