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Remember that when you deal with the average member of the population you're dealing with someone who reads and writes somewhere between a grade 7-10 level.

To add some data since a lot of people forget this, the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that 43% of the 16+ U.S. population had low literacy. The web population is probably fairly close to this, but lower.

From the one link: "People with lower literacy can read, but they have difficulties doing so. [...] They must read word for word and often spend considerable time trying to understand multi-syllabic words. [...] Lower-literacy users tend to satisfice -- accept something as "good enough" -- based on very little information because digging deeper requires too much reading."

So around 1 in 3 browser users will fit that description, and error/warning dialogs need to be written with this in mind.

Media companies stagnated while their monopoly on content production and distribution was taken away as the international network of computers known as the Internet severely lowered the costs for distribution, and new technology lowered the costs for production. It no longer takes a big company, with millions in investments to produce a video, or report some news, or produce some music. Coupled with the Internet, "Local Band A" can now distrubute internationally for the same cost as distributing nationally, for the same price as distributing locally.

This new competition is something our hallowed media producers can't just bribe^H^H^H^H^H lobby into obscurity (at least not quickly or directly). While an apple to apple comparison will usually favor the big production values of old, the ease of access decides what people will look at. It doesn't matter how much you spent to produce an album, when the free competition is good enough to entertain me. Just read alertbox to see stories of how many barriers there are to getting people to register and pay for something online. Just giving it out on the front page will win out to registration, payment, login, download everytime.

Now after 15+ years of the Internet being in public homes, the media companies care about this new technology. It is no different than (to use the /. car anology rhetoric) buggy makers ignoring cars for the first 15 years they were affordable to public consumers. Instead of having the vision to embrace, and alter their offerings to compliment and utilizes a new technology, the producers want everyone who uses the technology to change their behavior. As much as people bitch about the Internet's generations sense of entitlement, it's obvious where they got it from.

My apologies, spell check is borken atm.

I'm the Community Manager for Zenoss, an open source enterprise network monitoring application. We have thousands of installations and even more users, and we see a lot of the same participation percentages seen by Linux and Wikipedia. There's a great article call Participation Inequality, pointing out that about 90% of users are never heard from again and 10% participate in forums, mailing lists and other indirect ways. We see similar numbers ourselves, and we get really great contributions from hundreds of users from enterprise IT staffs. Extensions, patches, testing and documentation are all provided by our community, you just have to work with them to lower the barriers to entry.

For every Slashdot poster, there's 1,000 lurkers. For every 1,000 fans who won't lift a finger, there will be 1 who will contribute.

Your image link is broken, here's one that works.

I think your conclusions from the image are off by a couple of orders. The image states 100% of content is from 10% of users, that implies for every 1 poster there is 9 lurkers. Unless my maths are wrong, which could be the case at this terrible hour.

In any case, I always was amazed how Nielsen was heralded as this guru of web usability. He may have been early to the game, but I always thought most of his recommendations were bad. Just take a look at his website, http://www.useit.com./ Besides being god-awfully ugly, the lack of any real borders or section boundaries makes it really hard to find information quickly.

Seriously? I hadn't any trouble navigating that page. News is nicely separated from permanent content without using a menu. IMHO menus on webpages severely impact their usability in a bad way. Websites with menus on it are usually the ones where I get lost easily and don't find what I'm looking for. In most cases the search function is broken, too.

And about the page being ugly: it may be styled minimalistic, but that's exactly the way I like it. I don't like sites with much bling-bling like http://www.space.com/ and especially game/movie sites because it distracts me from the actual content. But as both seem to correlate reciprocally, that's not a big problem to me...

Jakob Nielsen argued that frames "broke the fundamental user model of the web page" ... back in 1996. Sorry, the user model of the web has fundamentally changed since then.

For example, in the google image case, I really like the frame because it serves an important purpose. Often times it takes much longer to load the target page than the top frame. If that loading takes too long, I can just click the "See full size image" to go directly to the image without having to load the whole page.

