One of the best things about the social web is that you can share what you find with other people. Sharing is such a basic concept, such an easy thing to do, a thoughtful thing to do, and a fun thing to do. The problem with sharing though is that a lot of sites to a very poor job in allowing users to do that. Here are some simple tips …
Web Design for Children
(This was originally written for my old social media blog buzznetworker.com.) I have seen a lot of people designing blog pages recently that were targeted for kids or subject that kids might be interested in. There has been a rise in webkinz and other subject specific blogs that kids would be interested in. One of the things that I find funny about some of these sites is how unusable they …
Interface Design: Universal Usability and Accessibility
(This post was originally posted on my old social media blog buzznetworker.com) Time to dive back into interface design and topic that a lot of people usually don’t think about when designing a website or application, universal usability and accessibility. The World Wide Web Consortium developed guidelines for accessibility called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 which helps develop strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the Web accessible to …
User Centered Design
This is from Chapter 7 of “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald A. Norman: Seven Principles for Transforming Difficult Tasks into Simple Ones How does the designer go about the task? As I’ve argued the principles of design are straightforward: 1) Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head 2) Simplify the structure of tasks 3) Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of Execution and Evaluation …
Logical and Safe Design Is Not Always Considered
I want to look at specific part of chapter 5 in The Design of Everyday Things. This chapter focused on human error, how it happens, and how we need to examine it. There was a paragraph that really stood out in my mind because the logic in it is so basic and the design is somewhat complex but I never noticed it or thought about it. Cars provide a number …
Different Constraints In Design
In continuing my series on interface design I want to talk about chapter four of The Design of Everyday Things. Now this book isn’t strictly about designing web interfaces like the other book I am reading, however this talks about design in general and gives the reader a lot of interesting things to think about. One of the recent topics that I read about was design constraints and how they …
Thinking About the Psychology Behind Design
When we are examining interface design another aspect we have to think about is human nature and the psychology behind how we as human beings use things. In “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman he relates a story about the testing of a computer program years ago and how the return button and the enter button did two different things. For most programs they operate the same but …
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