manalang

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  manalang 10:58:57 am on November 19, 2008 | Comments | # |
  Tags: consumer, design, enterprise, ui, ux

  [cross posted from http://theappslab.com/2008/11/19/looks-good-works-well/]

  Last night, I was lucky enough to see Bill Scott (of Yahoo Design Pattern Library, YUI, OpenRico, Netflix fame) present at my local Ruby user group. He shared his thoughts about the successful design patterns that have defined today’s web. As someone who enjoys brilliantly designed “things” including web apps and sites, I found his talk very interesting.

  Designing Web Interfaces

  View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: rich ajax)

  Most (actually, all) of his talk was devoted to the consumer web. My head is almost always focused on how to take the good stuff coming from the consumer web back into the enterprise web. Bill’s ideas made me realize how little we (as enterprise web app developers) pay attention to the minute details that go into producing web apps that customers love. Bill is currently the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix. If you’re a Netflix customerfan, you’ll know that Netflix.com is a superb site. Netflix’ business depends entirely on the success of its site. Very small incremental changes could drastically affect their business. All of the changes they make to the site go through rigorous testing with real users and are carefully measured. (More …)

   

• manalang 10:32:45 am on June 25, 2003 | Comments | # |
  Tags: design

  This is more of a note to self… this website (A List Apart) is a great design resource for web designers. This is one of Jeffrey Zeldman’s creations. For those of you who don’t know Jeffrey Zeldman, you can read his bio here. In a nutshell, he’s a well known, respected, and successful web designer.

  He recently wrote a book called Designing With Web Standards which I have yet to read. Anyway, the latest issue on A List Apart is on Unlocking Hidden Navigation Access Keys. It’s a good article on how to build a website for people with limited mobility — just plain good sense for any website.

   

• manalang 10:56:30 am on June 18, 2003 | Comments | # |
  Tags: design

  It’s nice to see that more and more sites out there are taking advantage of CSS. I painfully admit that a lot of the sites I’ve designed in the past have not taken full advantage of what it can do. In the past, it’s been easier to fall back on the use of tables and images to get your page to look the way you want it to. But as I know better now, CSS is really the way to go. It makes your life so much easier when you want to redesign your site.

  Below is a list of CSS references I’ve learned a lot from. Have a look.

  • Simon Willison’s Graphic Design Category — as a follow up to his basic linking tutorial, he provides a link to Al Sparber’s excellent Uberlink CSS Rollover tutorial
  • Adam Kalsey’s Design Category — great implementation of CSS tabs which was improved by Jemima Pereira by adding rounded corners.
  • css Zen Garden — great place to see the power of CSS in action
  • glish.com: CSS layout techniques — good implementation of 2-3 column layouts
  • Real World Style — 16% of his users have Netscape 4x and use Unix so he offers tips on making CSS work in a challenging environment. [via Hallway Conversations with Chris Heller]
  • 50 sample CSS headers — Marks up the same heading paragraph 50 different ways. [via Hallway Conversations with Chris Heller]
  • Converting HTML to CSS — Steps through some common “How do I …” tasks. [via Hallway Conversations with Chris Heller]
  • Fancy paragraph based rollovers — This actually seems more like the blink tag - interesting when you first see it, but not of much practical use. [via Hallway Conversations with Chris Heller]