Dear IT Guy, Can You Actually Use the Tool You’re Creating?

Steve Radick at Enterprise 2.0 – Dear IT Guy, Can You Actually Use the Tool You’re Creating?:

"You gain trust and respect because they know that you’re dealing with the same issues they are.  You’re struggling to access the site on your phone too.  You’re not getting the alerts you signed up for either.  You’re not able to embed videos correctly.  You go through what they go through."

(Via Naresh Sarwan at Digital Asset Management News.)

On LEGO Powered Time-Tracking; My Daily Column

Michael Hunger – On LEGO Powered Time-Tracking; My Daily Column:

"As a child I hated these one-rowers as they were not useful in building stuff. But here and now they seemed a perfect fit. Small enough and in the right sizes. I chose a time partitioning of a quarter of an hour. So I can use the lengths 1,2,3,4 to build 15,30,45 and 60 minutes worth of time in a row representing an hour.

[…] One last thing I have been thinking about is getting these daily columns recorded automatically. So using your webcam or phone camera, you just hold the “day” in front of it. After taking the picture it is processed."

(Via Nat Torkington on O'Reilly Radar.)

Master Planner: Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything

Kevin Kelly at Wired – Master Planner: Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything:

"On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.

[…] Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features."

(Via Signal vs. Noise)

The Amazingness of Instant

Scott Adams – The Amazingness of Instant:

"I've discovered that 90% of its usefulness comes from the fact that it's speedy. Yesterday a fox walked by the window, and I was the only witness. Someone asked what type it was, and I was able to point to a picture on the iPad in less than 30 seconds. Some version of that situation happens continuously. Life comes at us in sub-minute chunks, especially in the kitchen. That's a lot of iPad opportunities."

HTML5 and the Future of Adobe Flash

Gartner RAS Core Research Note at Adobe.com – HTML5 and the Future of Adobe Flash [PDF]:

"The root causes for a suboptimal user experience consist of lack of appropriate process and governance, and lack of a genuine commitment to a quality user experience. Such a commitment would lead organizations to adopt a user-centered, usability-oriented development process. Rather than taking these steps, we see a lot of projects that are “stakeholder-driven” (i.e., driven by internal politics). […] Most enterprises don’t seem to care enough about the user experience to change their habits (in terms of processes that are developer-driven, vendor-driven and stakeholder-driven, rather than user-driven)."

(Via Mike Slinn at InsideRIA.)

Finishability

Phil Gyford – Finishability:

"But those old-fashioned constraints of printing can also be a benefit. There’s something satisfying, predictable and achievable about a more-or-less fixed amount of stuff to read appearing on a regular schedule.

For example, when faced with most news websites one of the reasons I don’t spend much time reading them is because I know I can never finish, no matter how much I read. So, once I’ve read the front page headlines and realised the world hasn’t ended, why read much more? I’ll never finish it all anyway."

(Via Derek Powazek and Today's Guardian.)

HTML5 and the Web

Tim Bray – HTML5 and the Web:

"HTML-based software has historically provided a better user experience compared to what went before. Everyone in our profession knows that building a good user interface is maddeningly difficult. The discovery, in the early Web browsers, that reasonably-typeset text which embedded simple forms and hyperlinks, and came equipped with a “Back” button, hit the biggest 80/20 point ever in the history of User Interfaces, couldn’t have been predicted by anybody; but it’s as true today as ever."

A 2.5 Year-Old Uses an iPad for the First Time

Todd Lappin – A 2.5 Year-Old Uses an iPad for the First Time:

"My iPhone-savvy 2.5 year-old daughter held an iPad for the very first time last night, and it turned out to be an interesting user-interface experiment."

(Via John Muellerleile.)

What’s New in Tablets

Tim Bray – What’s New in Tablets:

"Speed Is A Feature · For a 1Ghz device with limited memory, the iPad is unreasonably fast. I suspect this accounts for a whole bunch of the “Wow!” reaction the iPad obviously provokes."

Core application versus corollary applications in DAM

Theresa Regli at CMS Watch – Core application versus corollary applications in DAM:

"Where the confusion often starts is when, as is often the case with DAM products, #2 [the external or "self-service" application] looks completely different from #1 [the "core" application]. This is where it's important to note that most DAM products are a platform: that is to say, highly malleable and open to customization. That includes the interfaces. So when a vendor is showing the core application and then switches over to the external or as they sometimes call it (to further confusion) "portal" application, chaos ensues."

The Importance of Usability in Digital Asset Management

Joshua Duhl at We Speak Digital Media – The Importance of Usability in Digital Asset Management:

"By contrast the other DAM systems used an approach that took into account the user’s role, permissions or privileges to inform the UI what to display and what to hide.  The user interface was tailored to the role, set of tasks or in some cases the user’s level of sophistication.  As a result users only saw what they could do.  Under the covers, such an approach is a complicated implementation; one that takes a lot of refinement over time to get right, but one which enables greater simplicity and ease of use."

iPad Application Design

Matt Gemmell – iPad Application Design:

"Most users need only a small set of features, and software is better when it’s focused. A nice side-effect of focused software is that the UI is easier to design and comprehend (because there’s less of it, and it’s more obvious why each thing is there). The trick is to figure out which small set of features are actually important, and implement only those.

[…] Be focused, targeted and comprehensible. You can add things later when it becomes clear what’s important, but you’ll never recover from a confusing first impression."

An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash

Morgan Adams at RoughlyDrafted Magazine – An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash:

"I’m a full-time Flash developer and I’d love to get paid to make Flash sites for iPad. I want that to make sense—but it doesn’t. Flash on the iPad will not (and should not) happen—and the main reason, as I see it, is one that never gets talked about:

Current Flash sites could never be made work well on any touchscreen device, and this cannot be solved by Apple, Adobe, or magical new hardware.

That’s not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It’s because of the hover or mouseover problem."

(Via Ajaxian.)

Quicksand

Plupload

Computers shouldn't make people feel like idiots

Matt Linderman on the Apple iPad at Signal vs. Noise – Computers shouldn't make people feel like idiots:

"For those of us surrounded by the minutiae of computers all day, it’s easy to forget there’s a world of people out there who just don’t get it. And it’s not their fault. It’s ours.

Apple has decided it’s worth throwing out advanced features in order to get these people onboard. Anyone who builds apps would be wise to consider taking a similar path."

RFI as rich asset

Kas Thomas at CMS Watch – RFI as rich asset:

"I proposed a simple expedient: Require screenshots.

If a product supports a certain type of functionality via a graphical user interface, the vendor should have no qualms about showing the UI in question, doing the operation in question. It's one thing to be told "Yes, our admin interface supports restricting a user's right to Copy or Move a file" (for example), but a picture, as they say, is worth a thousand workarounds."

The Way I Work: Jason Fried of 37Signals

Jason Fried at Inc. – The Way I Work: Jason Fried of 37Signals:

"In the software world, the first, second, and third versions of any product are really pretty good, because everyone can use them. Then companies start adding more and more stuff to keep their existing customers happy. But you end up dying with your customer base, because the software is too complicated for a newcomer. We keep our products simple. I'd rather have people grow out of our products, as long as more people are growing into them."

iPhone Killers, Blackberries and Chicken Parts

Mark Sigal at O'Reilly Radar – iPhone Killers, Blackberries and Chicken Parts:

"I would submit that my experiences underscore a hard truth in the age of iPhone; namely, that successful device vendors can no longer deliver piecemeal offerings that 'mostly work.' Rather, they have to deliver complete product solutions that work consistently as expected."

Things We Hate About Content Management

Irina Guseva et al. – Things We Hate About Content Management:

"Interfaces need a comfortable lived in feel. Content management is something people work with every day, it is their interface to their job. You meet people who hate the interface, and that makes their work a heap of pain. I have seen people who describe the 44 clicks it takes to insert an image. You have a responsibility to these people, to make them love the content and make the tool disappear.

[…] “Power users” (those who use it all day long) of CMSs needed to have a “Desktop” experience. What does Desktop Experience mean? Well, it doesn’t really have to be on the desktop – these days it is perfectly possible to get very close to a hitherto Desktop experience in a browser or similar. these are qualities: very low latency from action to response, no page refreshes, modal and modal-less dialog boxes as appropriate, “push” notification."

iTunes Solves the Nested Clause Dilemma

Theresa Neil at Designing Web Interfaces – iTunes Solves the Nested Clause Dilema:

"Now, to my delight, Apple has tackled the last remaining frontier of predicate editors- the nested clause. My design partner, Jessica, found this when trying to pull together a playlist for her birthday last week. She needed something more complex than a simple AND or OR (which Apple eloquently rephrased as “matching all of these conditions” or “matching any of these conditions”)."

Usability still improving -- improvement still needed

Kas Thomas at CMS Watch – Usability still improving -- improvement still needed:

"Dialogs are annoying, in general, because there's usually very little actual "dialog" happening in a dialog box; it's more of a monolog. It's the programmer who wrote the software telling you what to do next, rather than the reverse."

View Source Tutorial: Fancy Web Page Using HTML5, CSS, and SVG

Ajaxian – View Source Tutorial: Fancy Web Page Using HTML5, CSS, and SVG:

"I love this example because it shows a few things. First, that SVG is definitely not dead; this works on every browser but IE -- that doesn't sound like a dead technology to me. Second, this example is much better done with SVG than the Canvas tag."

Desktop littered with tiny icons?

Ryan Singer at Signal vs. Noise: "Unimportant things are easier to keep around when they are small."

Makes me wonder why there's so much stuff in very small font size in our application's UI…

Gmail's Labels Now More Like Folders: A Good Thing?