In any case, I always was amazed how Nielsen was heralded as this guru of web usability. He may have been early to the game, but I always thought most of his recommendations were bad. Just take a look at his website, http://www.useit.com./ Besides being god-awfully ugly, the lack of any real borders or section boundaries makes it really hard to find information quickly.

I see you've disabled it on your website, which you made "as clean as I could". Please read Jacob Nielson's Change the Color of Visited Links. (OK, his site is not the prettiest, but pay attention to his ideas.)

Agreed, iPod Touch has a great mobile browser, see Jakob Nielsen's study of mobile browser usability below.

It's very easy to create a simple thumb-friendly site which is formatted well for the small screen using the "iui" javascript/css library: http://code.google.com/p/iui/

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html
In practice, however, most of the other [non-iPhone] full-screen devices we tested had usability that was so weak users didn't browse the Web much better with them than they did with regular smartphones.

What can be easily said, or thought to be intuitively known, may not have been legally codified, and therein lies the rub.

You can cite the Lexmark patent, elements of Apple's HIG, peruse the citations in one of Jakob Nielson's papers that would seem to support prior art, or just search Patent Storm for "iconic systems" and seeing results dating back more than a decade figure this is a wash. Right?

While IANAL, what seems to make this patent different is that it is for a *system* involving multiple icons at one go (select a bunch of icons at one time, peform an operation on them, and automagically they're re-iconified or something like that).

If other patents dealt with singular icons or methods thereof, and if no one has lined out, in writing, a similar system prior to 2001 (the date of submission), then, well... maybe it's time to pass out the Pepto Bismol©.

Pivoting means that ClearType or favorite subpixel rendering of your choice won't work. And I do really prefer ClearType, in the same way I prefer dualmon and high resolution.

Speaking of which, turning on ClearType is another of those "get more productivity for free" scenarios. Jakob Nielsen thinks it might be worth $2000 per year, which is probably overstating it. But it will save a measurable amount of time (meaning a measurable productivity gain) by making text more readable.

...the idea that the view should never contain logic at all is quite dogmatic and as such doesn't work well on the real world...

I think that's what the OP is trying to say when he comments that 'MVC is a pattern'. Patterns help solve particular problems, but when following the pattern in the most purist of the sense doesn't solve the problem (or gasp! make it bigger!) then being 'pure' doesn't make sense.

Take AlertBox. I think there some gems in his usability suggestions, but if you follow his guidance to the 't', you end up with a boring and un-user-friendly site like his.

You didn't teach your parents to use their PCs as much as you taught them how to cope with a terrable UI. There should always be instant feedback to a user's actions, otherwise it starts causing confusion.

I think user interface design is a facinating subject, but, sadly, it is often dismissed by programmers as the user's inability to use technology and not a problem with their UI.

The UseIT alertbox is an excelent source of articles on UI (primarally web based). There is also this interesting look at the 2000 Florida "butterfly ballot".

For a moment I was wondering how such obvious spam got modded up. The "100% free" thing set off my mental spam/advertising filter, and I almost was not even aware of your post due to banner blindness.

But now I see it is entirely relevant.

Good for privacy of course, but as so much of the web is ad-funded is this really going to be good for the web as a whole?

I'm going to say yes.

There was a time before there were adverts all over the web, I'm sure it will work just as well as it used to. We'll just have sites that people want, as opposed to over-bloated sites with more advertising than content. Without adverts and tracking, those articles that are spread over 10 pages when 1 will do (just so there looks like lots of hits) will disappear, or just return back to 1 page articles.

It's not like people look at banner adverts any more anyway.

While this list does represent a decent selection of things to review to ensure that you're ready to release a gui package, what does any of that have to do with usability?.

(remember: using starts with considering installation)

I disagree, they are nearly all points about system administration - that's not usability unless you are considering usability of a computer system from point of view of a sys admin, which I don't think you are.

Nielson's heuristics are a good starting point: http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html

In four mouse clicks I've added that site to my exceptions list. It warned me, I read and understood the warning, I acted.

Good for you, but people like you - and me and the rest of the people here - aren't "normal". Grandma won't know what the hell to do (besides call you). She might even think "those evil hackers" "got her".

