noisylime

Sometimes you just want to get the information you’re after, save it and move along. And you can’t. Usability nightmares — which are rather the daily routine than exceptions — appear every now and again; and usually almost every time you type your search keywords in Google. In his article “Why award-winning websites are so awful” Gerry McGovern points out that the shiny surface wins awards. Real substance wins customers. and that is absolutely true. Nevermind what design you have, and nevermind which functionality you have to offer — if your visitors don’t understand how they can get from point A to point B they won’t use your site.

In almost every professional design (except from special design showcases such as, e.g., portfolios) you need to offer your visitors

• clear, self-explanatory navigation,
• precise text-presentation,
• search functionality,
• visible and thought-out site structure.

And that means that you simply have to folow the basic rules of usability and common sense. You want to communicate with your visitors, don’t drive them away, right?

In this article we take a look at some of the recent usability nightmares you should avoid designing functional and usable web-sites. At the end of the article you’ll also find 8 usability check-points you should probably be aware of.

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Jonathan Schemoul has released SmoothGallery 2.0, a javascript gallery and slideshow system allowing you to have simple and smooth (cross-fading…) image galleries, slideshows, showcases and more.

Why would you use this over others out there? Jon thinks that:

Unlike other systems out there, JonDesign’s SmoothGallery is designed from the ground up to be standard compliant: You can feed it from any document, using custom css selectors.

And even better, this solutions is very lightweight: The javascript file is only 24kb.

The major new features are:

• Back and forward buttons of your browser now controls the gallery. Moreover, you can send that url up there to a friend, he will see exactly the same slide on the gallery than you. This is called HistoryManager. See a demo.
• You can have multiple galleries on one place and switch between galleries. This is called Gallery Sets. See a demo.
• Tired of that smooth fade-in of pictures ? SmoothGallery now supports transitions between slides. See a demo.
• Don’t want to use all of your bandwidth for some galleries ? SmoothGallery now includes a real preloader and loads only what is needed, while giving feedback to the user on the progress (Most of the time, users won’t even see a loading bar, as SmoothGallery tries to load what the user could want to see).

[via Ajaxian]

If you’ve seen a demo of Adobe AIR or Flex recently, you’ve probably seen Buzzword, a Flash-based word processor. Compared to Microsoft Word 2007 or Pages ‘08, Buzzword is unimpressive and underpowered. However, compared to any Ajax word processor, Buzzword is a revelation. A web-enabled word processor that doesn’t limit you to the incredibly basic typographical engine used in the live HTML editing everyone else uses? Hey, that’s pretty neat. In fact, Buzzword’s text layout capabilities are pretty dang cool.

Add to it some great collaboration features, animation eye-candy, and a well-designed, innovative, and polished UI and you’ve got people asking the question once again: wait, do I use Ajax or Flash?

Buzzword has been around for a while; why is it in the news today? Adobe acquired Virtual Ubiquity, the company behind Buzzword. And they’ll be integrating it into a new offering: Adobe Share, which is basically their competitor to all of the Web 2.0 Office Suite plays (and gives you a cool way to embed PDFs in your web page).

When it comes to Ajax vs. Flash, Dion and I have always been pragmatists; when we can use one to enhance the other, they should work together. While Buzzword is not yet embeddable into your own custom applications and not yet integrated with Adobe’s Share suite, it does make one wonder if the future of Web-based word processors is Ajax or Flash.

Do you think Buzzword is a compelling improvement over the Google Docs word processor or Zoho Writer? Or just what some would expect from the Flash of word processors: distracting eye candy that is ultimately useless.

Just a few years ago, I remember a client telling they needed a Word-like experience in the browser, and I remember telling them, “Sorry, it’s the Web.” Amazing how far we’ve come in such a short time…

[via Ajaxian]

Adobe released version 1.6 of their Spry Javascript/Ajax/Effects framework. The big focus for this release was compliance with web standards, making big changes to promote unobtrusiveness and progressive enhanement:

As I mentioned in my previous post, this release is about raising our game with respects to web standards, accessibility and progressive enhancement, among other topics. We wrote a set of articles discussing these topics. You can check them out at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/articles/best_practices/.

In addition, the Spry team spruced up their selector traversal capability with the introduction of the Element Selector utlity:

Ah, the sweet Element Selector. Along the lines of jQuery and DOMQuery, the Element Selector (SpryDOMUtils.js) is a utility used for grabbing multiple parts of the page using CSS Selectors and applying functions to them. Our speed is on par with other tools and we have robust and accurate CSS3 support. Read about it here and check it out here.

Finally, the team has created a Spry Updated for Dreamweaver CS3 which will provide extensive support for the Spry framework within Adobe’s editor product. This extension can be download via the Adobe Labs site.

You can download Spry v1.6 from here.

[via Ajaxian]