Rich Rosen at O'Reilly Broadcast – Gmail's Labels Now More Like Folders: A Good Thing?:

"The common wisdom is that marking things with tags or labels (so you can later search for them by tag) is better than organizing them hierarchically into folders.

[…] The problem is that people don't seem to "get" labels or grasp what the inherent advantage is in not organizing things into folders. They WANT folders.

[…] Labels are much more flexible for organization and searching. It's a pity Google felt they needed to take a step backwards by saying "yeah, OK, these can be like folders, too, whatever." This is a failure resulting not from the feature's original design but from Google's inability to promote it and educate users about it."

jQuery TOOLS

jQuery TOOLS – The missing UI library for the Web:

"What you really need are tabs, tooltips, accordions, overlays, high usability, striking visual effects and all those "web 2.0" goodies that you have seen on your favourite websites.

This library contains six of the most useful JavaScript tools available for today's website."

Getting insight into one’s own email

David Ascher – Getting insight into one’s own email:

"The “start page”, which makes a lot of sense in Firefox, never made a huge amount of sense to me in Thunderbird. In particular, it’s shown only when a folder is selected, and no message is selected. That’s hardly a logical time to show the (colorful, pretty, but fairly useless) page we show now. Instead, why not show information about the selected folder, and help people who clearly intended to select a folder, so most likely wanted to do something related to that folder!"

New York Times AIR reader released

RJ Owen at InsideRIA – New York Times AIR reader released:

"As a whole, the application does a better job replicating the "newspaper" experience than reading in the browser.  […] Clean design and great execution make this a stellar user experience, and something other companies should strive to emulate. Even more impressive, I've had this application running on my machine all morning and haven't noticed any of the performance problems people complain about with Adobe AIR. "

Calendar as Filter

Scott Adams – Calendar as Filter:

"I think the biggest software revolution of the future is that the calendar will be the organizing filter for most of the information flowing into your life. You think you are bombarded with too much information every day, but in reality it is just the timing of the information that is wrong. Once the calendar becomes the organizing paradigm and filter, it won't seem as if there is so much."

violet nabaztag, mir:ror

violet – The Internet of Things starts here, fun objects using RFID and WLAN:

"Violet’s dream is therefore to make the physical space in which we live – our homes, offices, public spaces – a better place: rich, intelligent, connected, personalized, awe-inspiring, fun. Not a space that simulates 3D, but that naturally is 3D. A space that you don’t need a browser to explore, only your own two feet; that you navigate not with timid mouse clicks, but that you can embrace fully; whose icons are not little drawings, but true objects; that doesn’t need training, as it is able to comprehend your daily habits."

Tim Bray on the Future of the Web

InfoQ interview – Tim Bray on the Future of the Web:

"When the web came along people shriked with glee and universally abandoned all those rich immersive responsive pre-internet applications and ran into the arms of the web.

[…] Over the years since then I have regularly and steadily heard them saying: "We need something that is more immersive, more responsive, more interactive". Every time without exception that somebody said that to me, they have either been a developer or a vendor who wants to sell the technology that is immersive or responsive, or something like that.

[…] On the other hand richness is a good thing but I would rather take an old fashioned point of view and if you look at the world's most popular actual real Internet applications you'll see things like Google and Facebook and Wikipedia, and so on kind of which I play all day web applications, and they are rich all right, they are rich because they expose you to lots of deep high quality content and allow you to communicate with interesting people and I think a dollar with that kind of richness is worth a thousand dollars of things that wiggle when you put the mouse over them So I tend to be highly cynical about this whole subject.

[…] The whole web runs on polling and the whole universe of RSS and feeds runs on polling. It scales beautifully it works perfectly with the existing caching mechanisms that are built into the web and the deployment mechanisms, and the load sharing mechanisms and all that stuff."

Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well

Jakob Nielsen – Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well:

"Mega drop-downs make it easy to use icons and pictures when appropriate. And, even if you stick to text alone, you have richer typography at your disposal (letting you differentiate link sizes according to their importance, for example)."

How to be a program manager

Joel Spolsky – How to be a program manager:

"The number one mistake most companies make is having the manager of the programmers writing the specs and designing the product. This is a mistake because the design does not get a fair trial, and is not born out of conflict and debate, so it’s not as good as it could be."

7 Questions to Evaluate SaaS

Alistair Croll at GigaOM – 7 Questions to Evaluate SaaS:

"With software as a service, the focus has become whether the tool is good enough on day one and how well it will adapt over time.

[…] How effectively can your users accomplish their goals? How many cases-per-minute or entries-per-day can workers do, and how many errors do they make?"

Pixel Bender Explorer: Bending Ext AIR Apps

Aaron Conran – Pixel Bender Explorer: Bending Ext AIR Apps:

"Pixel Bender is an exciting new technology by Adobe which brings video and image processing capabilities to the flash runtime. It allows you to create and apply filters to ‘bend’ pixels and create compelling animations which have never been possible in an HTML environment. Because Adobe AIR uses flash to load any HTML content, we can leverage these powerful filters on a standard Ext Application in the AIR environment."

See also: Mihai Corlan – BlackBookSafe: Anatomy of an AIR 1.5 application.

The case against Flex-based application UIs

Tony Byrne at CMS Watch – The case against Flex-based application UIs:

"Flex applications are prone to the same memory leaks and CPU spikes that bedeviled applets for years. To be sure, I've seen some fat and ugly JavaScript-based interfaces too, but at least everyone can debug those openly."

Speed Still Matters

Jeff Atwood – Speed Still Matters:

"What's more important? Getting flash after 5 seconds, or functional no-frills layouts in less than a second? Let's get our priorities straight. Speed still matters. And remember, the perception of speed is just as important as actual speed. If you can't be fast, be clever."

Beautifully Documented Code

Atul Varma – Beautifully Documented Code:

"I wasn’t very pleased with the typography of the generated content—though obviously the aesthetics were customizable through CSS, none of the default stylesheets left me dying to read the documentation I created.

I’ve always had these kinds of hangups when it comes to design; a lack of it repels me from some software that might otherwise be interesting or useful, while good aesthetics is part of the reason I’m drawn to a handful of projects like TeX that are truly elegant out-of-the-box. With this in mind, I decided to play around with creating my own simple code documentation system."

(Via Ajaxian.)

Mapeed.AddressChooser

"Mapeed.AddressChooser is a Javascript script to create a nice address form for any websites that need to collect addresses. […] Interactive map display location while you are typing an address."

(Via Ajaxian.)

WebApp.Net

Branch Out

Tim Bray – Branch Out:

"Developers of the world: real deep design skill is rare, but there are a few principles of design and color that, if you follow them, will keep you mostly out of trouble and produce something that may not seduce the viewer’s eye but on the other hand won’t revolt it. Bookstore shelves are full of books on the basics of online design, have a look."

Queue everything and delight everyone

 Leslie Michael Orchard – Queue everything and delight everyone:

"And, in the end, that’s really the purpose of a web-based content creation interface—accepting something as quickly as possible to make the user happy enough to continue submitting more. The other part of the user interface, retrieval, serves simply to get the original content distributed as fast as can be reasonably expected."

10 Handwritten fonts you can't miss

Woork – 10 Handwritten fonts you can't miss:

 "This is a list of my preferred Handwritten fonts I often use in my design projects. I included a link to download each font apart and some suggest about how you can use them."

Don't hide or disable menu items

Joel Spolsky – Don't hide or disable menu items:

"Instead, leave the menu item enabled. If there's some reason you can't complete the action, the menu item can display a message telling the user why."

Silverback

PicLens

Progress Bars

Scott Adams – Progress Bars:

"A minute of entertainment is better than 58 seconds of boredom even if you are in a hurry."

SproutCore

Features are a one-way street

Ryan Singer at Signal vs. Noise – Features are a one-way street:

"Whether the feature is good or bad, once you launch it you’ve married it. This changes the economics of feature additions. If you can’t destroy what you build, each addition holds the threat of clutter. Empty pixels and free space where a new feature could be added are the most valuable real estate on your app. Don’t be quick to sell it, because you can never get it back."

Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality

Alex Iskold – Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality:

"Probably the most striking revelation about the semantic search space is User Interface. First, to go on the tangent, Powerset got it right by realizing that semantics needs to be surfaced in the UI. After a user searches Powerset, a contextual gadget, aware of the semantics of the results, helps the user complete the search experience." 

FusionCharts Free

Robert D. Currier at linux.com – FusionCharts Free: Cross-platform charts that rock:

"If you've struggled with GNUplot, JPgraph or other charting applications, FusionCharts Free is a breath of fresh air. Have you dreamed of finding a charting and graphing application that is simple to install, easy to configure, and drop-dead gorgeous? Stop dreaming and download a copy of FusionCharts Free. You'll be producing professional quality charts and graphs in no time."

SIMILE Seek

"“Seek” adds faceted browsing features to Mozilla Thunderbird and lets you search through your email more effectively."

fonts.info releases free fonts for web embedding (via font-face)

Ward Cunningham’s Visible Workings

Jon Udell - Ward Cunningham’s Visible Workings:

"This isn’t just an innovative approach to software testing and workflow visualization. It’s also a radical statement about business process transparency. For most of us, most of the time, business systems are black boxes whose internal workings we can only discern in the outcomes of our (often painful) interactions with them. But what if you could find out, before pressing the Save button, what’s going on in that black box? And what if your way of finding out wasn’t by reading bogus documentation, but instead by probing the system itself using its own test framework?"

