Design 101 at cnug

Sandy — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 03:21:02 +0000

I spoke tonight at CNUG out in the burbs and promised that I would post my materials up for people to download and check out links. Below you will find my Powerpoint slides, as well as some links for deeper reading on form layouts and other things I mentioned in my presentation. Thanks for having me out to talk, I hope everyone took away something valuable!

PowerPoint deck: CNUG_Design101.pptx (396K)

Color tools:
The one I used in the demo: http://kuler.adobe.com
An alternative: http://www.colourlovers.com/
A link for the colourlovers Blend plugin: http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/dd421877.aspx

Form layout information:

Luke Wroblewski’s very awesome blog post:http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/web_forms.html

A review of form layout methods with usability eye-tracking data: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement-in-forms.php

Other links:
The 5 Second Test: http://fivesecondtest.com

Browser Compatability (or FF3 release party)

Sandy — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 03:58:17 +0000

Aaahh, even just the title of this post makes me want to argue with a developer. I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that 8% or even 15% of an audience is “minimal” or “inconsequential” – no part of your audience is inconsequential! Unless, of course, its 1 or 2 people who happen to be in the office across the hall using some bizzare browser just to be difficult.

Anyway, what brings this up is that after years of waiting Firefox 3 will be releasing on June 17th, 2008 (Tuesday). Personally, I’m a bit amped for this. I use both IE and Firefox since I test pages with both, and either is fine in my opinion. Right now there isn’t a great advantage to one over the other, but I’m really excited to see what the new features will be. When Firefox 2 came out with tabbed browsing you bet I dropped IE until they implemented it. This could either be the launch of something that changes the normal… or not. Either way, I’m on my way to download the beta version to find out!

Also worth noting, Opera 9.5 has been released. And just to help keep your site testing as complicated as possible, IE 8 is on the horizon promising either same old same old OR some degree of web standards compliance. WOAH! What would be awesome is if all these browsers would try to hook up with some sort of standards group to make cross browser compatability easier…

I know, I know… that’s crazy talk.

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Design 101 at cnug

Browser Compatability (or FF3 release party)