A web site or app should be the product of a Web Designer and a Web Developer (who occasionally are the same person, as demonstrated by Shaun Inman). Anyone else who is added into this equation is a waste of money and time.
Ryan Carson on UX designers.
Of course, good typesetting is something more than selecting a series of sizes, just as music consists of something more than well-chosen notes. Rhythm, in particular, enables a sequence of notes to beat with musical life, and tempo sustains their wit. It is much the same for the world of letters.
An excellent and practical explanation of typographic rhythm in web design.
So what does an app that’s made for web design look like? What are the native and common attributes that keep popping up with every page we design? This is a start for the considerations I find myself making on nearly every design I work on.
With millions of people designing websites it's hard to believe there's no tool that tries to address this use case in a modern way. Maybe Adobe should spend less time hopelessly defending Flash and create such a tool. Looking at their current toolset, starting from scratch is probably the best idea.
My eyes puked from the motion sickness of not-knowing-where-to-look-oh-my-god-everything-is-everywhere-ness of the page. It’s a typical case of ‘designed for developers, by developers’, and I’m sure most regular Stack Overflow users have got used to it and don’t mind.
Outsider's attempt to pinpoint and fix design mistakes on Stack Overflow. Being an avid listener of Stack Overflow podcast and knowing how much though, testing and data-driven adjustments were put into design of this website, I was rather amused to read the analysis. While there might be some valid points, a lot of the advice doesn't take into account the target audience and well-thought community focus of the site.
Try to Avoid
- Hyperlinks that aren’t 100% obvious
- Javascript tooltips that show important information or metadata
- Displaying action items on hover. Examples I’ve seen typically involve edit / delete items.
- Displaying graphics in a less-than-ideal state until hovered: all those semi-opaque or black & white screenshots and photos that only display full color when covered by a cursor
- Drop-down menus. While some of these can be revealed on click or tap, be sure the user has cues that show those options.
- Focusing too much on hover dependent CSS3. I know it’s a bit of a heartbreaker, but while these have always been seen as enhancements, we’re going to have to settle with the fact that multi-touch users won’t be seeing our fancy transitions.
Good analysis of hover behavior on touch devices.
Recent troubles aside, this is why art, film and architecture have achieved such great heights in our society: those art forms are economically robust enough to support a vibrant critical class.
NYTimes.com's Khoi Vinh on the need of professional web design criticism.
Don’t mix up the two roles, user experience designer and graphic designer. Neither should do the others’ job. They should never be blurred into “web designer.
Sounds like an advice from Captain Obvious, but maybe it's still not for some.
Does any of those look like sites you couldn’t at least emulate the basic functionality of in no time at all? When a web service, web application or website makes it big, there are always those in the crowd that say they could create the site over a weekend because they don’t understand the big deal behind it.
You read this already. A thousand times.