Feeling the pulse with Queen Bee

Jason Fried - Feeling the pulse with Queen Bee:

"At the top of our Queen Bee admin screen we have a stream showing the latest activity across Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, and Campfire.

[...] Everyone at 37signals has access to this stream of signups, upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations. It’s a great way to get a feel for patterns, how things are going in general, and where people are finding out about our products."

Preview 3: Backpack Page Changes

Jason Fried at 37signals - Preview 3: Backpack Page Changes:

"When you have multiple people contributing to a page it’s handy to know when and what changed since your last visit. We’ve made this really easy with the new Backpack.

If you visit a page that changed since your last visit you’ll see a sticky note in top right corner of the page."

MarkMail Provides Amazing Search Capabilities

Tim O'Reilly at O'Reilly Radar - MarkMail Provides Amazing Search Capabilities:

"I love the way MarkMail gives me a bunch of drill-down choices in the UI, and as I choose them, rewrites the command-line in the search box. I'd love to see features like this in my other mail packages. With Mail.app on Mac OS X, for example, it's impossible to do a complex search. You can search for a text string in the from field, the subject line, or the entire message, but what if you want to say "I want a message on x, from Joe, to Mary, sent between April and June of 2006." Even on Gmail, where I can do this kind of search with Search Options, I have to go to another whole screen, out of the search flow, to do it. You can construct that kind of a search in MarkMail just by navigating around. Yumm. How long before regular mail vendors start doing this kind of thing? This is a really sweet search interface."

Feature Richness and User Engagement

Jakob Nielsen - Feature Richness and User Engagement:

"Typically, when new prospects first visit your site, you're simply one of ten sites on the SERP [Search Engine Results Page]. The only way they'll shortlist your site is if you can convince them in two minutes.

Thus, websites should have almost no features: focus on the words.

To determine how much complexity you can afford in a user interface, you must analyze user engagement levels: Do they care deeply, or do they just want to get something done as quickly as possible? Typically, users care less than you think! You're not important to them. This is one of the main reasons companies need systematic usability studies: to make explicit the fact that outside customers don't find your design as important as you do (because you work on it all year)."

Talk at Yale: Part 1 of 3

Joel Spolsky - Talk at Yale: Part 1 of 3:

"The old testers at Microsoft checked lots of things: they checked if fonts were consistent and legible, they checked that the location of controls on dialog boxes was reasonable and neatly aligned, they checked whether the screen flickered when you did things, they looked at how the UI flowed, they considered how easy the software was to use, how consistent the wording was, they worried about performance, they checked the spelling and grammar of all the error messages, and they spent a lot of time making sure that the user interface was consistent from one part of the product to another, because a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one.

None of those things could be checked by automated scripts. And so one result of the new emphasis on automated testing was that the Vista release of Windows was extremely inconsistent and unpolished. Lots of obvious problems got through in the final product… none of which was a “bug” by the definition of the automated scripts, but every one of which contributed to the general feeling that Vista was a downgrade from XP."

How to demo software

Joel Spolsky - How to demo software:

"As you go along, be sure to accidentally bump into all the nice little “fit and finish” features of your product. Oh look, that column is halfway off screen. No problem. I’ll just drag it over. (“Wha!” the audience gasps, “you dragged a column in HTML?”) Oh, look, this feature is supposed to be done by next Tuesday. I’ll type “next tuesday” in the due date box. (“OMG!” they squeal. You typed “next tuesday” and it was replaced with “11/20/2007”). Those nice little touches you put so much hard work into are not the meat of the demo, so don’t talk about them, just act nonchalant. What, doesn’t every web app let you resize and drag columns?"

One of the best search experiences

Ed Stevenson at Really Strategies Blog - One of the best search experiences:

"On kayak.com, you are offered a set of dials and levers for adjusting the query, such as eliminating airlines, changing departure time frames, or looking for the shortest trip. You want to leave between 10 and 12, just move the dial and the page is updated with results that match. You want to find the shortest trip. Move the lever.

Does your content, or its metadata, lend itself to this type of search? Is there a way to present options for your customers to refine search results in a more appealing way?"

Why Enterprise Software Sucks

Jason Fried - Why Enterprise Software Sucks:

"The people who buy enterprise software aren’t the people who use enterprise software. That’s where the disconnect begins. And it pulls and pulls and pulls until the user experience is split from the buying experience so severely that the software vendors are building for the buyers, not the users. The experience takes a back seat to the feature list, future promises, and buzz words."

Is it really the number of features that matter?

Jason Fried - Ask 37signals: Is it really the number of features that matter?:

"It’s not so much about consciously saying “we have three too many features here” it’s about saying “let’s solve most of this problem with less code and simpler design.” If we need to solve more of the problem later we can, but let’s solve most of it now—and quickly. And most of the time the partial solution is the plenty solution.

So remember: Good software is about balancing value and screen real estate and understanding and outcome."

Tagging and foldering

Jon Udell - Tagging and foldering:

"On the desktop as well as on the web, we’re in the midst of a long transition from container-based to query-based storage and retrieval. And really, transition is the wrong word, because the two approaches will coexist into the indefinite future.

Given that coexistence, how can we help people understand the relationship between these two approaches?"

Pressure to grow?

Jason Fried - Ask 37signals: Pressure to grow?:

"We’ve intentionally set up our business so our headcount doesn’t need to grow linearly with our key business metrix. We’ve put self-serve at the core of our company. Self serve sign up, self serve upgrade, self serve downgrade, self serve cancellation.

We’ve been constantly tweaking the UIs for the apps to make them even more self sufficient. By making things clearer and simpler we make help/support less necessary. We’re obviously here to help people when they need help, but we’ve seen significant growth in our customer base without significant growth in customer service requests. This is the biggest payoff of simplicity and clarity."

Information Design for the New Web

Ellyssa Kroski - Information Design for the New Web:

"Website designers are keeping a simple and Zen-like layout by increasing line heights and adding lots of whitespace to pages. Instead of crowding the page with information overload, New Web designers are focusing on the essentials, and producing clean and fresh pages."

(Via Nico Brünjes.) 

cross browser fixed header/footer layout (CSS)

Styling File Inputs with CSS and the DOM

Shaun Inman - Styling File Inputs with CSS and the DOM:

"File inputs (<input type="file" />) are the bane of beautiful form design. No rendering engine provides the granular control over their presentation designers desire. This simple, three-part progressive enhancement provides the markup, CSS, and JavaScript to address the long-standing irritation."

The fall of the Desktop and the File and the rise of Topical Interfaces and Topical Documents

Rick Jelliffe at XML.com - The fall of the Desktop and the File and the rise of Topical Interfaces and Topical Documents:

"The rise of Topics represents a great challenge to operating system and desktop suite vendors. When we look at Windows, or Mac or Linux window managers, we see that they really interact with the user at the wrong level. They say that the topic the user is interested in is applications and files. But how many people nowadays start their computer interaction with a web browser pointed to Google? There are still people whose organizing topic of interest in their computer interaction is the file or application, of course, but they have been swamped by people who are interested in the topic."

Design Decision: Welcome Tab vs. Primer

Jason Fried at Signal vs. Noise - Design Decision: Welcome Tab vs. Primer:

"The Welcome Tab in Backpack provides even more information than the old Primer, but it doesn’t get in your way. You can keep the tab around for reference as long as you’d like without it cluttering up your pages or pushing down your content. And when you’re ready you can hide the tab permanently if you’d like.

[...] We think this is a great solution to a common scenario—getting people started but keeping the “getting started” info around for later."

Make sure to read the comments as well. 

frevvo web form builder

"Live Forms is the easiest way to create rich, Web 2.0 forms using just a browser.

Whether you need a simple e-mail registration form, forms that work with your database or powerful business forms for working with XML, Live Forms helps you create amazing forms without writing a single line of code."

Tag graphics

37signals Product Blog - Insert "Update" tag graphic in Basecamp posts:

"When you're typing a message/comment, just put "[UPDATE]" in there. [...] Basecamp turns your update text into a little tag graphic."

Elastic lists

Moritz Stefaner - Elastic lists:

"Elastic lists enhance traditional facet browsing approaches by

• visualizing relative proportions (weights) of metadata values by size
• visualizing unusualness of a metadata weight by brightness
• and animated filtering transitions."

(Via Ryan Eby.)

Lightroom Fanboy

Tim Bray - Lightroom Fanboy:

"First of all, did I mention it’s fast?

Second, there’s no Save button. It just takes care of that. And remember, all the edits are deltas, as in non-destructive. It occurs to me to wonder why all software that edits any data in any way whatsoever doesn’t work like this.

[...] It’s really good at remembering what you just did, so you very rarely have to type in something more than once when you want to do it again."

One Interface

37signals - Getting Real: One Interface:

"To avoid crappy-admin-screen syndrome, don't build separate screens to deal with admin functions. Instead, build these functions (i.e. edit, add, delete) into the regular application interface."

Does User Annoyance Matter?

Jakob Nielsen - Does User Annoyance Matter?:

"Sites offer drop-downs for state abbreviations under the theory that doing so prevents input errors. But that's not true: menus are more error prone than typing because the mouse scroll wheel often makes users inadvertently change the state field's content after they've moved their gaze elsewhere on the screen. In contrast, everybody knows how to type their own state's two letters, and it's always faster to enter this information through the keyboard than the mouse."

Geni

"Geni is the fast, free, fun way to create your family tree - and stay in touch."

Highrise welcome and workspace tabs

Jason Fried - Preview 3: Highrise welcome and workspace tabs:

"The blank slate is the first screen someone sees when they log into a web-app for the first time. It’s what they see when there isn’t any data. It’s the critical first impression.

