The new look BBC website homepage has it’s links as just gray text. Not blue, not underlined and with only the faintest of hover effects. As a result, tired and at the end of the day, I found myself reading the headlines as absurdist poetry:
Sarkozy warns of disintegration,
Inquiry into unfair exam advice,
Child killer Black gets 25 years,
Lodger quizzed on double killing,
Dying woman calls for law change,
Double decker destroyed by fire,
Twitter did not incite rioting.
I looked for it but couldn’t find it so I made it. Here’s an Axure library of callout widgets:
It’s not exactly rocket science but hopefully someone might find it useful. Callouts are probably an oddity in the Axure world, as Axure is more based on prototypes rather than wireframes. But at work we use Axure more for traditional wireframes than prototypes so need callouts for on-page documentation. In this environment Axure’s killer feature is it’s SVN based system for collaborating on a shared file. (Try getting three people to successfully update a 100+ page Visio document at the same time without errors…)
There’s a recent trend that’s started really bugging me. Infographics. Not all infographics: I love websites like Infosthetics.com that show case some inspiring and beautiful ways of visually presenting data. What I’m hating is cheap blog infographics like this example on Mashable. It’s a time line; is the best way to present a list of events on the web a 700kb image? Really? There have been web development wars over using tables for layout vs nice clean semantic HTML and we’re now using fucking images to store information? Stop it. Now. It’s not big, it’s not clever, accessible, indexable or anything but shit. Calling it an infographic does not make it OK to through all web standards out the window. The web design and development community needs to make it clear that this is not acceptable.
This is an update on my project to style WYSIWYG interfaces to help the users get an understanding of the HTML they are creating. Read the original post here.
First of all, here’s the new demo page.
One of the big problems with most web based WYSIWYG text editors is that standard editor interfaces don’t provide any feedback about the horrors going on underneath the surface. WYSIWYG editors are often blamed for producing crappy HTML. However I think they generally do a decent job, it’s the users that screw things up by copying and pasting from Word or other web pages and generally doing the sort of unexpected things people do. But that’s not really the user’s fault; we can’t expect most users to know HTML or care if an H3 element is illegally nested in a P element. What we can do is create a nicer user interface that gives them more feedback on what they are creating.
Before I get started, let me say I’m not a designer offended by usability testing thinking it takes something away from my “art”. (I’ve done the art thing in a previous life) This post is about poor thinking taking away from what could be interesting usability findings.
Jacob Neilson it’s fair to say is Web 1.0, much like IE6 he made a significant contribution but has possibly not moved quite enough with the times. And much like everybody’s least favourite browser he is also still used be a lot of people. So I keep up to date on what he says in his Alert Box columns; sooner of later someone will quote them at me (and to be fair they often do have nuggets of decent information).