I really think the guidelines for designing with Flash are for any project.

Things that popped out at me (and made me nod my head):

• Do good design
• Familiar is good
• Dancing bears is bad (“Don’t show gratuitous motion.”)
• Don’t be annoying with sound/motion
• If your purpose is information, don’t be silly (was re: should I use 5pt font size)
• Be. Meaningful. (Though I think that’s up there with good design is good.)
• Pass the remote (was re: letting users have control)
• KISS and I don’t mean the band (Keep It Simple Stupid)

Also with the report came some excellent examples and a report on usability for those with disabilities. October 2002 was a long time ago, but the information still looks good. I wish I could buy all of their reports. But I (and you) can read his Alertbox for free!

I kept getting lost, in a way, because I kept getting distracted by the prehistoric examples and data. For example, what do I design for? 640? 770? What is in use today? 1997 was a long time ago in web years. I suppose it’s difficult to have a book with such current data in it, but I’m thinking it’s definitely time for a new version of this book.

There is also a tendency for redundancy. I suppose this is inevitable since whether you’re a search results page or an intranet site, you’re still dealing with the same topics of design.

I do like that even though this book is ancient, it touches on accessibility issues. So many places are only now thinking of that. I also like that testing is mentioned, though again, it is peppered with out-of-date technology which makes all the information seem invalid.

I think this book would be much stronger with new examples, updates here and there to technology and re-released. I think that that was one of the strengths of his other book, “Homepage Usability,” was the freshness of the examples and problems designers are facing. If, and when, there is a new and more concise version of this book, I will buy it.

I have been preaching liquid design for at least a year. Folks can see the information in any resolution.rnrnCommon resolutions are 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1400×1050. (Stats). At work, I surf at 1152×864 with the browser fully expanded. I tried higher and it was … whoa. I tried lower and it was … whoa. I didn’t resize my browser window though. Hmm…. I have at least 4 coworkers (customers) that are at either 640×480 or 800×600. I know this because they call when they have to scroll to the right for some of our larger reports.

Now. What should I do? On a random sampling of 19 sites, 3 are liquid. The rest are fixed, usually centered and random on the background image/color. The fixed size ranges from 597 (A List Apart) to 972 (The Designer’s Lunchbox). Those two extremes also show what folks do with this fixed mass of stuff with alignment.

Perhaps, when I have more time, I’ll separate my random screen measurements into categories. For example, LANL is a DOE lab. Liquid as can be. That’s not bad liquid, in my humble opinion. LANL news has lots of text, but it’s broken up by a 3-column layout. Fine. But — well, I’ll remake the page example with some dummy text. I don’t want to “call” anyone out. But it’s liquid and the text goes from the left of my screen to the right of my screen, fills top to bottom. I find it very hard to read and search for skimmability.

Here’s an advocate for liquid. That’s what I thought, except for “Not everyone browses full-screen anyway.” I thought it was more “web standard.” But I made a layout with 770 fixed, centered, and I found it oh so much easier to read/present information. I did it with only css, and it worked on lots of browsers. (And those that it didn’t, didn’t see the css so got the text anyway. So nyer.)

(Told you I was going to use this as my notebook…)

Ok, so I’m not a big fan of this design anymore, but here it is:

and here it is fixed:

No big difference to me on usability. But what if I took out the left navigation (possible) and the right image (which helps it mimic 3-column).

It’s preference, really, but I actually don’t want to look at the liquid one without the 3-column mimicry. It makes me want to call my mom and make the big, mean text go away.

‘Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams
1. User Research
2. Site Strategy
3. Technology Strategy
4. Content Strategy
5. Abstract Design
6. Technology Implementation
7. Content Production
8. Concrete Design
9. Project Management

full article..

Keep Office Politics Out of Your Design
1. Gather Data Objectively
2. Analyze Data for Conclusions
3. Derive a Recommendation
4. Polish the Recommendation With Peer Input

full article…

Politics are strong with what we do at work. Strong.

Usability > all. Just like putting the actual web folks with the rest of the programming information folks makes sense, so does designing a site based on what the user wants make sense. Getting there!