We pay a lot of attention to the blank slate states. I think Highrise has at least 8 of them. One for almost ever major feature and some special “almost-blank slates” for screen with just a little bit of data. Some blank slates go away instantly while others go away after you’ve done something three times."

Scrybe

"Scrybe™ is a groundbreaking online organizer that caters to today´s lifestyle in a cohesive and intuitive way."

MiniAjax.com

ModalBox

Hybridizing Java

Bruce Eckel - Hybridizing Java:

"It’s not impossible to build GUI applications with Java, but it’s been 10 years and there are still installation hiccups with applets, Java WebStart, and regular applications. After 10 years, people don’t trust it anymore. If it’s not there after 10 years, then I’m going to go out on a limb and say that someone doesn’t consider this problem important enough to fix. And even if they did, there have been so many bad experiences among consumers that it would take years to get the trust back.

[...] Allow for a moment the possibility that, after 10 years, Java is not going to take over the world of RIAs. Further allow that Ajax is just “how JavaScript was supposed to work in the first place,” but that the limitations imposed by browsers, HTML and CSS committees seem unlikely to let it expand beyond its current bounds. What are we going to use to build RIAs?

[...] One of the most appealing things about Flex is that Flash was created with the idea of UI first. In a very real sense, it’s a domain-specific language (DSL) for graphics, multimedia, and UIs, whereas most other solutions have been languages with UI libraries tacked on afterwards. Because of this design goal, Flex and Flash provide a complete, unlimited, flexible tool to build user experiences."

IBM Wants Many Eyes on Visualization

Tim O'Reilly at O'Reilly Radar - IBM Wants Many Eyes on Visualization:

"IBM today announced Many Eyes, a site for sharing and commenting on visualizations. [...] As with swivel, users can upload any data set, but the tools for visualizing and graphing the data are much richer."

First have a great use experience, then have a great user experience

Jon Udell - First have a great use experience, then have a great user experience:

"We talk obsessively about the user experience, and we recognize that we invariably fail to make it as crisp and coherent as it should be. But user experience is an overloaded term. I propose that we unpack it into (at least) two separate concepts. One is the basis of the “aha” moment. For now I’ll call it the use experience. In this example, it’s the experience of listening to spoken-word podcasts from sources that, just a few years ago, weren’t available."

Simplicity

Joel Spolsky - Simplicity:

"Donald Norman concludes that simplicity is overrated. [...]

I think it is a misattribution to say, for example, that the iPod is successful because it lacks features. If you start to believe that, you'll believe, among other things, that you should take out features to increase your product’s success. With six years of experience running my own software company I can tell you that nothing we have ever done at Fog Creek has increased our revenue more than releasing a new version with more features. Nothing."

Microformats Icons

Wolfgang Bartelme  - Microformats Icons:

 "As Microformats have gained much popularity over the last year we thought it was time to standardize the way they are represented on a website. So we created the Microformats Icon Set. The starter set contains icons for hCal, hResume, hCard, XFN and a generic TAG icon."

Tantalizing hints of the Knowledge Navigator

Jon Udell - Tantalizing hints of the Knowledge Navigator:

"It's all compelling stuff, but there's something about Avi Bryant's [Dabble DB] maneuver that shouts Knowledge Navigator. In this 90-second excerpt from the screencast, you can see how Avi hoists data right out of a web page and weaves it into a structured view. So natural, so powerful. How can we not have this capability always and everywhere?"

fluxiom

"fluxiom makes it easy to organize and share your digital assets within your company, your colleagues and friends. Manage any kind of file like corporate media assets, marketing materials, product folders, contracts, images, text documents, logos or artwork – you name it."

Outsource Your CSS Markup

Markus Urban - Outsource Your CSS Markup:

"Some time ago I learned about two new services that offer outsourced CSS/XHTML coding. This was a pretty interesting concept and so I took both for a test drive. They both essentially convert your design from a PSD (Photoshop), Adobe Illustrator, JPG, or any type of “flat” file into standards-based CSS and XHTML."

(He's testing XHTMLized and PSD2HTML).

10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website

Markus Urban - 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website:

1. "EASY is the most important feature of any website, web app, or program.
2. Visual design and copy are extremely important.
3. Open up your data as much possible.
4. Test, test, test.
5. Release features early and often.
6. Be special.
7. Don’t be special.
8. If you plan on developing a successful webapp, plan for scalability from the ground up.
9. Watch, pay attention to, or implement right away
10. User generated content and social software trends"

WordPress Comments System built with Yahoo! UI

Jack Slocum - WordPress Comments System built with Yahoo! UI:

"New comments can be General Comments as well, or they can be "Block" comments. A "Block" is any paragraph, image, title or code in a post. When you select a block to comment on, it is highlighted in blue.

Comments can be posted anywhere in an article. If you see something and you wish to comment on it, click on the comments bar directly next to it.

To view the comments posted by readers, click on the yellow indicator next to that "Block" on the comments bar."

 (Via Ryan Eby.)

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg: "Get a clear picture of where your visitors are clicking and enhance your site's results."

(Via Ryan Eby.)

Lucene Summit: NINES Collex

Erik Hatcher - Lucene Summit:

"I really found the Collex interface concept to be very interesting. Everything is a contraint or limit and you can easily add or invert the contraint. It’s also easy to add things to a personal collection and parts of the personal collection then become facets/contraints themselves. He’s really using all of the metadata (archive and user) to it’s full extent. He also has more plans including “exhibits” where people can “curate collections”. These collections themselves can then become objects in the index and so on. "

DateBocks

Nathaniel S. H. Brown - DateBocks, the new, intuitive date input selection for your forms:

"We use common terms in english to express how we identify a date coming up, or a date in the past. Such as “Next Tuesday”, “Last Month”, or even as simple as “Friday”. We clearly know which date that identifies, but until now, a computer had no idea, as far as forms were concerned."

Reminds me of what I read about Lotus Agenda.

Refining Data Tables

Luke Wroblewski - Refining Data Tables:

"After forms, data tables are likely the next most ubiquitous interface element designers create when constructing Web applications. Users often need to add, edit, delete, search for, and browse through lists of people, places, or things within Web applications. As a result, the design of tables plays a crucial role in such an application’s overall usefulness and usability. But just like the design of forms, there’s more than one way to design tabular data."

Creating a virtual card catalog

John Blyberg - Creating a virtual card catalog:

"Ever get nostalgic for the old card catalog?

I was lurking on #code4lib and someone dropped a link to some fabulous old catalog cards. That reminded me of an idea Eli Neiburger had to make a flash-based card catalog that you could flip through. Never one to let a good idea sit, I decided to work on a variation that would allow visitors to AADL’s catalog a chance to get their hands on a “virtual card catalog”.

[...] Using PHP’s great GD front-end, I threw together an interface to view the cards and a little database that will allow users to add some marginalia. Of course, you can view the cards with or without the comments."

See also Edward Vielmetti: Sample card catalog output using XSLT and CSS from the AADL catalog, and my old CSS browsable cardfile...

Canonical Intranet Homepage

Jakob Nielsen - Canonical Intranet Homepage:

"Intranet designers have glorious career prospects, even as surface design becomes more standardized and more features are supplied by middleware rather than hand-coded.

Currently, most intranets have poor usability because the project is too big for the available personnel. Companies should empower intranet teams to focus on important usability contributors, while relegating the rest to standard software. If you're slaving away on trivial features, it's a bad use of time. Making a more strategic contribution using more powerful tools offers a much better career."

Application UI goes back to basics

Jon Udell at InfoWorld - Application UI goes back to basics:

"As the new generation of so-called rich Internet clients arrives, let’s be careful what kind of richness we wish for. We don’t need Web recreations of the feature-bloated monsters that our office suites became. What we need instead, and what’s starting to appear, is a breed of lightweight single-purpose Web applications for basic tasks: writing, communicating, spreadsheeting, charting.

As the reaction to WriteRoom proves, there is enormous pent-up demand for applications that do one thing well."

Design Tips for Building Tag Clouds

Jim Bumgardner at ONLamp.com - Design Tips for Building Tag Clouds:

"Tag clouds are only one, specific kind of weighted list. There are many kinds of mappings from visual features to underlying data that have not yet been exploited. How about trying some weighted lists that don't look like common tag clouds? For example, you could map font size to time, showing more recent tags in large sizes. Or, in a historical database, you could map font to decade or century, using progressively older- fashioned fonts for older data."

Considering Ajax, Part 1: Cut through the hype

Chris Laffra at IBM developerWorks - Considering Ajax, Part 1: Cut through the hype:

"The major reason for the success of the Web is the predictability and simplicity of its UI model. Basically, anyone can move a mouse, click on a link, move a scrollbar, and hit the Back button. With the growing popularity of Ajax, the risk is very real that developers will go overboard and essentially make everything clickable and change the UI in an unexpected and asynchronous manner. The last thing you want to do is force your user to think.

[...] In this installment of Considering Ajax, I discussed the hype that currently surrounds this technology. You also saw that reliable frameworks are still under construction, and that you should worry about navigation history, bookmarkability, feedback, persistence, concurrency, and security."

FogBugz 4½ and Subjective Well-Being

Joel Spolsky - FogBugz 4½ and Subjective Well-Being:

"If you're a software designer, this is it. This is your big chance to do something meaningful to improve the world. Design software that puts the user in control and you'll increase happiness, even if your product is the most boring accounting software imaginable.

