Hey everyone, sorry for the dearth of articles the past few weeks, I have been crazy busy working on various projects. Not an excuse, just an explanation.

Anyway, Smashing Magazine has a cool article on the User Experiences of the Future.

Its worth checking out.

Some of the stuff I have talked about before (such as multitouch and Surface), but there are a few things that really are amazing that I hadn’t seen before. In particular, check out the video on Photosynth. It actually demos two technologies related to images that are just simply amazing. You combine that with the multitouch concept and man you have something cool there.

I will be sharing some of what I have been working on soon. Its a bit of a tangent, but I think it will help developers out…

For a while now I have been writing about how to create a Side Scrolling Page Effect similar to the one that is seen on Panic’s Coda site. I have built the effect using 3 different frameworks and I have found that each framework has its own pluses and minuses, but in the end I decided to build a more robust solution using Scriptaculous (you can see why in the conclusion section of the MooTools article).

Today I am rounding out the series with the posting of that robust solution. Basically this is my take on that effect and what I implemented for my client. How the basic effect is achieved is covered in the other articles, so today’s goal is to explain what takes it from a simple demo to a fully functioning, cross-browser compatible website. At the end of the article I will, as usual, have a link to where you can download all the code used in the demo.

Read the rest of this entry »

User Experience (aka UX) is the backbone for everything we as designers and developers do. Whether you are building the next google, or accounting software, how the user interacts with the application is paramount.

Officially (at least according to Wikipedia) UX “is a subset of the field of experience design which pertains to the creation of the architecture and interaction models which impact a user’s perception of a device or system. The scope of the field is directed at affecting all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used.”

What I find interesting is most people who design applications don’t seem to take the user experience very seriously at all. “Does it look cool?” is typically the only question asked. I say that because it is the only explanation for a website that hides the navigation in some way or an application that is incoherent and difficult to use (but it looks cool). Now, if that is the point of the app, then more power to you…but most sites and applications are meant to be used by people who aren’t all that computer savvy. To make those applications successful, focusing on the user should be a top priority.

So to get all the designers, and developers (or anyone else who is thinking about creating some software) up to speed here is a list of articles, interviews, books, blogs, and podcasts about the rich world of UX.

Read the rest of this entry »

So I was wandering around the web today and I found a couple of cool little scripts that make the daunting process of making web based forms pretty a little less so.

Now, if you don’t want to develop forms at all (but still want something pretty), you can always use something like Wufoo, Icebrrg, or Jotform.

However, if you want to get your dev on, making a form can be quite a challenge, but nowadays it doesn’t have to be. These two libraries aren’t new, but they are new to me so I thought I would share.

Read the rest of this entry »

So as regular readers know, I love looking ahead and talking about what’s next in the world of the user interface, and more broadly, how people interact with computers.

I have been fascinated with the concept of multi-touch computing for a while. In all honesty, I didn’t think it was going to be a reality for a good while. Watching Jeff Han do his thing, I always get the feeling that the consumer is not going to get their hands dirty for a long time. I still love his stuff, but who needs an 8 foot touch wall? Certainly not the everyday consumer. Also, getting a completely new paradigm (like getting rid of the mouse and keyboard) to take hold, A LOT of different industries have to get together and play nicely. In order to get a lot of companies chatting will take a major player…enter Microsoft.

Microsoft has just unveiled Surface, their take on the multi-touch interface. Now before you read anything else, you owe it to yourself as a geek to go watch the videos on the Surface site. Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you…

Read the rest of this entry »

What if a button didn’t have to look like a button? What if it could look like anything you wanted it to? Lets say a book that was sitting on a shelf. That isn’t too fancy…you can do that right now with images and CSS.

Ok…but what if, when the user clicked on the book, it slid forward and got larger, flipped a few pages and then showed you the content inside. That can be done in Flash right? Well…kinda. Just like you can make a 2D image look 3D, you can make Flash behave 3D-ish, but it doesn’t have a very solid 3D engine.

Yesterday I took the long view and talked a little about building UIs for a keyboard-less world. That world is coming…

However, even the comfortable world we live in right now is about to change in a big way. I have talked about it before but WPF is on the next horizon and it promises to bring a whole new slew of goodies that has the potential to impact UI developers in a big way.
Read the rest of this entry »

When you think of the user interface, what comes to mind? Graphics, design, flow, ease of use? More concretely, when you think about developing a UI things like CSS, Forms, Javascript, Xaml, etc. are the terms you hear.

But step back for a moment…what is UI? User Interface…how a user “hooks in” and uses some form of device. This device can be a car, a computer, heck even furniture. For the computer, the actual interface is a mouse, keyboard, and monitor.

In the future…there might be something like this.
Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know about you, but I love me some rounded corners. They just give off a more casual feel than the standard “hard” corners.

I have built several sites that do the whole rounded thing, but I have always done it the hard way by using a bunch of images and such. Why? I have never found a non-image way that gave nearly as clean of a look as an image. At least not until now.

Today I found spiffy corners. Its not a new site (its actually on its second version) so many of you may have already found this little guy, but he is new to me.

For those of you who don’t know about this site, it is a CSS and HTML generator that creates really nice rounded corners that don’t have all the “jaggies” that are so common. The resulting code isn’t too shabby either (which is a feat in and of itself). I tested it on Firefox 2.0.0.3 and IE 6 today and the examples looked great in both.

So if you are creating a site and need some nice looking rounded corners, give this guy a try and send me a link of your site!

Poynter Online is mainly a journalist site, however they sometimes have some good articles that apply online as well. Case in point, a few days ago they posted a new article about their new EyeTrack07 study.

What does this have to do with UI? Well basically it debunks the myth that online readers have ADD. That is a big difference from what we have been hearing the last few years about users with an attention span of a gnat. Also, these eye studies are great to check out because it really gives you a look at what is important on the screen so you can design accordingly.

Its an interesting read that is worth checking out, plus if you are really interested, they have some videos about the study as well.