Blog Posts about Usability

Forgive me for this superficial analogy, but sometimes I feel like our daily ever-vigilant efforts to stop ebook piracy are akin to my trying to pull up the bermuda grass in my backyard. I can yank up all the weeds I see, but the runners have already spread underground, and new weeds will pop up tomorrow in other areas of my lawn.

The Web doesn't constrain us to the physical limitations of print on paper, author Zoe Mickley Gillenwater, of Flexible Web Design, reminds us. It's not print design. If you are a designer who is used to controlling every pixel in a fixed-width Web page layout, you're in denial about how much flexibility you can build in to your pages to make them user-friendlier.

As an acquisitions editor, some of my favorite moments are when books I signed months ago are first delivered to the author, hot off the press. All the frustration and deadlines and sleepless nights and self-doubt the authors endured during the editorial process melt away into glee and excitement. I got to experience that twice this week.

Q: What is a Web Designer anymore? It was easier to make Web sites all by yourself, even 5 years ago, but now there is just too much technology for one person to handle. If I want to make a Web site for a very small business, don't have I to be web "developer" now?

The short answer is that everybody is a Web designer now.

The slightly longer answer is that Web designers are practitioners of a highly specialized discipline that requires years of study to truly master.

The long answer is that a good Web designer is a good designer, and this can come “naturally” or from training, but is not medium-dependent. However, a professional Web designer has to understand the medium well enough to know its strengths and limitations. Any designer can pump out something that looks brilliant when displayed in a Web browser window, but is slow to load, static when loaded, and completely unusable.

Do you have a question about Web standards, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, interaction design, user experience, or Web typography? Maybe you just want to know "How'd they do that?" Ask me questions, and each week I will select a question to answer via my Peachpit.com blog.

I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by and inspired by creative professionals my entire career. As a result of the sum of those experiences, I feel as passionately about the core principles of visual communications as practicing creatives do. Yes, creatives value aesthetics. Yes, they value inventiveness over stylization—but not at the expense of functionality. They are thoughtful, smart business professionals who value communication of real meaning over decoration.

Your Website can have a perfect user interface, an exquisite, cutting-edge design, and all the whiz-bang features in the world, but if your intended audience never finds it, all your hard work is for nothing. Users don’t just find you by accident; you have to attract them. New Riders’ author Aarron Walter provides a checklist you can follow.

Nine years ago, when I signed Jeffrey Zeldman to do his first book for New Riders, Taking Your Talent to the Web, it was in what I call the “dot-com hoo-hah days” when all things Web were golden. A year later he finished the book, and it was published. By that time, the dot-com collapse had changed everything.

Why are so many designers and creatives also musicians?