[...] Brett also snuck in a feature he's been itching for: lots and lots and lots of keyboard shortcuts. There's only one keyboard shortcut you have to memorize, though: Ctrl+; switches FogBugz into keyboard mode and little letters light up reminding you what the shortcuts are for various commands around the screen."

Giving the user control over accesskeys

Roger Johansson - Giving the user control over accesskeys:

"The normal way for a website to define a shortcut key is to use the accesskey attribute on an element that may have such an attribute, specifying a character that becomes the shortcut key in combination with one or more other keys as implemented by the browser (typically Alt in Windows and Ctrl in Mac OS X).

That doesn’t leave the user with any way to change the accesskeys defined by a website. Well, now there are at least two ways that web developers can offer that possibility."

Onlife

"Onlife is an application for the Mac OS X that observes your every interaction with apps such as Safari, Mail and iChat and then creates a personal shoebox of all the web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more. Onlife then indexes the contents of your shoebox, makes it searchable and displays all the interactions between you and your favorite apps over time."

Speed is a Feature

Stephen O'Grady - Speed is a Feature:

"A big part of the equation that is Google is speed, pure and simple. Very low latency performance, delivered from their secret sauce architecture. [...] The interesting thing is that speed is not traditionally considered a feature, per se. It's a design consideration, to be sure, but in the applications I've developed speed has rarely been a part of the requirements gathering phase - apart from occasionally defining what consitutes unacceptable performance (greater than 8 second load times on web pages, for example).

[...] What's the catch in all of this? Speed is [much] easier said than done, and depending on the application type might be near impossible for smaller players to deliver on cost constrained hardware platforms."

Multi-Touch Interaction Research

Jeff Han - Multi-Touch Interaction Research:

"While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations."

Current style in web design

Ben Hunt - Current style in web design:

"I'm glad to say that web design in 2006 is better than ever. [...] The examples below (which I'll roll over time) show excellent modern graphic design technique. They all look good, and are clear and easy to use."

AquaBrowser Library

"Welcome to AquaBrowser Library.

Discover:

• * A constellation of words on the left shows you related terms, spelling variations and translations.
• * Click on words in the constellation to explore the contents of the catalogue.

Refine:

• * Refine shows you what your search results contain.
• * Click on any term to focus and narrow your results."

Lussumo Vanilla

"With Vanilla we wanted to break the mold created and followed by just about every other forum on the web. We sat down and thought about what we liked, and more importantly, what we didn't like about web forums. We wanted emphasis on the discussions rather than the statistics. [...] Vanilla is a PHP / MySQL solution that is 100% open-source."

Campfire

"Campfire makes group chat easy

• Every chat has a permanent URL
• Campfire chats don't require special chat software or networks
• Instantly share and discuss files with your colleagues/clients Search or browse through transcripts of past chats"

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

"Welcome to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. We are very happy to be sharing our library with the design and development community. This is our first drop of what we hope to be a monthly release cycle for the publication of patterns."

VisitorVille

"VisitorVille takes a revolutionary visual approach to web analytics. VisitorVille makes data mining simple and accurate, easily performing tasks that are impossible to accomplish using traditional (and dreadfully boring) web analytics solutions.

What makes VisitorVille unique is immediately clear: VisitorVille does not represent website visitors simply as numbers or graphs, but as real people in a real environment. You can monitor your site traffic as if you were people-watching in a big city."

Reality Bytes - Imagine if SimCity wasn't just a game

Steven Johnson in a Discover article (May 2003, p. 28) - Reality Bytes - Imagine if SimCity wasn't just a game [PDF]:

"In a true mirror world, data would be mapped onto recognizable shapes from real life. For instance, to find information on a local hospital, you would locate the building on a computerized map and click on it with an “inspector” tool. Within seconds, the big-picture data about the facility would come into focus: number of patients and doctors, annual budget, how many patients died in operating rooms last year, and more. If you were looking for more specific information- say you were considering giving birth at the hospital-you could zoom in to the obstetrics department, where you would see data on such subjects as successful births, premature babies, and stillborns. Information about how the hospital connects to the wider city-what Gelernter calls topsight could be had by zooming out."

The article refers to the book Mirror Worlds by David Gelernter.

Date Slider

"The date slider is a Flash visualization that Measure Map uses as one way to navigate the site. We are happy to provide a version of this date slider to the public."

10 Places You Must Use Ajax

Alex Bosworth - 10 Places You Must Use Ajax:

"It's been well over a year now since GMail changed the way everyone thought about web apps.

It's now officially annoying to use web apps that haven't replaced clunky html functionality with peppy Ajax goodness.

Here are places Ajax should now be required in a web application."

Alfresco

“Alfresco is an open source, open-standards content repository built by the most experienced content management team that includes the co-founder of Documentum.”
(Take a look at the tour and the architecture diagram.)

Grandma’s don’t use computers

Ben Meyer - Grandma’s don’t use computers:

“So who should software developers target for their easy of use testing? Who can’t wont put up with software that is hard to use? Middle aged men that have kids or commonly referred to as “dads". They are young enough to know about the latest technology, old enough to have money to buy them, but don’t have time for applications that don’t just work.

Because there are kids in the house dads have very little time. They don’t have time to try out every single option in a program or tweak their system like a twenty two year old collage student can. They just want things to work on the first try.”

Dabble DB

“Dabble combines the best of group spreadsheets, custom databases, and intranet web applications into a new way to manage and share your information online.”

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

Jakob Nielsen - Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes:

"Some weblogs are really just private diaries intended only for a handful of family members and close friends. Usability guidelines generally don't apply to such sites, because the readers' prior knowledge and motivation are incomparably greater than those of third-party users. When you want to reach new readers who aren't your mother, however, usability becomes important."

The importance of interaction data

Jon Udell at InfoWorld - The importance of interaction data:

"Rather than consulting a dictionary to propose alternatives to misspelled words, Google instead mines its own database for patterns of use. If statistics show that a query for "Boswerth" is likely to be followed by a query for "Bosworth," the search engine will make that connection for you.

Discussions of software as a service tend to focus on its obvious benefits: zero-footprint deployment and seamless incremental upgrades. Less noticed, but equally valuable, is the constant flow of interaction data. The back-and-forth chatter between an application and its host environment can be a drag when connectivity is marginal and it precludes offline use. But when this communication flows freely, it paints a moving picture that shows how individuals and groups are using the software. As they watch that movie, developers become intimate observers of their users. They can't help but think of ways to optimize the patterns they discover, and, as a result, the software improves gradually and continuously."

Etsy’s Excellent Visualizations

Marc Hedlund - Etsy’s Excellent Visualizations:

“I had seen Etsy, the marketplace for handmade goods, but not its excellent visualizations, until Upendra showed them to me this week. Check these out:

* Etsy ColorSpace
* The 3d Etsy Time Machine (I love that the clock runs backwards)
* The Etsy Geolocator“

Why Web Apps Suck

In “On Browser UIs”, Richard S. Tallent has a comprehensive list of reasons “why web apps suck". On “missing widgets":

“Tree views: even the best ones out there suck. MSDN, for example. They also almost invariably lead to using frames to avoid population and rendering on each page refresh. […]

Context menus. This alone is responsible for any number of cases of over-busy interfaces in web apps. Without the right-click ability (sorry Mac users), the interface must display every possible action and provide an alternate method of selection. Combined with a lack of drop-down menus, the result is a busy interface that must show too many possible-but-unlikely actions.”

Listen kids, AJAX is not cool

Marcus Baker - Listen kids, AJAX is not cool:

“If you writing a user interface, make sure it responds in 1/10th of a second. That’s a pretty simple rule, and if you break it, you will distract the user. […]

Suddenly we have lot’s of web developers “enhancing” the browser experience with behind the scenes XML fetching back to the original site. I cannot think of a worse collision of technologies than low level user interfaces with requests over the internet. The delays and failures of internet traffic are especially painful in this environment and, from the AJAX demos I’ve seen, the developers aren’t helping. […]

I don’t think I am alone in being habituated to the way the web behaves as pages. When you write AJAX applicatons you drive a horse and cart through one of the most successful metaphors of all time.

AJAX has possibilities, but it’s not there yet. Not as a community and not with the tools. Web developers cannot become GUI developers overnight. We need time.”

Ajax Blog has a good follow-up - AJAX: telling it like it is…:

“The more I think about it, the more it’s clear that some kind of delaying HTTP proxy, that I was suggesting here, is badly needed to make people see how badly AJAX can suck when you inject a little latency - AJAX@localhost is always going to look good. […]

From where I stand, Javascript is today where it should have been about 5 years ago as people were discovering DHTML - you can now write code which has a pretty good chance of running under all the modern browsers for the sake of neat web page gimmicks. But what Javascript isn’t is a sane environment for building MVC applications where the data model is available courtesy of AJAX. […]

Of course this not going to stop anyone from trying - we’re talking holy grail here. But what is worth remembering is if you decide to go AJAX, realize that you’re significantly increasing the risk that your project will ‘fail’.”

Backbase

“Backbase provides Rich Internet Application (RIA) software that radically improves the usability and effectiveness of online applications, and increases developer productivity. With Backbase you can build web applications with a richer and more responsive user interface.”

Web Design patterns

Martijn van Welie has a nice collection of Web Design patterns with examples.

Backpack

From the Backpack Manifesto:

"Some have called Backpack "a wiki with out the wacky." Others have called it "blogish." Others have said it's a project management tool for all the little things in your life. Some say it's a application that helps you get things done. Some have called it Basecamp's little brother. Call it what you will. We call it useful and hope you do too."