Self-signed certs are a potential problem, but Firefox could have worked out a better way of handling it. A more novice-friendly way.

Basically, we need Bruce Schneier and Jakob Nielsen to marry and have children. We'd better contact Dr. Moreau to work out the breeding program. :)

FMI:
http://useit.com/

The AlertBox newsletter is also nice and lets you know when new articles are posted and it isn't very spammy at all.

You know what's better than asking the users?

Not asking the user.

What you really should do is watch the user. If you ask them, they'll tell you what they think they'd do, or what they think you want to hear, or what they think they'd like to see... everything except what is most important: what they really do.

(And I'm not the only one who thinks so.)

JJ

i habe been reading /. for quite a time now and never read the word "usability" ever. (i think most FOSS guys also never heard of it)

Interface Usability is a whole science. There are plenty of books describing exactly what you are trying to reinvent!

For a start you might want to check out Jakob Nielsen's Alterbox Website, which is full of small articles regarding common usability problems.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ ... and if you like his style of writing you might also want to buy his book "Usability Engineering" (which is a must-have when you work in the field of usability IMHO)

useit.com, Jacob Nielson's site. Everyone having anything to do with interface design should read the whole thing.

<sarcasm>Well, you see... our new, half-assed, pieced-together technology will only properly work if we force users to use it the way we want. Remember: it's OUR content, so we get to determine how the USERS use it!</sarcasm>

<serious>UseIt.com.</serious>

When a technology encourages poor design, it's wise to speak out about it. The more people that understand the issues the better. Flash has it's place, but as a standard replacement for basic web pages it just doesn't cut it.

Fash: 99% Bad, written in 2000, still makes as much sense today as it did 8 years ago.

An ideal Flash would be truly integrated in the browser in a seamless way, however it just isn't there. Style sheets and JavaScript are better solutions for most applications.

try googling jakob nielsen's work.

one link: http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html

or, just http://www.useit.com/jakob

as nothing works unless you can use it.

try googling jakob nielsen's work.

one link: http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html

or, just http://www.useit.com/jakob

as nothing works unless you can use it.

If most people are failing to notice/read an important sign, this is most likely a user interface failure than the passender's faults. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Adult Literacy Survey, 48% of the U.S. population has low literacy. (Note that this percentage is found in just about all advanced countries, so it's not some kind of "stupid Americans" thing). To quote that page,

Lower literacy is different than illiteracy: people with lower literacy can read, but they have difficulties doing so.

The most notable difference between lower- and higher-literacy users is that lower-literacy users can't understand a text by glancing at it. They must read word for word and often spend considerable time trying to understand multi-syllabic words.

Lower-literacy users focus exclusively on each word and slowly move their eyes across each line of text. In other words, they "plow" the text, line by line.

That means for 48% of the population, reading a detailed sign is a significant chore such that, with balancing with everything they have to worry about in an airport, they simply don't have time to do it. If that sign is really explaining what is going it, it is going to be more than just a few words. That magazine-sized sign completely and automatically fails for about half the population.

Before anyone goes blaming them, people with low literacy are not that way because they are stupid and lazy or whatever else you might immediately blame them for being. That's just how it is, and it is not going to change anytime soon. And just because they are low literacy does not mean that they don't deserve to know what is going on when they proceed through a needless security checkpoint.

Improving the flow of information for low literacy passengers also improves the flow of information to high literacry passengers too. It's better for everyone. The lack of knowledge of what is going on is what allows this ridiculous security theater to get even worse. The more people know the privacy implications involved (that the man behind the curtain gets to see you naked), the less accepted these machines will be. Why do you think they are hiding their implementation in the first place?

One thing I wish you would have added wouldn't help the truly blind, but it would surely help all the over 40 geezers. That's stop using red on red, blue on blue, and especially gray onb a slightly darker gray.

Stop using non-scalable font sizes that break Firefox's [CTRL][+].

Stop trying to make the screen conform to a given size. People have different sized screens with different resolutions. It isn't paper that you've printed and dictate the size of. Your anal control-freakery just gives you a bad, ugly site with too wide of margins and wasted screen real estate, or worse, horizontal scroll bars.

