This roundup of ten usability crimes highlights some of the most common mistakes or overlooked areas in web design and provides an alternative solution to help enhance the usability of your web site.
Author: Yelena Shabrova
Best Practices for Hints and Validation in Web Forms
Great tips on how to make web forms easier to understand and fill out, perform validation without causing inconvenience to users, and handling validation errors.
Best Practices for Hints and Validation in Web Forms, by Kean Richmond
5 Ways Web Design Focuses on Usability
5 Ways Web Design Focuses on Usability, by Marisa Peacock
Solid, common sense tips on how to build web sites that are easy to find, access, navigate and interact with.
A toy for generating word clouds from text
Wordle takes the text you provide and turns it in a typographic design. Sometimes the result is beautiful, sometimes it’s funny. The more frequently the word appears in the text, the bigger it will be in the final image.
I tried Wordle with text centered around “programming” and “code” and used “sexy code” in it. Wordy had its own ideas where sexy would fit best, and no matter how many times I randomized the design it was sided with anything but “code”. “Sexy resources” looked quite nice though 🙂
Stixy
Found something that suited the needs of one of my non-profits better than Google docs: Stixy, a free service with the only limitation: don’t upload anything bigger than 50 Mb.
Stixy does not allow to edit documents online, but it also does not alter your documents during conversion to a proprietary format like Google. You can also share images, notes, and to-do lists, and the interface is self-explanatory.
Call to Arms for Web Designers: Make Simplicity the Trend for 2010
This thoughtful post at Inspect Element is not about cutting down on visual elements of design for the sake of simplifying interaction. It is about getting rid of clutter, both visual and functional. Complete with examples.
Call to Arms for Web Designers: Make Simplicity the Trend for 2010
35+ New Websites With A Stunning And Effective Use of Textures
Soft, subtle textures as opposed to wide spread grunge effects. Not that there is anything wrong with grunge; personally, I love it. But this collection is different:
35+ New Websites With A Stunning And Effective Use of Textures
Networking Tips for the Busy Designer
This article is full of excellent advise for those who put off networking for fear of spending so much time on it.
Networking Tips for the Busy Designer from Vandelay Design Blog
The Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator
Got yet another request riddled with Web 2.0 mystery terms? Have a feeling the prospect does not have a foggiest idea what he’s talking about? Frustrated? The Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator will put it all in a perspective for you and provide a much needed comic relief.
Exploit-Me
Exploit-Me is a suite of Firefox add-on created to test web applications for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and access vulnerabilities. All three add-ons in this suite (XSS-Me, SQL Exploit-Me, and Access-Me) are open source.