Sony products are too much trouble - The Queen

According to Macworld UK, "iPod user HRH Queen Elizabeth II has admitted she finds Sony products too difficult to use. Sony's new CEO Howard Stringer recounted a luncheon with the Queen to Sony shareholders. He told them that the Queen had struggled with certain Sony products. According to Stringer the Queen told him: "I have a lot of trouble with your remote controls. Too many arrows."

Making A Better Open Source CMS

Jeffrey Veen - Making A Better Open Source CMS:

"Give first-time users a series of quick wins that become increasingly complex. When I first log in, I want to create a Web page. Next, I'd like to add some styles to it. Then, I'd like to make links to some other Web pages. I'll build a navigation system after that, and start to add other features eventually. But I want to feel successful with your system within a few minutes. I don't want to you to present the stunning power at my fingertips until I'm comfortable with my surroundings."

Open Source Web Design

"Open Source Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. Helping to make the internet a prettier place!"

The Form Assembly

The Form Assembly: "The Form Builder is a tool for creating standard compliant web forms. It integrates the wForms extension and relies on a set of technologies like XML, XMLHttpRequest, XSLT and DOM (a.k.a Ajax) to provide a seamless single-screen experience."

Sparkline PHP Graphing Library

Sparkline PHP Graphing Library:

"Sparklines are "intense, simple, wordlike graphics" so named by Edward Tufte. [...] We aim to increase the adoption of sparklines on the web by providing a high-quality PHP sparkline library."

Spotlight changes everything

David Pogue in the New York Times - From Apple, a Tiger to Put in Your Mac [registration required]:

"The most important is Spotlight, which is like Google for your hard drive. As you type into the Spotlight box in your menu bar, a tidy menu instantly drops down. It lists every file, folder, program, e-mail message, address book or calendar entry, photograph, PDF document and even font that contains what you typed, regardless of its name or folder location. This isn't just a fast Find command. It's an enhancement that's so deep, convenient and powerful, it threatens to reduce the 20-year-old Mac/Windows system of nested folders to irrelevance. Why burrow around in folders when you can open any file or program with a couple of keystrokes?

[...] Now, if it weren't for that brilliant Spotlight feature, Tiger wouldn't be as important an upgrade as, say, last year's Panther edition. [...] But with apologies to Mac-bashers everywhere, Spotlight changes everything."

Light Appliances

"Light Appliances is a system of information appliances to give access to internet communication and media to people otherwise unable to do so, without using the PC. The system is composed of buttonless appliances, each one dedicated to one specific function like email, voice over internet, video call and internet TV. [...]

Imagine a person changing the photo in a digital picture frame by caressing the frame's corner. Imagine now the person calling the friend displayed in the photo by dragging and dropping the contact into a phone by using a particular one-button remote control called 'dropper', or sending him a handwritten email by dragging the contact into an e-mail appliance instead."

Copper and Tin

Paul Graham - Copper and Tin:

"The hard part about figuring out what customers want is figuring out that you need to figure it out. But that's something you can learn quickly. [...]

And compared to the sort of problems hackers are used to solving, giving customers what they want is easy. Anyone who can write an optimizing compiler can design a UI that doesn't confuse users, once they choose to focus on that problem. [...]

A hacker who has learned what to make, and not just how to make, is extraordinarily powerful. And not just at making money: look what a small group of volunteers has achieved with Firefox."

The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part IV

Joel Spolsky - The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part IV:

"Before we could launch FogBugz, even after the final shipping bits were perfect and ready to go, we had a list of things we wanted to have ready to make the product experience complete. For FogBugz 4.0 the big things were:

1. Professional-quality graphic design in the user interface 2. An online demo that included every feature of the product 3. An online movie that introduced the product for couch potatoes 4. A great marketing website 5. Getting at least one book about FogBugz into bookstores 6. Making a real physical product available on CD-ROM"

Groupware BAD, Users GOOD

Jamie Zawinski on Novell's Hula:

"If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy."

Let's hear it for screencasting

Jon Udell on InfoWorld - Let's hear it for screencasting:

"I'm now using screencasts - that is, narrated movies of software in action - to showcase application tips, capture and publish product demonstrations, and even make short documentaries. And I'm seeing others around the Net starting to do the same."

As We May Think

Vannevar Bush's legendary essay from 1945, As We May Think:

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "memex'' will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

[...] It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. [...]

Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails."

Lifestreams

By Eric Freeman and David Gelernter back in 1997: "Lifestreams is built on a simple storage metaphor --- a time-ordered stream of documents combined with several powerful operators --- that replaces many conventional computer constructs (such as named files, directories, and explicit storage) and in the process provides a unified framework that subsumes many separate desktop applications to accomplish and handle personal communication, scheduling, and search and retrieval tasks. While our current prototype is tailored to managing personal information, a "lifestream" is also a natural framework for managing enterprise information and web sites; we are just beginning to explore such use."

Opening New Browser Windows

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox on the Top-10 New Mistakes of Web Design is old (from 1999), but (sadly) still relevant - I've lost hope that sites like heise.de and golem.de will ever get this:

"Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer's carpet. Don't pollute my screen with any more windows, thanks (particularly since current operating systems have miserable window management). If I want a new window, I will open it myself!

Designers open new browser windows on the theory that it keeps users on their site. But even disregarding the user-hostile message implied in taking over the user's machine, the strategy is self-defeating since it disables the Back button which is the normal way users return to previous sites."

Web Usability - Accessible Forms

Roger Hudson, in Web Usability - Accessible Forms, explains:

* "label for and id to associate form elements * <fieldset> and <legend> to group form elements * tabindex to set the tabbing order"

Stylegala

"Stylegala aims to promote, discuss and inspire the web audience in the areas of design, CSS and web standards - combined."

Delicious Library

"Run your very own library from your home or office using our impossibly simple interface. Delicious Library's digital shelves act as a visual card-catalog of your books, movies, music and video games. A scan of a barcode is all Delicious Library needs to add an item to your digital shelves, downloading tons of info from the internet like the author, release date, current value, description, and even a high-resolution picture of the cover. Import your entire library using our exclusive full-speed iSight video barcode scanner."

Simplicity is 'next big thing' in IT

Macworld UK - Macworld UK - Simplicity is 'next big thing' in IT - Economist:

"The Economist Magazine this week has published an IT survey, which declares the single message of simplicity Apple to have preached since its inception as "the next big thing".

"The next thing in technology is not just big but truly huge: the conquest of complexity", the Economist explains. It talks about how "most of us" find technology frustrating, infuriating and sometimes tortuous at times. The title is trying to assess the work done by the IT industry to simplify matters.

The survey looks at two recent consumer-technology successes: Apple's iPod and Google. Writer, Andreas Kluth, said: "Google and the iPod are successful because each rescues consumers from a particular black hole of complexity"."

newsmap

"Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe."

Faceted Metadata Search

Search Tools has a nice article on Faceted Metadata Search:

"Full text search wipes out the value of the metadata: a number 3 is just a number, not a size, price, product ID or other meaningful number, as it is in context of the tagged page or database record. Similarly, it's hard to know whether a recipe, for example, has chili pepper as a significant ingredient or minor flavoring. While many searches are just fine without that information, there are other cases where providing that context would be extremely helpful.

A good solution to these problems involves exposing the facets in dynamic taxonomies, so that the search user can see exactly the options they have available at any time. They can switch easily between searching and browsing, using their own terminology for search while recognizing the organization and vocabulary of the data."

Replacing FileMaker with Free Software?

Slashdot discussion - Replacing FileMaker with Free Software?:

jhealy1024 asks: "I'm looking for a way to replace our FileMaker DB solution with an open-source RDBMS. Problem is, FileMaker's GUI and report design tools are pretty darn good, and I can't find a suitable replacement. Anybody out there have a solution that doesn't require me to take a year off to hand-code a replacement solution?"

UNIX_Meister responds: "I think there's something here that is escaping most of the /. readers. Filemaker has a nice GUI for creating applications - RAD type functionality. We're not talking about a GUI to manage a mysql database. I'd like to be able to create an application that uses a database backend quickly. Something like Oracle Forms & Reports of old, or Access, or ??? Think "glade" "mysql/postgresql" perl's report writing

I've been looking for something like this in the OSS world for years, and in that time, like the author of the article, could have written one."

Mastery, Mystery, and Misery: The Ideologies of Web Design

Jakob Nielsen - Mastery, Mystery, and Misery: The Ideologies of Web Design:

"The original ideology of hypertext and the World Wide Web, as expressed by Vannevar Bush (1945), Ted Nelson (1960), and Tim Berners-Lee (1991) makes individual users the masters of the content and lets them access and manipulate it in any way they please. User empowerment requires perfect usability and simplicity: only if users know what every design element means will they feel in control of the medium.

[...] A simple user interface is not boring. It excites users because it lets them connect with the content and engage the company behind the site."

Developer Spotlight: Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen in a Builder AU interview:

"We could look beyond [cloning] and there could be a new set of productivity software. It could really be done another way. The real problem with Microsoft Office, besides being Microsoft, is that it is an office product based on paper. It comes out of research about how to do office automation.

In the new world what we need is not memos but we need to build Web sites and intranets so when you communicate in companies it is via a collaborative environment. Some areas where they have had success is in Wikis and some of the blog software, but of course it is still quite primitive. But you could make something quite more interesting based on this on things like intranets."

Award for beautiful coding: David Heinemeier Hansson

Derek Sivers - Award for beautiful coding: David Heinemeier Hansson:

"Go download, install, and run Instiki. (If you don't have Ruby 1.8.1 installed, it's worth updating to it just to run Instiki.)

After you're amazed (will take only 1 minute) go to Rails. Watch the 10-minute video. Close your mouth: it's open.