Actually reading http://www.useit.com/ or http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ would go a long way to fixing both your gripes and mine as well.

Clearly delineated layouts are ***ALMOST*** as important as the color scheme.

Remember the old timers' rule of thumb. If a novice computer user who knows nothing of the business background for the application can easily explain to you what the application is for and how to use it, then, and only then, it's a good interface.

Jakob Neilson lists some interesting research in his book "Designing Web Usability"

http://www.useit.com/jakob/webusability/

People have mentioned high contrast, but it apparently goes deeper than that.

If reading speed matters to you, there seems to be an ordering:

* Black on White (like standard paper, and is the fastest to read)
* White on black (slightly slower, but pretty small in measurable difference)
* Other high contrast (bigish drop off from the top two, but still good)

Low contrast is just bad, period. You're asking the brain to do alot more work in separating letters from the background.

Interestingly, font also matters for reading speed. Serif would be the best (with appropriate caveats), and is probably based on the fact that much of what you typically read in english probably defaults to this font. The funkier the font, the slower people will be in character recognition.

So your grumbling boils down to a) Flash and b) your comparative lack of familiarity with the Discovery Channel sites.

No, my point is that Wikipedia is easier to get information out of. That's because they understand that fancy design reduces utility. Further, their only reason for existence is to provide answers, whereas the Discovery Channel has different purposes, like promoting their show, reinforcing the fan base, and selling my attention to advertisers.

And suggesting that it's somehow more efficient to become familiar with every primary-source site on the web rather than just one? You can't expect to be taken seriously with statements like that, can you?

it is silly to use Wikipedia when there are better/more direct sources. Basic critical thinking skills will allow you to see that.

Basic critical thinking skills? Yes, please use them before posting. It will save us all some time.

More direct sources are very rarely better for a quick overview, which is why I have shelves of dictionaries, almanacs, concordances, indexes, encyclopedias, guides, maps, analyses, abstracts, and literature surveys. I also have plenty of primary sources, and go to them when needed. But the whole point of an encyclopedia, on-line or off-, is to make basic info more conveniently available than primary sources. Which is what 99% of people want as a starting point. If you don't, fine. Post your little link and move along.

For an introduction to UI design, here are some good resources:

• The Design of Everyday Things (everybody has to read it)
• User Interface Design for Programmers (the Cliff's Notes, but possibly everything you need to know)
• Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Application Design Mistakes (somewhat web-centric)
• Tog's First Principles of Interaction Design (Tog is Bruce Tognazzini, an Apple UI legend)
• Persuasive Technology (it's not just for evil scientists)

You need to read up about Human Computer Interaction.

Also, the guidelines for a web application or mobile application will be different to that of GUI application.

You should read up about accessibility, should your application be used in government organisations then it may often need to be able to be used by people with eyesight or mobility defects.

Important points, never rely on colour to differentiate things. Not everyone has reliable colour vision.

Involve end users where possible.

Read Jacob Nielsen's opinions, don't take them as gospel but he does have some good points.

http://www.useit.com/

Stick to the guidelines of the OS you are developing the application for. Use common well established key shortcuts.

Jakob Nielsen once famously stated that the "perfect user interface" will require 1Tbps.

Of course I live in America so if I got 2Mbps through my broadband connection I'd be happy.

Hire someone that knows what they are doing.

That's the easiest, but likely most costly, way out. But the original question was "how do I teach myself graphical design, particularly in the context of websites?"

To answer that, I would suggest there's a lot of a) reading and b) practice involved. You don't have to go to school to learn web graphic design, but you do have work hard at learning it. But, taking a course will just make it a lot easier. "Art" stuff is harder to just pickup and do, unlike "tech" stuff. This coming from a guy who was going to go to art school but opted for a Computer Science degree while studying CGI and ending up as a web developer.

