Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog Comments

Jan: Hierarchy - Design's pecking order

nospam@example.com (Jan) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:10:47 -0400

very nice

James Dowsett: Primary Navigation Image Replacement

nospam@example.com (James Dowsett) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 05:13:43 -0400

Hi,

Regarding Method #3: You can get rid of the long dashed focus border that shows in Firefox by adding 'overflow: hidden' to the appropriate 'a' selectors in the css.

It would seem Google does not penalise the use of such techniques, as long as they are used correctly:

http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2008/05/05/image_replac/

Cheers

Jared: Primary Navigation Image Replacement

nospam@example.com (Jared) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:45:38 -0400

Thank you for the assistance. It worked perfectly.

Dave Yuknat: It's Called Usability Testing, not User Testing

nospam@example.com (Dave Yuknat) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:38:04 -0400

Ditto what Anna said.

Each time a Project Mgr or a biz owner asks me, "when are we doing user testing"? They are talking about testing with users. And that's fine w/ me. I'm not going to correct them!

Anna Marshall: It's Called Usability Testing, not User Testing

nospam@example.com (Anna Marshall) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:35:17 -0400

Your points on the idea that you're testing a site, not the user, are well taken. But I think "user testing" can be appropriately used to mean "testing with users." Usability testing is a narrow category -- suggests your only looking at how easily users can perform a particular set of tasks, not necessarily about their first impressions, overall reaction, information retention...

Michael Julson: Scaled Visio Wireframe Templates & Stencils

nospam@example.com (Michael Julson) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:18:00 -0400

Thanks for the great stencil. Could I talk you into applying a license to the stencil like from Creative Commons or GPL? I would like to work with the stencil and make some wireframes that I could distribute, but I'm nervous doing this being that there's no license.

BTW, two quick notes of feedback.

It would be great if there was some way of applying a pixel ruler so that sizing of columns, images, etc.. was somewhat accurate. Perhaps there's a way of doing this in visio, but I haven't seen anything other than metric/standard measurements.

Second, I looked for a way of contacting you about this and couldn't find an email form or anything. It would be great if your website had a method of sending a private note.

Again, thanks for the great stencil.

Matt Humphrey: Fly-out Menus are Evil

nospam@example.com (Matt Humphrey) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:08:10 -0400

Dave, you actually raise a good point that I think gets overlooked very often. Laptop/touch pad users tend to get overlooked when drop-down and fly-out menus are considered as options for site navigation design. These navigation styles are very complicated to maneuver on a touch pad. The more mobile we get, the more arguments there are against these navigation styles.

Any reports from iPhone users on how these work?

Matt Humphrey: It's Called Usability Testing, not User Testing

nospam@example.com (Matt Humphrey) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:58:14 -0400

To add to the semantic mix-ups, there's also User Acceptance Testing (UAT) which usually consists of testing the site or application against its original requirements to ensure the correct functionality.

Thanks for the clarifications, Sophie!

Dave Wittzel: Fly-out Menus are Evil

nospam@example.com (Dave Wittzel) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:51:17 -0400

Hear! Hear! Speaking as a user, I have particular problems when using a touchpad.

George: Fly-out Menus are Evil

nospam@example.com (George) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 08:58:51 -0400

And still the latest Amazon.com uses fly-out menus. Amazing.

Mal: Primary Navigation Image Replacement

nospam@example.com (Mal) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:24:06 -0400

Hi

Cool technique BUT when you increase text size the text underneath can peep out.

Depending on the height of your nav item, you might have to make your menu text really small to keep hidden which would make it harder to read when images are off...

Hmmm... could you use some sort of clipping mask for the text? (using overflow or something?

Cheers

Jeremie Blehm: A+ for UPS Whiteboard Ads. F for Website.

nospam@example.com (Jeremie Blehm) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:04:54 -0500

After nearly a year someone finally listened to you!
New ups site! ups.com/whiteboard

Rob: Craigslist 404 - lost dog

nospam@example.com (Rob) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:07:49 -0500

Because a picture of a dog, does not indicate being lost. The use of poorly selected images if common problem. Also, another common problem is using icons that can not easily be deciphered. I thought it was an image of a cow.

Maybe a better picture would be fat fingers hitting a keyboard.

Eric: Social Networking - Facebook

nospam@example.com (Eric) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:45:35 -0500

This link goes to a story my school did about cyber-bullying on Facebook.

http://voice.paly.net/view_story.php?id=6406

Oscar: Primary Navigation Image Replacement

nospam@example.com (Oscar) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:45:58 -0500

Another drawback of the first three methods is that they've all been used by spamemrs/blackhat SEO's to try to game search engines, like Google. So now, google recognizes those techniques and penalizes your content/site if it uses them.

Also, why prepend #nav to your list item IDs? You could use the following selector just as well:
#navigation #Mission {},

Which becomes more powerful if you ever take that list (which might be auto-generated by a CMS) and put it in another div, say #sidebar, then you just use:
#sidebar #Mission {}

Although, if you've got both #navigation and #sidebar on the page, you'd have to change mission from an ID to a CLASS, but you wouldn't lose specificity of getting to those listitems:
#navigation li.Mission{}
#sidebar li.Mission{}

its a little more typing, but then you could shorten #navigation to #nav, if you had to.

PS - can you make the comment textarea wider?