“Companies waste fortunes seeking a magic bullet for Search Engine Optimization. But the keys to honest, effective web findability are appropriate writing and semantic markup. Aarron Walter’s wonderfully lucid and informative book tells everything you need to know to get your web content (or your client’s) in front of as many appreciative readers as possible.”
- Jeffrey Zeldman, founder, Happy Cog Studios author, Designing With Web Standards, 2nd Edition
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User Experience Designer Robert Hoekman Jr has written a pair of wonderfully lucid books that examine best practices in interaction design. In Designing the Obvious, and Designing the Moment, Hoekman extolls the virtues of understanding specific user tasks rather than generalized user personas. It’s easiest to design usable interfaces when the activity it serves is clearly understood.
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On February 26th, 2007, Robert Hoekman Jr., author of Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design, spoke to my User Centered Interface Design class at The Art Institute of Atlanta via Skype. The topic of our conversation was Robert’s current work as an Interaction Designer and Usability Specialist, and his task-centric design approach that, instead of focusing on nebulous personas, focus on how tasks are performed. Once a task is fully understood, the knowledge can be extrapolated to any demographic.
Robert’s lecture was recorded and is released here along with the slides for your listening and learning pleasure.
Web Directions South, a recent conference held in Sydney Australia September 28 and 29, is now releasing presentation slides and podcasts of the learning sessions conducted by some bright people in the web world. Speakers include: Jeremy Keith, Andy Clarke, Kevin Yank, and many others. The podcasts are being released incrementally, but you can subscribe to receive them automatically when they become available. The topics of discussion are wide ranging including Information Architecture, recent technological trends, and the like.
A recent article entitled “Web Design is 95% Typography” has sparked a great deal of discussion about the importance of typography in web design. This is not necessarily a revalation, but the article does make an interesting connection between typography and information design. The author points out
“95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.”
This statistic nicely illustrates the importance of strong typographic design in order to deliver clear information design. One site the article mentions as exemplary in information and typographic design is Subtraction, which I have long admired as it’s very hard to pull of a black and white design using color so sparingly. The information hierarchy is always clear and logical; the design is functional and attractive.
Of course the recent A List Apart redesign is also mentioned as an example of strong typographic design. Jason Santa Maria got his inspiration for the design from classic book layouts. The Morning News is a site that is not mentioned that I think is quite good at delivering a lot of content in an elegant and functional manor through good typographic design.
A List Apart has posted a really wonderful list of essential resources for web desgin newbies, a task that I have been trying to tackle here to help guide my students. This list is really top quality and addresses many of the same topics I was discussing recently.