Here are some books:

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design

An excellent book that expands on CSS techniques as well as gets into how to visualize site design to best markup your website (without tables per say). Later on it will teach you how to look for inspiration in print media (magazines, newspapers, etc) and how to keep a "diary" of design ideas by cutting and pasting different images into a scrap book. It'll also cover different design aspects such as fixed vs liquid layouts, pixel vs em sizing, and get into CSS3 stuff that's coming down the pike (still) with the Advanced Layout Method. This is a must read, but requires some good CSS knowledge.

Bullet Proof Web Design

This book is less about design and more about how HTML/CSS markup to make your design easier to do without getting into table layouts. It'll make your job easier and might give you some design ideas. And since you cannot have one without the other...

Web Standards Solutions

Another excellent web development book. Like "bulletproof" above, it's a very fast read but worth it's weight in gold. Can you find this stuff on the Intranet? Sure, particularly from A List Apart, who's authers regularly post their articles too, but it's worth having a nice colored book for fast reference.

The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Voices That Matter)

There's a website for this book, The CSS Zen Garden, that you can use and probably pass over this book (I did, but I'm still interested in adding this one to my collection). This will teach you about how HTML and CSS differ and what can be accomplished by good CSS and semantic HTML. It'll probably also get your inspired as there are a ton of gorgeous examples in the book.

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

You cannot talk about web site design without taking into consideration Usability and Steve Krug's book is probably the best thing you can read for you and your visitors. He's a nice guy (I've contacted him via email after reading his book and he kindly responded), his book is funny, short, and chalk full of full color graphical examples. You can also read from Nielson's website Useit.com to get more education on usability but there's a good deal of people who feel Nielson's "requirements" can be taken with a grain of salt.

I found this study that found that green text on a yellow background is the easiest to read:
http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/AHNCUR.html

They only tested for dark colors on light background and not light colors on dark background so I wonder if it really is the case that green on black is the best or if other color combinations are actually better. I know this doesn't have anything to bear on the aesthetic appearance of a website, but I thought it was interesting. I mean look at Jacob Nielson's site and how ugly a supposed usability expert's site is.

Dumb mods. For their education, this thread is about usability issues caused by increasingly wide screens and the inability of old-media to break out of a narrow-columns mindset. TFA links to a website designed to be taller than it is wider, and that website is showing a monitor that is very much wider than it is tall. This is irony of a very mild sort.

Somewhere about 15 words per line is optimum. It cuts both ways, as making lines too short increases eyeball 'flyback', which reduces reading speeds and hinders comprehension.

Things get even worse when you have to re-aquire you position in a document after scrolling text into view.

Go to the BBC, who show as little as 4 words per line. Note how they actually cause line breaks in the top and most popular stories columns.

Now go to Ars where they have 3 strips of banner across the top, meaning I have to scroll them off the screen to see an article posted 2 hours ago. Also see how the middle column causes flyback at about 5 words, making scanning the text harder. Many readers simply will not bother to look at content that is in too narrow a column.

Now worship at Jakob's Altar See how its far easier to read with the wider columns. The actual articles are shown absent of sidebars, at about 15 words/line.

Im at 2080x1024, and some web pages and applications that were designed on an A4 pad suffer usability issues. In particular, PDF documents and Excel seem determined to show as little on the screen as possible. This is just going to get worse as screens get wider.

My point was that a 1-sentence summary declaration that "users are retards" getting moderated as "+5 Insightful" is a telling reflection of the lack of tolerance and willingness to understand user needs that has kept Linux in backend environments for so long. Most users were raised with Windows PC's throughout their lives (except for elites like you and I who were exposed to Linux), so their expectation that common games running on all of their freinds computers would run on theirs is not necessarily a reflection of their lack of intelligence. Consoles have a long history of heterogeneity, so this expectation does not exist; it is an apples to oranges analogy.

