test objects design

study done by W3C in June of 1997 on using HTML, CSS1 and PNG and speeding downloads. Very interesting findings as in “Replacing images with CSS reduces the number of separate resources referenced, and therefore reduces the protocol requests and possible name resolutions required to retrieve them.” AND “…the number of bytes needed to represent the content is reduced by a factor of MORE THAN 4, even before any transport compression is applied. Second, there is no need to fetch the external image, and since HTML and CSS can coexist in the same file one HTTP request is saved. ”

Now you know why the pages load so slow on the websites you visit. More evidence for Browser Upgrade Initiative.

Bert Bos. One of the designers of CSS specifications has a great essay about software specifications and how to write them so people can read them. As he puts it “writing specs is a form of human communication. There is one word that summorizes all the fancy keywords of this essay: USABILITY ”

What a great guy. Thanks Bert.

a quote from Ed Kit. “design a filter for the translation that occurs between one phase to another”. The context of this quote is the software engineering is nothing but the translation of intentions from one phase to another. First there is this thought in our head that we want to build software. The stakeholders get together to hash out requirements. This is a crucial moment because languaging requirements is the hardes thing to do in software. This is the phase of translation of our intentions on paper so others can understand what we want the product to do. This phase. This translation is the place where most of the defects in software gets produced. So how do we design the filter?.. let’s get back to this soon.

It is time to grow up. Give up your childish ways and become a man (or a woman; yeah reminds me of Monhty Python). The Browser Upgrade Initiative is in full force. CSS all the way. Ban those Table tags and start fresh. I shall redesign this site with CSS only. This will be a cool adventure.

Ev reports something Tim O’Reilly (paraphrasing someone else?). said at P2P conference. “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”. That struck a thought with me. What if the skill of building a website is to create a context in which other people can communicate, be heard, generate something new. I mean. why do you visit websites? Yeah-sure- to find things, shop, news, quotes on your stocks but WHY do you visit certain websites over and over again. Why are you so drawn to them?. Maybe because those websites were build around the context of creating a space for conversation. I shall revisit this. Can’t quite put my mind on it right now.

Jeff Raskin is The Interface Revolutionary. I have yet to meet a computer user who is happy with the way computers treat them. And most of their pain is caused by bad interface design. That includes overcomplex software, nonexistent manuals and help systems that themselves need help.
Also check out his new book Humane Interface, The: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems

OK, there is one principle: You want your customers’ money. Anything that helps them give it to you is good. Whatever gets in the way is bad. Frank Hayes shines the light on User Testing your web application. Not beauty. Not legibility. Not entertainment value. Not logic. Not whiz-bang flashiness. Just the ability to do business.

Another example why you need to test your web application for error handling. This is from Jim Carr at eCommerce Business and I quote “Barnes & Noble.com’s appear instead to nail the poor beast to the highway, leaving it as roadkill. At least, that’s how I felt after ordering a book — and not receiving it for almost three weeks — from the No. 2 online bookseller. My problems started from the get-go. When prompted to enter my gift-certificate number at the bn.com shopping cart, I apparently typed the wrong number. (The certificate contains separate “serial” and “verification” numbers.) This left bn.com’s back-end systems unable to process my order.”

Ed Kit shares testing story

“One of the big airlines had a new discount in place to sell a block of seats at a special rate. They told agents nationwide that this program was now available. It was a fairly small change so they didn’t bother to test it. There was the proverbial one line of code, an “if” clause, that was programmed wrong.”…”They sold none of those seats for three or four months and lost over $50 million in revenue.”

Ouch!

“Information architecture tends to be concerned with the whole, the structure of a site. Interaction design is more at the page level,” says Peter Merholz, a user experience consultant in San Francisco. “It’s like the difference between the person who designed the supermarket and the person who designed the checkout line bar code reader.” at
The Web’s Master Builders | Computerworld Story…