Archive for the ‘ User Experience ’ Category

I was 17 when I announced to my orthodontist I wanted to be an industrial engineer. I was so sure about this. The weeks before, I had spent time scouring Encyclopaedia Britannica (yes, those were the days before Wikipedia) finding out what industrial engineers do and was hooked.

So, today, when I came across this article in the Wall Street Journal about Starbucks’s ‘Lean’ Japanese Techniques, my long forgotten dream bubbled back up to consciousness. I traded the assembly line for computer applications, but the passion remained, albeit, driven by another media.

Couple months back, I read an article about the future of computing that just made me excited. Just short of ecstatic you can even say.

What is jTipster? Remember the times you would like to add notes to a picture, but there were no other ways to do it without firing up Photoshop. The problem with that is the content added to the picture was not easily changed, you needed some Photoshop skills and well, not SEO friendly.

So, what is it again? Well, jTipster allows you to add “markers” to a picture. For each marker added, you can add short or long captions that appear on rollover. See it working here.

So, how do you get it working. Follow the steps below and to get started.

I noticed I was being charged twice for my hosting account. The first time I noticed the charge, I logged into my account and there it was, 2 hosting accounts under my name. I clicked the checkbox next to the New Account and hit “Cancel”.

While working on a site today that was built to support multiple languages, I ran into a small issue. Since the site’s buttons were all actually text links (hrefs) made to look like good ol’ regular buttons (easier to do this rather than creating multiple button sets for each language), the default button action code I had working for other sites didn’t work for this particular site.

After coming up with a quick bit of code yesterday for the longdesc comment that Ruth left, I had another idea. I decided to try the the idea using the title attribute on images. Before launching on my idea, I decided to find out if the idea was valid by W3 standards.

I just received this comment today by Ruth and when I read it, I thought, yeah, why not. “longdesc” as the name says provides a longer description to supplement the alt attribute of an image. When I first thought about the problem, my first inclination was to provide a hidden div that held the long description which became visible whenever the image it corresponded to was interacted with. The solution seemed intriguing but I had another thought toying with me at the back of my mind.

I had my first child usability testing today for a project I am currently working on. I chose paper prototyping for this phase as I wanted to figure out the issues with the interface before the programming team started working on it with all the holes in full glory. All I needed – post-its, regular A4 paper, a pair of scissors and glue. For all the business savvy readers out there, here’s a cheap and quick way to test your interface. An added incentive, it’s incredibly easy to do!

14 days and counting – Firefox 3 has managed to surprise me on more than a few levels. When I first downloaded it, I assumed it was just going to be another of those updates you can hardly notice the changes that has taken place. Now, this is not a personal affront to those who work on making this enigmatic browser more secure than ever, but then as an interaction designer, I usually am more into how the browser works with users.

The first time you write a plugin, however simple it is, a sense of accomplishment takes over. It might last a couple hours, but those hours are precious as walking on the moon. As a person who recently got addicted to jQuery, the library has certainly lived up to its reputation in helping cutting lines of codes. Without further ado, here’s my first jQuery plugin – a stylesheet switcher.

There would be times you would want to offer your users an indication of the current form element they are on. A simple, non intrusive manner for this would be as simple as changing the background of the element using CSS. Users who are using their keyboard to move through the form elements would also benefit from this as this provides a more obvious cursor position.