But if a refutation is what you want, then here it is: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010204.html

Regards,
Shane

What are the issues in designing an interface that is clean, easy to understand, and easy to use? What are things to be considered? What are things to be avoided? What are good over-all philosophies of UI design? Reading the questions posted, I'd recommend becoming familiar with the broader principles that inform nearly any sort of design; then narrow your reading and research to specific GUI-oriented design. Developing a healthy sense and understanding for what makes an effective user experience is important to any sort of consumer design work (and effective UI design definitely is about understanding your consumer/target audience); "usability" as a discipline has yielded to the larger field of Experience Design (XD) as a key area of study for GUI-designers. Let's start from the 10,000-foot view: Books I'd recommend for your conceptual skills are: --Bill Buxton's *Sketching User Experiences: Getting the design right and the right design*. Bill's background at Xerox PARC and later at SGI/Alias|Wavefront (creators of the Maya 3D CGI software, among others) have made him a pretty revered figure in the industry. This book's a terrific primer on the process of thinking about design. --The upcoming O'Reilly release, written by Adaptive Path, *Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World*. What's the distinction between product and service? Adaptive Path--the outfit from which came Jesse James Garrett's seminal white paper on Ajax three years ago--started thinking about this as they examined the success of the iTunes and iPod experience; the book grew from there. Moving down to 5,000 feet: For best-practices from the usability perspective (hey, an easy-to-use site usually has a well-designed GUI), it's hard to beat the two canonical books: --Steve Krug's *Don't Make Me Think!* (now in its second edition) --Jakob Nielsen's *Designing Web Usability* Both books arrived as website usability emerged as the successor to the David Siegel School of "third generation web design" in the late 90's. Nielsen codified usability best practices through a research-intensive method, and Krug made usability accessible for the creatives who thought Nielsen a bit pedantic. Solid, foundational material that hasn't needed radical revising in nearly 10 years. Ground-level: Here's where you and/or your team go to work, and I heartily recommend you check out another O'Reilly title, *Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design*, by Jenifer Tidwell. There are several solid tutorials out there on in-the-trenches GUI design, but I've still seen nothing as effective as this one. Hoping this helps, --Steve Weiss Executive Editor O'Reilly Media Links: http://www.billbuxton.com/ http://adaptivepath.com/ http://www.useit.com/ http://www.sensible.com/ http://jtidwell.net/

Altough usefull on some circunstances, that is bad advice to give to an unknown audience. All the above things make software good for a fraction of the population (and is very focused on it), but neglet the others.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, from Alan Cooper is a very nice introduction to usability that will make you think about it, not just devour gidelines. After you read it, you can search Jakob Nielsen's bibliography for specific techniques about usability, then, if you want more info, you can search it for actual gidelines.

By the way, Nielsen has a site where he archives some very nice articles for free. It is focused on web, not applications, but he goes out of his way to explain what generalizes.

Most of his advice is utter bunk, and his though process is entirely disconnected from logic and reality.

The top book in this area are generally considered to be..

About Face by Alan Cooper. Version 3 is out
Don't make me think by Steve Kung. This is for web.
Anything by Jakob Neilsen. Now mainly focuses on web but he is the main UI person around. Has a web site http://www.useit.com/
GUI Bloopers by Jeff Johnson a little dated but far too much informaion about every aspect of the user interface.

Then you have the books for the language or framework you are working on. Java, Apple and Microsoft all have books on how the user interface should work for thier environment and language. Most of theses can be freely downloaded or read online.
Then for a higher level look along with other information _Code Complete 2_.
If you can make it through all of thoses you will be one of the top UI people around.

I particularly User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky.

If you're designing web software, then read through the archives of Use It by Don Norman. I don't like his books - Designing Web Usability is the only paperback I've ever bought that had usability issues! But he's mostly on the ball.

Tips are all over the internet. I'd start with the Alertbox by Jakob Nielson (ex-Sun employee, now a usability consultant) and anything his group has published on user interfaces. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/

My pet peeves in GUIs ... the designers ignore that people actually have to read the GUI, and treat it like it's supposed to be admired for artistic. For a GUI, bland and boring is good, functional is the goal.

