We, designers, need to consider two things when adding “beautiful” enhancements to our designs.

1. Responsive and intuitive page elements
2. Branding and consistency of theme.

Focusing on these two things will give every pixel in a design a purpose and will contribute to the website’s overall usability.

I am extremely excited to announce that I’m joining the amazing web team at Intuit. They’ve been a source of inspiration for me for a few years, so it’s an incredible feeling to be on the brink of working with them.

It’s been a long road to get here, and now the fun really begins. Hopefully I’ll get the chance to talk more about it later. Exciting things ahead!

On March 5, Tufte was appointed by Obama to a panel to advise the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which monitors the way the $787 billion in the stimulus package is being spent.

Tufte’s initial work will be on the recovery.gov website, which is the primary way the board will conduct business transparently to the American public.

Wonder if he brought his own litter of kittens, or will be borrowing them from DC shelters…?

The best use for real time communications on the web is not to simply bring in the most recent information on a topic, but rather to make clear that others are experiencing or interacting with the same content at the same time.

How would sites or web apps be different if you could see who else is there with you in each moment?

Check out this awesome job of explaining user personas through a fun comic created by Brad Colbow. Some topics are more easily understood when presented this way. (at least for me). The comic style brings what is essentially a “slightly” dry subject to life.

A list of more resources about user personas and mental models are listed at the end of the post.

But seriously, we need more ponies on our websites ;-P

• Minimalist designs will become (even) more popular this year. Simple, elegant, classy, fast page response times. Collage/handrawn design will calm down a bit
• Maybe some professional looking monotone stuff with colorful details
• Solid colors
• More HTML5 and CSS3 implementation instead of a trend like letterpress or glossy buttons (those were the days)
• A lot of rounded corners, RGBA transparency, and drop shadows using CSS3
• More JQuery and more integration of social media in design
• Massive typography
• Serif fonts will get more attention
• More people will use custom font embedding (e.g. FontSquirrel, OpenType, sIFR)
• Less ie6 support!
• The year of mobile design…With the proliferation of smart phones, tablets and other devices, how are we designers going to adopt Flash and other platforms to design for mobile devices?

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
- Charles Mingus

Yesterday I came across this interesting web accessibility article at CNN.com, talking about how big internet companies such as Yahoo and Google are embracing it.

We should all start an accessibility push in our organizations, here’s why:

• There are about 60 million people in the U.S. who can’t use a computer to get on the Internet in the normal fashion. For those people, a mix of screen reader software, keyboards with special buttons, and even motion-sensing Web cameras must take the place of the mouse and QWERTY keyboard.




• With a rapidly aging population in many parts of the world — notably the U.S. — accessibility requirements will become useful for today’s crop of baby boomers as they grow older




• In order to do business with the U.S. government, companies must comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which insists that electronic and information technology products sold to government agencies be designed with disabled employees in mind, and that government services produced by contractors consider disabled citizens in equal measure.

Performance, internationalization, and accessibility are not a feature, they should all be standard.

There is a world of differences to consider when designing for web or designing for desktop applications:

From fundamental interactions to keyboard driven navigational paradigms to accessibility issues to screen layout to basic behavior and reaction of buttons, links, etc…we have to consider that a product with a rich client and a web client are two completely separate applications striving to assist the user in meeting the same goals. Of course, it is a little more complicated than that but perhaps it get us going in the right direction.

1. Build every feature any customer would ever want: Apparently, by having all the features anyone can ever imagine, “eliminate any possible reason that customers might buy a competitors’ product”. That’s a wrong conclusion and a really bad idea. Software that tries to be everything to everyone generally sucks. It becomes bloated, hard to use, and in need of big up-front training, which is probably a  good definition of enterprise software right there.




2. Become a sales force-driven company: Hire a bunch of sales people and make them convince people to buy your software. Side step the actual users, the developers, and go straight to management. The sales people will invariably promise more than you have and drive you even deeper into “build everything for everyone”.