For those of us who put together print styles for our sites, we’ve probably tossed around the idea of embedding QR codes so that users can quickly get back to a page they have printed. In the hardcopy version of my article for .net Magazine, “Make your website printable with…
Nuns taking photos of each other at the Peak on Hong Kong island with their Hello Kitty iPad (which could result in a niche Tumblr). I had the pleasure of traveling to Hong Kong for the UXHK conference just last week (the conference was the week prior, but I stayed…
Bruce Lawson tweeted out a seemingly random musing today that I have pondered myself — what if, while on a mobile device and surfing a RWD web site, I want the desktop version of a site? There are many reasons as a user that this might be the case, ranging…
Here’s the TL;DR: Google Maps sniffs a browser’s user agent string. If it finds Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, then it kicks it over to the m.google.com mobile home page. So let’s be clear. It’s 2013 and one of the biggest companies on the internet is using a sniffer to…
Now that the (Western, my favorite) holiday season is upon us, the tradition of advent calendars whose chocolate is replaced with web-related tips and articles is back. This year’s crop is missing some from last year, but there’s still good stuff to be found. If you know of any others,…
We should be familiar with anti-patterns in user interface design — counter-intuitive or ineffective user interface techniques. Dark patterns are user interface design patterns that intentionally try to steer users into taking actions that are in the best interest of the site owner, not the user. Sadly, users encounter these…
This image gleefully stolen from The Page That No One Will Ever See. Now it may be a seen page. Yesterday an eye-catching headline popped up in my Twitter feed: 6 Reasons Facebook and Twitter Are More Important Than a Website (which is a different message than the author’s “infographic”…
My Twitter stream and the headlines of sites across the web yesterday lit up with Facebook’s CEO blaming its stock price (failure to meet hyped expectation) on HTML5 (and its failure to make the Facebook mobile experience suck less). Even ZDNet jumped on that bandwagon with a post titled Facebook’s…
I have been working on a slow and plodding redesign of my personal site and am playing around with some navigation ideas. I wanted to create a JavaScript-free and image-free radial menu, an idea I toyed with a couple years ago and abandoned due to the lack of CSS support…
It’s not hard to stumble across diatribes against IE6 (and 7 and 8) users across forums peopled by web developers. As a web developer there is no denying that my desire to play with the new and shiny is hampered by my need to support users on older browsers and…
Stuck for ideas for an article? Did you hear that Facebook’s IPO isn’t netting them enough billions of dollars and so is referred to as a failure? Have you heard about the hot new technique for making generic sites mobile-friendly? Need to get people to click through to your article…
Many organizations don’t have the budget to guide them through a full translation / localization project, and some don’t even know where to start. In late 2009 I wrote about low/no-cost options from Google (machine translation) and Facebook (human-powered): Facebook and Google Want to Translate Your Site A new option…