I'm usually not one to just repost links on my site, but Smashing Magazine has an awesome article on User Experience Design that serves as a great overview of the field, and an introduction to its importance and role within a project. Check out What Is User Experience Design? Overview, Tools And Resources at Smashing Magazine.
So, first three minutes with IE9, and my thoughts are:
Double-clicking in the portion of the top of the window where the tab bar would extend to causes a new tab to appear instead of maximizing the window. There is no visual differientiaton to indicate where the cutoff point between these two behaviors is located. Thats a usability fail right there.
The Beta of Internet Explorer 9 was released today. I'm usually not excited by IE, but man, anything that stands a chance of knocking IE6 further down the road is a good thing in my book.
Ars Technica has a great article covering IE9, so I wont go into specifics, but I will say that while Microsoft's done some typically stupid things (the UI... yuck), it is a very compliant browser, and hopefully will let us really move forward with HTML5 and some advanced styling. Look for some post from me about what kind of CSS tricks we can hopefully treat as standard now that IE is "back in the game".
Check out these videos on User Experiance at Smashing Magazine. I've not had the chance to watch many of them, but there are some gems in there.
Found a very funny song about web design while looking for good articles today. Perhaps it will give you a laugh too, since I found it so sadly familiar. Click here for 'Make the Logo Bigger' (warning, it autoplays).
When you're laying out a site, one of the most basic questions you can ask is "Do we make this liquid or fixed width?" Do you let your site fill the user's browser, or do you hold it to a single fixed width? It's a good question, but let me make a suggestion, nay, let me suggestion a rule: Always use a fixed width for your content.
I'm Jon Hartmann and I'm a Javascript fanatic, UX/UI evangelist and former ColdFusion master. I blog about mysterious error messages, user interface design questions, and all things baffling and irksome about programming for the web.