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?

I have said on numerous occasions that there is no simple checklist that, when followed, will give you an accessible site without fail. There are simply too many variables. But, what do you do when you want to create accessible pages and you have dozens or even hundreds of developers who (like most of their peers) have little to no experience with accessibility? What do you do when it just simply isn’t practical to have someone review all of your pages? In short, how do you insure that a very large organization creates pages that can be accessed by the largest audience possible without drastically increasing your budget? This is one of the questions we have been (and continue to) struggle with.

Bloody good stuff. Read the full article and download the check list.

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.

Thanks to the publishing power of Jadu’s Web Content Management System for Government, Manchester City Council has been able to provide advanced Web 2.0 features and enhanced public services to the community, such as advanced Google Maps, social book-marking of content and dynamic A-Z services.

In the local government category, Manchester comes ahead of the other favourites Camden, Glasgow, Hounslow and Blackburn. Winners in other categories include the BBC, Amazon, Google and Tesco.

Matt Walton, head of online channel development at BT, said: “With the BT Online Excellence Awards, we’ve given consumers the opportunity to recognise the websites they regularly use – whether that’s for shopping, entertaining the kids or getting information from their local authority.

“That’s where they’re different: we weren’t interested in the technical aspects of the sites – just why users like them. As we suspected, the range of products or information available was the most important factor, followed by how easy it was to use.”

Leader of Manchester City Council Councillor Richard Leese said:”Our website combines a good mix of news and information with a range of services that people can access and order online. We use our website as one of the vital channels to make contact with and to hear from our communities, so we are delighted to receive this award.

“However we don’t want to stand still; we want to carry on improving so please do log on to let us know your views.”

“manchester.gov.uk is a milestone in Local Government websites. The website provides a great service to the people of Manchester – and to be recognised alongside Google, Amazon and the BBC for excellence is one of the highest accolades for Manchester and Jadu.” – Suraj Kika, CEO, Jadu

Lancashire County Council’s Children’s Services website – whatnow.co.uk also received fourth place in the ‘Best Kids Website’ category, just behind other winners including the BBC and Disney.

For more details about the BT Online Excellence Awards and the results, go to www.bt.com/onlineexcellence

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

From the excellent I Love Typography, see the 15. I only just discovered this site and it really is text smart. This is part one of a showcase, so stay tuned for the next.

Basically this tiny PHP script will show you how to make a stylesheet switch depending on the time of day, similar to the one found here.

• 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.

New inline elements include time, meter, and progress. New embedding elements include video and audio. New interactive elements include details, datagrid, and command.

HTML 5 is part of the future of the Web. Its new elements enable clearer, simpler markup that makes pages more obvious. Div and span still have their places, but those places are much more restricted than they used to be. Many pages will no longer need to use them.

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.

A few CSS3 selectors are already making their way into modern web browsers. Of the browsers tested thus far, Konqueror is the clear leader in implementation, with the Gecko (Mozilla, etc) engine not too far behind.

The basic idea is to make an extra dummy input text field in your form, and using CSS to make it invisible to the real human users.

Thereby, if a post is sent to your php script handling the request and this extra text field contains information, you know that the submit must be spam, and the script can ignore the post.

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, the initial direct contact with clients during the discovery meeting is likely the most important moment in the life of a project. While most of my previous reference in this regard has been toward the establishment of designer competence and development of fellowship with the client, there is another vital aspect to this initial meeting: the specific questions asked.

It’s all about discovery.

It works in all the major browsers – Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+, IE6+ and Safari. On older browsers, it’ll degrade and your visitors won’t notice a thing. Looks lovely.

I really do fear that I’m dying,
I really do fear that I’m dead,
I saw it in your eyes what I’m looking for,
I saw it in your eyes what will make me live.

The 2007 Eden Sessions – the Eden Project.

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.

A successfull bulletproof image-based button should:

• Automatically grow horizontally to fit any amount of text
• Grow horizontally and vertically if text size is increased or if the text wraps to multiple lines
• Retain its appearance within reasonable limits
• Be able to have rounded (or other non-square) corners
• Have no unclickable areas
• Be readable when images are disabled

A bag-full of mark-up required but pretty neat.

More site settings as the British Dyslexia Association see things.

ワンクリックアワード

There are thousands of companies, blogs, government bodies and other organisations trying to make their news and content accessible as a text-based RSS feed. Podcasting and “Pod radio” are technologies where the RSS feed is enriched with a link (called an enclosure) to an mp3 file. This is widely used by radio stations, national and international commercial and non-commercial broadcasting companies, on line news papers, and so on.

It’s important for web designers and developers to know how to write good ALT and TITLE attributes. Practices like these should be employed into each web page element as it’s created.

Alternate text is not meant to be used as a tool tip, or more specifically, to provide additional information about an image. The title attribute, on the other hand, is meant to provide additional information about an element…. Many people seem to confuse these two attributes. – Roger Johansson

As Roger notes, we should be including accessibility features when initially creating web pages rather than going back to add it later.

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.