• Gaudy color schemes: High-contrast is good, but that means high tonal contrast, not screaming red on puke green. Dark text on a pale background is the best for most users, and the colorblind. To test your design, print it out on a black and white printer. If you can't read it, you have the wrong colors
• Too-subtle color schemes: Pale shades of blue with gentle grey text, unreadably misty and soothing.
• Reversed tones: pale shades on dark, for optical reasons need special spacing if you don't want the verticals to blur together.
• Bizarre fonts and font sizes. I remember one supposedly great CD player software that had a jagged "lightning bolt" font for its control labels ... couldn't read them at all, so I deleted it.
• Odd names for things that have well-known common names. Don't call the mute button the "audio whiffer", even if the developers call it that.
• Multiple names for the same control, on different menus. Pick a name and use it all over the GUI.

I've heard (and from my experiences I think is true) that people who are good at development are not necessarily the best for design, and vice versus. There's always exceptions, and I'm sure some on this site will say that they can do both well. If I was independently writing a software (for the general population) I'd want someone to do the UI, because my mind doesn't work that way.

Besides making UIs that look 'pretty' these are ideas that I've been pointed to in classes here and here. They are useful for both developers and designers of GUIs.

There are a lot of people who think that web, Ajax and Flash applications are a very bad thing. Not just users, but also noted developers and usability experts.

More thoughts on why Ajax is bad for web applications: this is about how Ajax apps are often very fragile and usually don't work as expected.

Ephemeral Web-Based Applications: usability guru Jakob Nielsen writes this great article that goes into depth about how most web apps are complete failures when it comes to usability. Even something as basic as navigation quickly becomes unintuitive and difficult.

Why the .NET framework makes for bad web applications: this explains why .NET apps using some of the latest technology around is often a bad idea.

You're not on a fucking plane (and if you are, it doesn't matter)!: Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson talks about how we don't need web apps everywhere.

There are a lot of anti-web app articles here. Having done a lot of web apps for years now i think a lot of them are spot on although they are really against web apps when web apps probably are the best tool for the job:
Web apps: taking five years to get to where desktop apps were a decade earlier?

A JavaScript tip built on years of experience: try to avoid JavaScript.

Why is Web page layout still such a problem?

Web 2.0: A serious case of diarRIA.

AJAX: the "ricer" of the software development world?

Keep the Web in the browser, please.

The wasteful nature of pointless JavaScript effects.

An example of the sorry state of JavaScript today.

The Web is inherently an inadequate application development platform.

Where is the developer productivity increase with JavaScript-based Web applications?

A great Web developer is a waste of a really great application developer.

Like John Gilmore's site.

I used to feel that way. Then I started using Foxit PDF reader.

The problem isn't with PDF in itself. PDF is perceived as a problem for two reasons:

1) Adobe Acrobat. Get rid of it, for goodness sake. Use something else. PDF isn't slow, Adobe's crappy reader is slow.
2) Web developers cannot resist putting TPPs on websites. What's a TPP, you ask? A Totally Pointless PDF. People: if you have a website, there's one way to get me to NEVER read your content. How? By putting it in PDF. The ONE exception is this: if you have a book or reference manual, then that is an appropriate use of PDF. But tell me that I am downloading a PDF. Don't disguise your PDF as another web page by just putting it behind a normal link. When I click a link, unless I am warned that it's a PDF, I expect an HTML page. PDF just interrupts the flow of the web. Don't believe me? The just google usability and PDF. You'll get lots of stuff like this: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714.html.

PDF is like other overused "web" technologies like flash: useful when used properly, and annoying as hell when overused.

To say that the study is not conclusive until enough time has passed for users to get acclimated is irrelevant. The test was on today's users using today's technology so we know what's happening now, not at some undefined point in the future. I'm sure in 100 years time we'll all be experts at programming our video recorders too - but that's hardly useful information.

Also, some people have mentioned the small sample size. In usability testing, this is not necessarily a problem. See: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html and http://www.measuringusability.com/sample.htm

I'm not defending the study, I'm just pointing out that there's more to such research than you might assume.

Umm, that was more than a decade after the published HTTP standards included the PATH_INFO environment variable, which gives the program everything past the file pathname portion of a URL. This was essentially defined as a string that the invoked CGI program would interpret however it wishes.

And actually using this feature as part of the user interface isn't new either. In 1999, Jakob Nielsen described the nature of URLs as a part a Web site's user interface.