Progressive disclosure is the most popular means of managing complexity. The idea is that clutter and cognitive overhead can be reduced by hiding less frequently used elements behind some avenue of accessing those elements, like a mouse click or a keyboard shortcut.

Read the full article by Brandon Walkin.

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?

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.

Full article right here

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?

With proper documentation for clients and content editors fellow developers to follow, you have a better chance at seeing your interface stay beautiful. Future designers and developers who work on the interface will have an easier time adapting, thus making their lives easier and potentially saving time and money.

Looks to be an interesting read from A List Apart on the type of documentation I’ve been trying to write for some time.

W3C Interaction Domain technologies enable millions of people every day to browse the Web and to author Web content. Industry uses these technologies for purposes such as distributing information within an organization and creating new business opportunities.

“Combining the various XML markups and Web APIs developed by W3C into an integrated system is the next big challenge. We are already seeing the fruits of this work on both desktop and mobile platforms – and the future is even more exciting” Chris Lilley, Interaction Domain Leader

• The pagination interface for each Ajax Pagination instance is “free floating”, meaning it can be positioned anywhere on the page and repeated multiple times as well.
• Each page within the paginated content is fetched individually and only when requested for sake of efficiency.
• The settings for each Ajax Pagination instance is stored neatly in a variable object for ease of portability. This variable can be manually defined or easily dynamically written out based on information returned from the sever, such as via PHP/ MySQL.
• The entire paginated content can be refreshed with new data on demand, with the pagination links updated automatically as well.

This script is ideal for showing multi-page content such as “user comments” without reloading the rest of the page each time a comment page is requested.

Thanks Dynamic Drive.

This simple, three-part progressive enhancement provides the markup, CSS, and JavaScript to address the long-standing irritation.

This solution is known to work in:

• IE 5.5+
• Firefox 1.5+
• Safari 2+

Shaun Inman, we salute you.

This myth that users won’t scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice, most of all our users.

Jacob was saying pretty much the same thing way back in 1997.

The winning design, submitted by The Alzheimer’s Society, is called ‘memories are made of this’ and comes in two parts. The first is a customisable screensaver. The user will be able to upload pictures, text and video to create a personalised scrapbook on a computer. The second part is a social networking element, which will provide an easy to use way for people with dementia to talk with each other. Full story from the BBC.

New Web 2.0 interaction design can offer a lot of new suggestions for easier interactions, good use of white space and other glaring design solutions to the typically very busy space of information architecture.

But, if you practice IA well, including some new Web 2.0 techniques, you can begin to create mental space as well as white space. Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design, a new New Riders book by Robert Hoekman, Jr., is a great place to find out how much mental space can be offered by your systems.

This book sits in my bathroom, just waiting to be read.

Among the more counterintuitive characteristics of art and design is the fact that these endeavors are governed by rules. The rules of artistry (and therefore design) are inviolate and unchanging. If you don’t obey the rules, your results will be boring, uninspiring, uncommunicative, and less than compelling. In short: poor art or poor design.

Please read.

Small selection of web design, usability, and accessibility related results of research, most of them derived from Human Factors International (newsletter). Fortunately, some of them are relatively popular, while others will surely enrich your professional self-conception.

Note: Also see Stanford University’s “Guidelines for Web Credibility”. Must-read.

Further to this: Humanized weblog, A Design Manifesto: Rethinking the User Interface, The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems by Jef Raskin.

What does this year hold for content technologies? On the whole, we expect to see more incremental changes, rather than epochal shifts.

Despite all the industry mergers, new product versions, and ceaseless march of acronyms, the content technology industry does not in fact move very fast.

Google Web Toolkit – Build AJAX apps.

The “digital divide” refers to the fact that certain parts of the population have substantially better opportunities to benefit from the new economy than other parts of the population. Most commentators view this in purely economic terms. However, two other types of divide will have much greater impact in the years to come.

“Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty. A printed work which cannot be read becomes a product without purpose.”

This a wonderful and interesting article from the people over at iA. Read it, it’s very readable.

The functional comparison between <input type="submit" value="Submit"> and <button type="submit">Submit</button> are identical but the button offers way more flexibility in terms of styling with CSS.

The majority of browsers do not force any particular design on the button element, leaving it a raw ingot which we can cast and shape to our liking.

For me, Aaron has helped free my buttons. The article shows some nice tidy ways to get creative with the button, so please, submit to his article and enjoy.