Great article about why open source projectsw are so UNusable for end-clients.
I think this ties in with why the great Web 2.0 software so far has been proprietary!
I also like the take on the value of interface design and wireframing:
Coding before design. Software tends to be much more usable if it is, at least roughly, designed before the code is written. The desired human interface for a program or feature may affect the data model, the choice of algorithms, the order in which operations are performed, the need for threading, the format for storing data on disk, and even the feature set of the program as a whole. But doing all that wireframing and prototyping seems boring, so a programmer often just starts coding — they’ll worry about the interface later.
http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability
We are facing a new paradigm for browser testing.
The rough figures now are around 75% for standards based (50% IE7 + 25 % FF/Safari) and 25% IE6.
At what point do we stop testing IE6 in standard development. Its a hard question. Below 15% is pprobably our threashold.
Market share for browsers, operating systems and search engines
Balsamiq Mockups Home | Balsamiq
Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it’s digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting.
The Paper Version of the Web at Deeplinking
People have been sketching user interfaces since the birth of the web (possibly even before) but the sketches usually stay locked away in old notebooks and discarded bar napkins in Austin, Texas. Many of the websites we use started out as scrawlings, and with people like Jakob Nielsen and Bill Buxton spreading the gospel of faster, cheaper paper prototypes, “next year’s Twitter” may already exist on paper.
WebKit now supports CSS @font-face rules. With font face rules you can specify downloadable custom fonts on your Web pages or alias one font to another. This article on A List Apart describes the feature in detail. All of the examples linked to in that article work in WebKit now.
Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive ? Downloadable Fonts
I came across Google’s official position on Flash. It totally agrees with what we have been saying to our clients for years!
What will be interesting is what impact iPhone refusal to run Flash will have on this whole equation…
Page objects not sites
Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google’s YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation. In addition to making your site Googlebot-friendly, this makes you site accessible to a larger audience, including, for example, blind people using screen readers, users of old or non-standard browsers, and those on limited low-bandwidth connections such as on a cell phone or PDA. As a bonus, your visitors can use bookmarks effectively, and can email links to your pages to their friends.
sIFR - font replacement
Our highest recommendation…
Non-Flash Versions
time consuming!
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Best uses of Flash
However compelling the message, however great the copy, however strong the sales argument… the way a page is designed will have a dramatic impact on conversion rates, for better or for worse.A List Apart: Articles: Design Choices Can Cripple a Website
One important thing to note is that Safari for the iPhone does not include scroll bars, either vertical or horizontal, so keep an eye on how your pages scroll. My advice is that if your iPhone-specific web page has to scroll, it should only scroll vertically and not in two dimensions.
Do not use internal scrollbars.
http://www.practicalecommerce.com/blogs/developers-diary/archives/104
I am working to fill out the concept that marketing IS design and design IS marketing, part of the whole Seth Godin Purple cow idea…
This is a great blog about design and how it relates to branding:
“The best designers act as advocates for the end user, working hard to create a simple, elegant, and enjoyable experience for them. That works well when the users and customers are one and the same. However, very often there are intermediary customers that must also be considered. Maybe that’s a little more marketing strategy than designers want to be accountable for, but ignoring the needs of the customer and solely focusing on the needs of the user can be a losing strategy. Designers need to keep that in mind just as much as marketers do.”
Greg Hinzmann Marketing