CindyKate

Requirements Gathering Essentials

There is no simple solution to the complex task of requirements gathering for technical projects. There are, however, a number of key issues you should consider before you gather requirements for any new project. Martin considers each, and explains how they impact on your project's success.

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[Design] Shopping Carts and Madness

I stumbled across a really useful article by Barbara Chaparro covering the 'Top Ten Mistakes of Shopping Cart Design' this morning. The article was published more than three years ago, but I think it's still very much 'on the money'. I recom...

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Chronicle Books

Still stuck? Take a seat and have a read, then: Chronicle Books ~ Graphic Design.

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NiXLOG Redesign Notes

NiXLOG redesigns and takes us backstage. "I'm not shooting for the most usable, super-validating, mega-standards compliant site around -- there plenty of those out there. What I am trying to create is something simple, but very different. Something that challenges the norm. For better or worse. Something I can learn from." Amen, and praise the brown, brothah!

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[DHTML & CSS] 2005: The year of the DOM

Jeffrey Zeldman popularised the concept of the "three legged stool" approach to web design in his book, Designing with Web Standards. The three legged stool consists of XHTML for content and structure, CSS for presentation and JavaScript and the DOM...

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How a Core Relationship Strategy Can Help You Increase Profits

Are you having relationship problems? Some of your clients are time-drains, don't pay, require constant communication... and these guys distract you from the profitable clients! Andrew provides a practical strategy to identify and enhance relationships with your best clients - and resolve your issues with the others!

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Manage Guideline Violations on Your Community

You've worked hard to build a solid community - and you want to keep it that way. Take Patrick's advice and implement these simple procedures to ensure that all forum guideline violations are dealt with objectively, swiftly and effectively.

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Contextual Enquiry - A Primer

To build a site or application that people will use, you need to understand those people. How? Walk a mile in their shoes, or, as it's known in usability circles, perform a contextual enquiry. Gerry explains why, when and how to carry out a contextual enquiry - and what you'll get out of it - in this complete primer.

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Finding The Sweet Spot

There is a often a gap between business and user goals. D. Keith Robinson talks about why this is and how we can bridge that gap for more successful Web designs.

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We're Live! (Bright Corner that is.)

If you've noticed there haven't been a lot of posts recently, it's because we've been busy building our new site. Now we'd like to see what the community at large thinks, be it good, bad, or ugly. So hop on...

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The End of Usability Culture

Dirk Knemeyer returns to propose a major shift in our approach to and execution of Web design as the catalyst for more innovative and creative Web experiences.

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Drop-Down Menus, Horizontal Style

Multi-tiered drop-down menus can be a hassle to build and maintain -- especially when they rely on big, honking chunks of JavaScript. Nick Rigby presents a way to handle this common navigation element with a cleanly structured XHTML list, straightforward CSS, and only a few concessions to browser quirks.

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Extending Columns

Evolt's "Ten CSS Tricks You May Not Know" is great stuff. The last of the ten tips describes a way of extending menu divs the length of neighboring content areas made popular by Dan Cederholm. But they get one thing wrong:

Unfortunately the only solution to this is to cheat, and assign the body a background image of exactly the same colour and width as the left column.

Not true. I've been using an alternative method to extend menu divs for over a year. The page you're looking at right now -- unless this site's design has changed since the day of this post, of course -- uses this technique.

It works by specifying the background color of body or a wrapper div to be the same as the desired background color of the menu, then offsetting the content div. No image necessary.

See it in action.

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Browser Default Styles

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous entry regarding the latest design is that I'm not specifying any styles for most elements, instead letting your browser render them using its default styles. I'm not, for example, declaring any style rules for ordered or unordered lists, blockquotes, citations, or most paragraphs [1]. A font type and relative font size are specified on body and inherited by most everything else, but you'll otherwise get whatever your browser thinks is best. Is this crazy? (All the browsers I've tested in render things reasonably.)

[1] A bottom margin on #comments dd p is the exception.

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New Issue of A List Apart

A new issue of A List Apart is out. In this issue accessibility maven Joe Clark explores the rationale and methods behind zoom layouts in his article Big, Stark Chunky, also in this issue Daniel M. Frommelt returns with a followup article on Cross-Column Pull-Out Part Two: Custom Silhouettes.

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2004 Salary Survey for UX and Usability

Pabini Gabriel-Petit emailed me to tell me that the results of the 2004 Salary Survey for User Experience Design and Usability Professionals have been published. Here is a a good summary of the findings. There is also a link to a PDF of the full report on the same page. Some key points here are "Among all respondents, the most prevalent primary roles were user experience design, information architecture, and interaction design." and "The most common types of projects on which respondents worked were Web applications, followed by Internet sites." As with any salary survey you should take the results with a grain of salt.

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