“Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should One of the downsides of all the technical innovations of our day is that the software designers of the world have made it really easy to create wonderfully ugly sites! Somehow, in all the fuss over the Web and the never ending desire for ‘more interactivi

“Comix might work well here as explainers of processes. If you have a complicated product you’re trying to sell — and actually, Web servers, software, and applications, just the sort of things comix geex are interested in, represent this genre well — then go ahead and write out an eXPLANATiON in words, but also give us pictures. Why? Some people learn and understand better from words, others from images. You cover all your bases. Case in point: XPLANE, best-known for their editorial illustrations in Business 2.0. Xplane’s stick figures, combined with a few choice sentences, meet any definition of comix, including McCloud’s.”

“The use of the word ‘information’ as a descriptive adjective has exploded to the point of near absurdity: information age, information society, information economy, information superhighway, information millennium, information revolution. But what does this word ‘information’ mean in these constructions and how did it become the new keyword of our social formation’s self-definition?”

“There is an unarticulated war currently raging among those who make web sites. Like the war between dark-skinned blacks and light-skinned blacks in Spike Lee’s School Daze, this war is one that only its participants recognize. The war is not between commercial sites and experimental sites. It’s not between ‘Bloggers’ and ‘Flashers.’ This war is between usability experts and graphic designers.”

“Comix might work well here as explainers of processes. If you have a complicated product you’re trying to sell — and actually, Web servers, software, and applications, just the sort of things comix geex are interested in, represent this genre well — then go ahead and write out an explanation in words, but also give us pictures. Why? Some people learn and understand better from words, others from images. You cover all your bases. Case in point: XPLANE, best-known for their editorial illustrations in Business 2.0. XPLANE’s stick figures, combined with a few choice sentences, meet any definition of comix, including McCloud’s.”

“There is an unarticulated war currently raging among those who make web sites. Like the war between dark-skinned blacks and light-skinned blacks in Spike Lee’s School Daze, this war is one that only its participants recognize. The war is not between commercial sites and experimental sites. It’s not between ‘Bloggers’ and ‘Flashers.’ This war is between usability experts and graphic designers.”

“What do we really mean by ‘designing the user experience’ and how do we use interaction design and product design to achieve user experience goals? Without some firm grounding, we felt that ‘user experience’ would become simply market-speak, or a stand-in phrase for usability. Our overall goals are lofty — to work towards a framework of how experience relates to interaction and product design.”

“What do we really mean by ‘designing the user experience’ and how do we use interaction design and product design to achieve user experience goals? Without some firm grounding, we felt that ‘user experience’ would become simply market-speak, or a stand-in phrase for usability. Our overall goals are lofty — to work towards a framework of how experience relates to interaction and product design.”

“The goal of this study was to discover the optimal design of multiple hyperlinks on a web page for information retrieval tasks. Of particular interest was the optimal depth versus breadth of the hyperlinks’ distribution across expertly categorized web content, with a particular emphasis on the importance of structure and labeling (or scent). The current study attempts to resolve several methodological as well as conceptual issues with past research on this topic, as well as tie the findings both to current research in information retrieval and web design for large information spaces. The differential effects of short-term memory and visual scanning will be examined as cognitive covariates in the experiment.”

“Each pattern description defines a context of use, a problem the designer needs to solve, a set of ‘forces’ pushing the designer in different directions, and a primary rule — and sometimes additional secondary rules — on how those forces might be resolved to best solve the problem. Examples are also provided, both good and bad; sometimes the bad examples show inappropriate uses of the pattern, and other times they show a situation in which the pattern should have been used but wasn’t.”

“Do-it-yourself banner ad designers need a lot of what Yiddish calls ‘chutzpah.’ They have to believe that they can design a more effective banner than the professionals, one that gets an equivalent click-through rate (CTR). A good banner could pull a 2% to 3% CTR or more, while a mediocre banner might pull the industry average of 0.4%. In other words, an effective banner can have a huge effect on your advertising campaign, the difference between a triumph and a trouncing.” Note: Here are ad specs for Yahoo! (Standard, JavaScript) and Lycos.

“Although the change from at meaning ‘for a given amount per’ to at meaning ‘in a specified (electronic) location’ comes fairly naturally to English speakers, it does not for native speakers of other languages, for whom neither ‘at’ nor @ meant anything until e-mail came around.”

“Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should One of the downsides of all the technical innovations of our day is that the software designers of the world have made it really easy to create wonderfully ugly sites! Somehow, in all the fuss over the Web and the never ending desire for ‘more interactivi

“Although the change from at meaning ‘for a given amount per’ to at meaning ‘in a specified (electronic) location’ comes fairly naturally to English speakers, it does not for native speakers of other languages, for whom neither ‘at’ nor @ meant anything until e-mail came around.”

“Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should One of the downsides of all the technical innovations of our day is that the software designers of the world have made it really easy to create wonderfully ugly sites! Somehow, in all the fuss over the Web and the never ending desire for ‘more interactivi