#21251
Yahoo! Mail: Simplicity Holds Up Over Time
In many respects, email is the ideal web application: it's an application that people often need access to when they’re away from their 'home' environment, and the core user tasks (reading and writing) are easily accommodated with standard HTML interface elements.
Garrett, Jesse James. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Web Design>User Interface>User Centered Design
#32238
Zebra Striping: More Data for the Case
I recently conducted a study into the helpfulness (or lack thereof) of zebra striping—the shading of alternate rows in a table or form. The study measured performance as users completed a series of tasks and found no statistically significant improvement in accuracy—and very little statistically significant improvement in speed when zebra stripes were implemented.
Enders, Jessica. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Human Computer Interaction>User Interface
#32672
Making use of the overflow and scrollLeft DOM property to scroll elements is a much more effective use of the CPU, over animating using CSS top/left. So this episode of J4D demonstrates the same effect used in two completely different ways.
Sharp, Remy. jQuery for Designers (2008). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Ajax
#32721
Creative User Interfaces in Modern Web Design
The whole may be more than the sum of its parts, but without the parts, there is no whole. Lest that sound like some weird philosophical meandering to you, take comfort in observing the finer aspects of creative and appealing user interface design.
Smashing (2008). Design>Web Design>User Interface
#33001
Clean, Cutting-Edge UI Design Cuts McAfee's Support Calls by 90%
When McAfee Inc. recently introduced its ProtectionPilot software--a dashboard-type management console for its Active VirusScan SMB Edition and Active Virus Defense SMB Edition suites--the trial downloads were fast and furious: In the first 10 weeks after release, more than 20,000 users went online to get a copy.
Hadley, Bruce. SoftwareCEO (2004). Articles>Web Design>User Interface
#33203
Years back, we compared successful clickstreams (clickstreams that resulted in users accomplishing their goals, as observed in tons of usability tests) with unsuccessful clickstreams (clickstreams where users abandoned their goals before completing), looking for any clues that would help us predict behaviors in one that we didn’t see in the other. One factor we looked for was whether the clickstreams contained image links versus text links — does one type of link show up more often in successful clickstreams than the other. Our finding was when users clicked in image links they were just as likely to succeed or fail as when the clicked on text links. There was no statistically-meaningful difference.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2006). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Hypertext
#33384
AJAX enables faster, more responsive Web applications through a combination of asynchronous Javascript, the Document Object Model (DOM), and XMLhttpRequest. What this means for Web interface designers is that a DHTML-based Web application can make quick, incremental updates to a user interface without reloading the entire screen.
Wroblewski, Luke. LukeW Interface Designs (2006). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Ajax
#33720
Using patterns has become a well-known design practice and is also considered best practice in the software development community. While UX teams can and should constantly promote best practice, we can also approach tackling poor design practice from the other side: antipatterns. Antipatterns are approaches to common problems that might appear obvious, but are less than optimal in practice.
Hornsby, Peter. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Interface
#34321
Seven Interface Design Techniques to Simplify and De-Clutter Your Interfaces
What is simplicity? Simplicity is the quality of being natural, plain and easy to understand. It is not surprising then that simplicity is often thrived for in user interface design. Most people naturally dislike complexity in devices and software. Yes, some people find joy in figuring out how something works, but for most of us, being unable to operate a device leads to wasted time and frustration, and that’s not a good thing. If you can take a complex device or a piece of software and somehow rearrange, reorganize and redesign the interface to make it easy to use and understand, then you’re well on the way to delivering a better user experience. In this article I’m going to talk about 7 practical techniques that you can utilize in web design to make your websites or web applications simpler and less cluttered.
Webdesigner Depot (2009). Design>Web Design>User Interface>Minimalism
#34539
Top-Ten Information Architecture (IA) Mistakes
Structure and navigation must support each other and integrate with search and across subsites. Complexity, inconsistency, hidden options, and clumsy UI mechanics prevent users from finding what they need.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>User Interface
#34563
Great Designs Should Be Experienced and Not Seen
When things are going well in a design, we don't pay attention to them. We only pay attention to things that bother us. The same is true with online designs. We attend to things that aren't working far more than we attend to things that are. When the online experience frustrates us, we pay attention to its details, often because we're trying to figure out some way to outsmart it.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>User Interface
#34903
ウェブサイトは、その構造とナビゲーションシステムとが互いに支え合っていなければならない。検索システムとも結びついていなければならない。サブサイトに至るまで一体化していなければならない。複雑で、一貫性が無く、選択肢が隠れていて、UIが扱いにくければ、ユーザーは必要なものを見つけられない。
Nielsen, Jakob. Usability.gr.jp (2009). (Japanese) Articles>Web Design>Information Design>User Interface
#34969
Search Goal Redefinition Through User-System Interaction 
The purpose of this research is to examine search goal redefinition during users' interaction with information retrieval systems.
Hider, Philip M. Journal of Documentation (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>User Interface
#35071
The Yahoo! User Interface Library
The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. YUI is available under a BSD license and is free for all uses.
#35173
Affordance allows us to look at something and intuitively understand how to interact with it. For example, when we see a small button next to a door, we know we should push it with a finger. Convention tells us it will make a sound, notifying the homeowner that someone is at the door. This concept transfers to the virtual environment: when we see a 3D-shaped button on a web page, we understand that we are supposed to “push” it with a mouse-click.
Link-Rodrigue, Margit. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Usability
#35577
Fortunately, you don't see dialogs in web apps much, but this sort of modal dialog lunacy is, sadly, becoming more popular in today's AJAX-y world of web 2.5. Those who can't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, I guess.
Atwood, Jeff. Coding Horror (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Usability
