Luke Wroblewski on Best Practices for Content Page Design
By Patrick Lufkin
As the web becomes increasingly social, distributed, and search driven, the paths that users take to find content grow ever more varied, and that, according to Luke Wroblewski, has important implications for web page design and usability.
Wroblewski has been involved with interface design since he was Senior Interface Designer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) back in the days of the Mosaic browser when the website had 5 pages. He is currently Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! and previously was Lead Interface Designer of eBay Inc.’s platform team. He has authored two books, Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability (Wiley, 2002) and Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld, 2008), a book on best practices for designing the forms that enable everything from online shopping to joining social networks. I’m gonna read the full, are you?
10 Principles of the UI Design Masters
A must read from NETTUTS?
Breathtaking and useful designs happen because the UI has been worked on tirelessly. It takes a real UI Master to understand how to make a terrific user experience on a website. Here are 10 extremely useful principles from some of the brightest minds in the User Interface field.
A little summer sundae
Well I have at last got myself a camcorder, a Sony HDR SR10E. Very nice it is to. My first attempt at shooting some stuff happened at Summer Sundae where I got lots of bad footage. Supergrass (who where just pretty average) headlined last night. Check caught by the fuzz!
Access keys: Friend or foe?
Web standards have (or are) transforming the web and the way we interact with it and its content. They are good and to be aspired to and understood, but what if in practical terms, some just aren’t working?
I’ve been questioning the use of access keys for a while, all our sites including those that have been tested with positive results by AbilityNet use them. The characters used are a mash of the government standard keys (1 through to 0) and obvious choices for the skip links (N = skip to navigation, S = skip to content).
How on earth can I say for sure that these don’t collide with existing browser and assistive technologies use of keyboard shortcuts? It seemed to me skip links and tabbing does work, they are practical and unobstrusive.
With a quick search I found various opinions and guidance on the subject of which widely agreed.
A good example is an article by Nomensa’s Alastair Campbell, What are Access Keys? (Note the date).
Although access keys are intended to improve site navigation, it is shown they actually can interfere with web accessibility. In terms of implementing a common standard, it would require a universal understanding of access keys to be applied to every site. Joe Clark, an accepted expert on accessibility, says access keys are: “severely compromised in practical application…” he continues to add, “If you add access keys, then, you are really coding for a future utopia”.
So do I stop implementing access keys on our Government and commercial websites?