Then go set up a free account at Basecamp. Add some schedules & deadlines. Play around a bit.

Absolutely brilliant. All of it. Did the beautiful language of Ruby inspire his style, or was it just a match meant-to-be?"

Beyond the dimension

Jono Bacon is inspired by Sun's 3D GUI project Looking Glass:

"When a user plugs in a device, it should be visually represented on the screen. This will make an intrinsic link between the physical device and the virtual device, although they may look different physically (this is the biggest problem). With this device on screen, the user should be able to interact with it in a similar way to the real device."

Basecamp

Looks like a great web application: Basecamp - "Web-based project management the way it should be".

Separating Browser from Resource

Harry Fuecks - Seperating Browser from Resource:

"A personal grievance: I hate writing admin interfaces for web applications. The "front end" - what a site's visitors see - no problem but the admin interface, which is typically both more complex and at the same time, visible only to a limited use group, drives me nuts - lots of work for people who tend to have very evolved opinions."

Capturing user experience closes the feedback loop

Jon Udell on InfoWorld - Capturing user experience closes the feedback loop:

"For developers who rarely get to see people using their software, any opportunity to observe users is likely to provide valuable insight. Arguably such observation can, and should, occur throughout the software life cycle. A software team will often nominate one member to advocate for the user. Equipped with low-cost and easy-to-use recording tools, that team member can capture users' experiences with alpha, beta, or production software. Ideally the material will be edited down to highlights, but even raw footage can be helpful.

It's still hard for developers to watch this stuff. We have had a tendency to spare them the pain -- and to sacrifice the gain -- because connecting developers to users in this way has not often been practical. This new generation of tools aims to close that critical feedback loop, thereby helping developers figure out what ease-of-use really means to users."

Do As They Need, Not As They Say

Jeff Lowery at ONJava.com - Do As They Need, Not As They Say:

"'Do it the way we've always done it, except better.' This is the unstated initial requirement of any new system I've been asked to develop. Nobody really wants to change the way things are done, even though they recognize the problems. It's an expensive proposition to replace an existing system with a new one, and whoever's paying for it is going to want to see some bang for their buck. It may not be the end users, who have learned to live within the limitations of the current system and probably have all sorts of protocols for dealing with the stuff that goes wrong on a frequent basis. Instead, it will likely be the upper-level manager or executive who sees in the bottom line just how costly such workarounds can be. He or she may also understand that they "can't get there from here" with the system they have, while the end users may not possess such strategic vision.

[...] I think it's important that you see your end users as your customers, even though management is paying the bills. While it's true that you can't ignore requirements from the management side, you can at least convince your end users that any additional data they have to key in, or any change in methods pertaining to new business processes, are not due to your own capriciousness. You have to identify with the end user, and recognize his or her pain as your pain. When you've done that, you see to it that change occurs in the least painful way possible."

B2B: Help Your Fans Convince Their Bosses

Jakob Nielsen has advice for B2B websites:

"Build a reputation for being easy to do business with and for standing by your products with great service. This is where the Web shines: you can provide excellent post-sales support online at a fraction of the cost of older methods. Unfortunately, most of the support sites we've tested fail the challenge, probably because online support is mistakenly seen as a cost center rather than the Web's main brand-building opportunity."

Complexity

Great article: Mike Duigou writes about Complexity.

"What could make JXTA or any technology complicated for new users? There are far too many possibilities: * Installation hell * Configuration hell * Starting hell * Documentation hell * API hell * More hells"

Most problems he describes can happen with any programming language, but this one seems Java-specific:

"When you start working with a new technology you are confronted with a vast seemingly featureless wall of API calls. Which ones do you start with? Are some preferred to others? How do I create a sub-class for a class that has 200 methods? (I recently had to make my first Swing component, a sub-class of JComboBox. I may one day recover from the experience). Perhaps most importantly, how do I begin architecting an application out of 80 classes and 500 methods that I have never used?"

A babe in Tuxland

Jim Westbrook on NewsForge: "K.D. had watched her mom, my wife, and me using the various Linux-based computers in our home since she was able to sit in our laps while we were at the keyboard. By the time she was two and a half years old, she was "helping" us by moving the mouse or pressing keys on the keyboard -- generally at the most inopportune moments.

When K.D. was three I realized I might reduce maintenance problems by creating a user ID for her. Her mom and I carefully explained that we would be glad to help her use it.

What I had not anticipated was how personally K.D. would take having a user ID of her own. I've since re-learned just how possessive small children can be. We were all surprised when on the second day K.D. asked her mom to log out so that she could have her login. The obvious sense of power and control that having her own user ID gives her is beyond my ability to put into words."

Mozilla Vision Thing

Harry Fuecks on Mozilla visions:

"Via Mozillazine, a fascinating post by Brendan Eich, the father of Javascript and Mozilla's chief architect. This is fiesty stuff. Brendan basically lays out his view of how things are might play out, over the next five years, in the "battle" to control the application development and deployment platform of the future, the two main sides being Microsoft Longhorn XAML vs. "Open Source" Mozilla (Gecko) XUL.

Mozilla are definately ahead of the field with XUL (see Introducing XUL) having something that "works" now. There's still some hurdles to overcome though.

As a platform for deployment over the web, XUL still suffers from practical issues - a compromise between security concerns and ease of use has yet to be made and this is preventing, say, PHP coders from churning out XUL based apps the way we can churn out HTML."

Productivity in the Service Economy

Jakob Nielsen on Productivity in the Service Economy:

"It's great to employ usability methods to simplify intranet user interfaces and expedite performance within existing tasks. Do it. Millions of dollars are waiting to be saved for the average company.

But, as the saying goes, we should also work smarter. Enterprise software has largely failed until now because it's cumbersome and it automates awkward and inefficient procedures. Business process reengineering must become more than a slogan. In particular, we must change how we define it; rather than simply "automating existing processes" we should be "designing workflow that's optimized through computer support."

Through methods such as field studies, task analysis, and user testing, organizations can discover new ways of working and better ways of supporting work with information technology. In particular, immense gains are possible through better collaboration interfaces, better knowledge management, and better decision support. Most existing systems are unworthy of their names: they don't help people collaborate better, they don't increase knowledge utilization, and they don't support better or faster decisions. But they could. That's the next frontier for enterprise usability.

[...] Usability is key to increasing the service economy's productivity, because only attention to the way humans work can help them work smarter. If we adjust our focus accordingly, we won't just save billions of dollars from productivity gains -- we'll also save millions of jobs and create millions of new ones."

Industry Prints

Ephraim Schwartz at InfoWorld:

"Deloitte has developed what it calls Industry Prints for some 20-plus industries, using data gathered from Deloitte's interactions with various enterprise-level companies. An Industry Print details every single process that makes up an industry. It maps processes all the way from the 10,000-foot level (run HR, run customer support) down to specific workflows for both humans and applications.

[...] It was only after the observation process that Telispark created an application. The result wasn't a squeezed-down version of the SAP PM app, but a unique, customized solution that worked the way the techs in the field did.

Hard as it may be to believe, most mobile IT projects don't take this approach.

Most companies are so bent on getting their enterprise applications into handhelds that they forget that mobility, by its nature, changes businesses' processes and workflows -- and that change must be designed into the mobile applications themselves.

Industry Prints are a series of best-practice workflows and they, or something like them, should be square one, before anyone actually does a lick of coding. The promise of high tech has yet to be fulfilled because we continually try to adapt human behavior to the needs of technology.

Isn't it about time we all had our "duh" moment, and started adapting the technology to us?"

German engineers ignore customer needs :-)

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: "Here are just few examples of the BMW 745i's clueless interaction design:

* Response times are incredibly slow. Each time you select something, you must wait several seconds for the next screen to appear. It's common to ridicule German engineers for their ignorance of customer needs, but no hardcore engineer should ever accept a slow computer for a high-end product. The hardware fails Geek 101. Slow response times mean that you must allocate more attention to operating the UI -- dangerous for an in-car user experience."

Towards Next Generation URLs

Thomas A. Powell and Joe Lima on beautiful URLs:

• "Keep them short and sweet.
• Avoid punctuation in file names.
• Use lower case and try to address case sensitivity issues.
• Do not expose technology via directory names.
• Plan for host name typos.
• Plan for domain name typos.
• Support multiple domain forms.
• Add guessable entry point URLs.
• Where possible, remove query strings by pre-generating dynamic pages.
• Rewrite query strings.
• Remove extensions from files in URL and source.
• Automatically spell check directory and file names entered by users."

Helping Your Visitors: a State of Mind

Nick Usborne at A List Apart:

"If you want people to know how to find what they want on your site, be sure the language you use is relevant to their needs.

At its simplest, this means avoiding corporate-speak and industry jargon. It means taking the trouble to find out which words and terms your visitors use when thinking about your products and services."

Windows Media Encoder

You don't have to love everything Microsoft, but it's great that they make Windows Media Encoder 9 available for free.

Jon Udell: "Software companies bring in new users, capture their interactions with software on video, and make developers watch the videos. I've been on the receiving end of that treatment; it's painful. [...] Windows Media Encoder, coupled with blog technology, does enable anyone to spontaneously capture and post a screen video that can teach other users about an application, and/or to provide compelling feedback to the developer. [...] One final point for developers: try narrating a video of your own software sometime. It's humbling."

Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution

Jakob Nielsen's Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution:

• 1. Don't check your email all the time.
• 2. Don't use "reply to all" when responding to email.
• 3. Write informative subject lines for your email messages.
• 4. Create a special email address for personal messages and newsletters.
• 5. Write short.
• 6. Avoid IM unless real-time interaction will truly add value to the communication.
• 7. Answer common customer questions on your website using clear and concise language.
• 8. User test your intranet.
• 9. Don't circulate internal email to all employees; instead put the information on the intranet.
• 10. Establish a company culture in which it's okay not to respond to email immediately.

Jakob Nielsen: Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003

Here's Jakob Nielsen's list:

• 1. Unclear Statement of Purpose
• 2. New URLs for Archived Content
• 3. Undated Content
• 4. Small Thumbnail Images of Big, Detailed Photos
• 5. Overly detailed ALT Text
• 6. No "What-If" Support
• 7. Long Lists that Can't Be Winnowed by Attributes
• 8. Products Sorted Only by Brand
• 9. Overly Restrictive Form Entry
• 10. Pages That Link to Themselves

URIs are important

On URIs:

• Tim Berners-Lee: Cool URIs don't change.
• Jakob Nielsen: URL as UI
• Jon Udell: The power of the URL-line

Jakob Nielsen: "About Us"

Jakob Nielsen talks about the "About Us" page:

"Saying who you are and what you do is basic politeness in any conversation. In business, it's also good to establish credibility and respect by explaining your company's origins, how you view your business, and how you relate to the community.

The Web is very depersonalized, but from our earliest usability studies, we've seen that users like getting a sense of the company behind the website. Who's there behind the screen?"

Cooper: The Origin of Personas

Alan Cooper tells how he invented the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool:

"[...] Even though the variation among the users was dramatic, a clear pattern emerged after just a few interviews. The users fell into three distinct groups, clearly differentiated by their goals, tasks, and skill levels. [...] So I created Chuck, Cynthia, and Rob. These three were the first true, Goal-Directed, personas.

Chuck was an analyst who used ready-built templates and reports. Cynthia was an analyst, too, and she used similar ready-built templates. But Cynthia also wrote her own templates, which she gave to Chuck to use. Rob was the IT manager who supported both Rob and Cynthia. He could optimize Cynthia’s templates, but he would never originate or use them.

At the next group meeting, I presented my designs from the points of view of Chuck, Cynthia, and Rob instead of from my own. The results were dramatic. While there was still resistance to this unfamiliar method, the programmers could clearly see the sense in my designs because they could identify with these hypothetical archetypes. From then on, I always presented design work using one of the personas, and eventually even the Sagent engineers began to talk about “what Cynthia would do” or “whether Chuck could understand” some dialog box."

Jakob Nielsen: Best Intranets of 2003

Jakob Nielsen: "Intranets are changing from being document repositories to being work support tools. Many of this year's winners had changed their information architecture (IA) from one determined by how documents are produced (usually the company's department structure) to one determined by users' tasks. But the work-support trend goes further than IA."

Writing the Web

Jon Udell notes that there's still innovation needed to really empower average users to contribute to the Web: "To this day, uploading an arbitrary file to a public URL is something that most people can't do. We (as a species) know how to attach files to email. We don't know how to post files and communicate their addresses."

Jakob Nielsen: Misconceptions About Usability

Alertbox: "Usability can save time by helping you quickly settle arguments in the development team. Most projects waste countless staff hours as highly paid people sit in meetings and argue over what users might want or what they might do under various circumstances. Instead of debating, find out."

Tablet PC at school

I'd love to go to school again: "The Diocese of Columbus Department of Education is undertaking one of the first wide-scale deployments of Tablet PC technology in an educational environment. They have partnered with HP and their TC1000 Tablet PC."

Robin XUL desktop

Robin is a "desktop on a web page", written in Mozilla's XUL. Slow, but demonstrates XUL's capabilities.

Found this through Andrew Channels Dexter Pinion weblog.

I hate &lt;a target="_blank"&gt;

Am I the only one who hates all those links that open in a new browser window? There seem to be more and more of them.

My browser does have a Back button, "Back" navigation via keyboard shortcuts, and a History window. Furthermore, I can manually choose to open a link in a new window, or a new tab, in foreground or background, if I prefer to keep the current page open.

So many powerful choices that let me decide what's happening on my screen. And yet, so many annoying pages that refuse to disappear from my screen when I'm trying to surf away. (And no visualization that would allow me to see which target this link will open in.)

Yes, I know that "target" can make sense - especially if it's a web application rather than a website, or if you'd like to open a preview/details window and not lose the current context. But for plain old hypertext links from a page to another page, this does not apply.

Mozilla does a great job in blocking unrequested popups. Maybe they could add an option to block unrequested new windows as well?

My CSS Card File experiment

Hauke and I built a browsable cardfile in CSS/Javascript - how lovely!

CSS for auto-wrapping "tables"

A List Apart: Practical CSS Layout Tips, Tricks and Techniques tells us how to use the CSS float property to build "tables" that automatically wrap when the browser window size changes...

useit.com: Gateway Pages Prevent PDF Shock

Jakob Nielsen: "Spare your users the misery of being dumped into PDF files without warning. Create special gateway pages that summarize the contents of big documents and guide users gently into the PDF morass."

MouseOver DHTML example

Tim Bray: "At work, we've been putting a lot of time into what used to be called 'Dynamic HTML', i.e. making web pages more dynamic and lively with a variety of Javascript techniques. There's this one design pattern that keeps turning up, and for those who aren't already JS hacks, it may be worth stealing. Illustrated with pretty pictures.

Below are nine thumbnails of some of the more-downloaded pictures from ongoing. (Actually, all the most-downloaded are screen shots, yer a bunch of hopeless geeks, but I digress). Wave your mouse around over them; in any reasonably-modern browser the date and title of the essay the picture's attached to should appear below."

Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation

A List Apart: "Assigning accesskeys to menu items adds “Hot-Key” functions to a website, letting frequent users spend less time less time moving and clicking the mouse. This solution, however, has been largely underused because it almost always fails due to two major flaws.

The first problem is that visitors to your website have no way of knowing that you’ve assigned accesskey attributes to your linked elements. Even if they suspect you have, they would have to guess which accesskeys assignments you’ve created. In this article, we’ll look at how to solve this problem, enabling you to clearly but unobtrusively let your visitors know which accesskeys correspond with the links on a page."

css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design

csszengarden.com is next to incredible - I wouldn't have thought that CSS is so powerful!

"There is clearly a need for CSS to be taken seriously by graphic artists. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The code remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external .css file. Yes, really."

VoodooPad

A native MacOS Wiki:

"VoodooPad is a new kind of notepad. It's like having your own personal hypertext library, where you can jot down notes, web addresses, to-do lists... Anything on your mind. VoodooPad automatically links each page together, to form a miniature world wide web, on your desktop! Anybody familiar with the WikiWikiWeb will feel right at home with VoodooPad."

overLIB

I'd like to have overLIB popups looking like comic strip bubbles - to display footnotes, explain acronyms, and allow multiple link destinations.

Spring

"Spring is an innovative, web-inspired desktop initially for OS X. It's a universal canvas where you interact naturally with singular, visual representations of the people, places, products, etc that define your life!"

http://www.usercreations.com/spring/

Wikis as outliners

Jeff Chan: "[...] I think wikis can learn from outliners. What I would like to see is some form of automated summarization or folding capability which keeps the amount of text per page roughly constant or bounded."

Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020512.html

Intuit QuickBase

Web-based information system, reminds me of Intrexx - beautiful interface!

http://www.quickbase.com/

TypePad

A web-based administration interface that's just plain beautiful:

http://www.typepad.com/2003/05/some_frequently_aske.shtml

Naked Objects

Nice Java idea - don't code a GUI, just define your "Business Logic" in classes, and the Naked Objects-Framework will create a generic GUI allowing for direct interaction with the classes' properties and methods:

http://www.nakedobjects.org/introduction.html

tasks (PHP)

Nice interface (down to the details) for a task management application:

http://www.alexking.org/software/tasks/demo/

Tinderbox

"The PERSONAL content management assistant

Tinderbox is a personal content management assistant. It stores your notes, ideas, and plans. It can help you organize and understand them. And Tinderbox helps you share ideas through Web journals and web logs.

VISUAL

Tinderbox maps your notes as you make them. Build relationships by arranging notes, organizing them with shape and color, linking them. Tinderbox lets you record ideas quickly and keep them where you'll find them again when you need them.

SMART Tinderbox's agents automatically scan your notes, looking for patterns and building relationships. Agents help discover relationships and help make sure important things don't get lost. Agents are easy to make and easy to modify. They're flexible and powerful.

Tinderbox can even gather and update changing information and breaking news from the internet.

When it's time to share your notes, Tinderbox can assemble multiple notes into one page. Updates are a breeze -- even if you update several times a day. Private notes, timestamps, permanent links, archives: everything you want, just the way you want it."

http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

zaplet

Workflow management by e-mail: http://www.zaplet.com/

ShoutBox

PHP ShoutBox: "spontaneous chat" directly on a web page... For a community or groupware sites?

http://mojavelinux.com/cooker/demos/phpshoutbox/

InView Momentum

... a P2P application - a little bit like Groove/Sametime, written in Java. Commercial software.

http://www.inviewsoftware.com/products/index.htm

PHP iCalendar

Extremely good-looking (read-only) web calender written in PHP: http://phpicalendar.sourceforge.net/nuke/index.php

SnipSnap

Interesting Wiki/Weblog in Java: http://snipsnap.org/space/start

Beautiful comment box layout on inmyexperience.com

inmyexperience.com:

This is how a comment box should look like... (maybe including an "Avatar" / icon of the person commenting.)