Bruno Abrantes

The concept of fiddling with and tweaking your design project on the final stages of development is probably not foreign to you, but the idea of doing it after your project is done might be.

If you work as a freelancer, you probably live on a project-by-project basis, and you realize that you just can’t spare the time to gradually refine each and every one of your projects. However, if you’re an in-house designer or developer (or if you’re just a freelancer who runs his/her own blog), you can probably appreciate the merits of a product-oriented mindset which is concentrated on getting a product out and then refining it continuously through it’s lifespan. (…) more after the jump ›

No, I don’t mean to say existing Internet Explorer 6 users shouldn’t upgrade to one of the countless newer, faster and safer browsers out there. What I’m talking about is a little gimmick which surfaced a week or so ago called IE6 Update.

The authors came up with the brilliant idea of mimicking the standard Internet Explorer information bar, urging users to update to a newer version of Internet Explorer. You can include the bar on your site or web application using a small code snippet available on the project’s website. It automatically checks if your users are running IE6, only showing the bar to those who are. So why is this such a bad idea? (…) more after the jump ›

On the Web, first impressions are everything. Your page may have great content, it may just be what users are looking for, but, if your design fails to captivate users in a mere 5 seconds, your content might just never get noticed.

Enter the 5 Second Test, a quick Usability Test that costs next to nothing and can deliver great results. It’s basically  like any other usability test you’ve probably conducted before: there are users, tasks, and the application/site you’re testing.

At the start of the test, give your user a task to perform:

You’re on Application X’s home page. What are the ways you can subscribe to the application?

After informing the user that the page will only be visible for a short period of time, ask her to try and remember everything she sees.

You would then show your user the home page for about 5 seconds, and afterwards have her write down everything she remembers about the page. Finish up by asking one or two questions to assess whether the user has completed her task.

Sounds useful, doesn’t it? There are several benefits to using this method, the most proeminent being that it’s cheap and that you can conduct a whole lot of tests in a small window of time.

Even though conducting this kind of usability test is easy, I’ve found a handy tool that simplifies it even further. As a developer, you can create three kinds of test: classical (which is the one I described), compare (in which users compare two different interfaces) and sentiment (in which users describe their mood and most and least liked elements in the interface). As a user, you can take random tests and, as the page puts it, make an interface designer happy!

You should be thankful for remote controlled TVs. Or should you? This beautiful animated short film made me think about the wonders of the technological era. Oh, and laugh, it made me laugh.

Yes, it’s true! The next working CSS specification is being published in paperback format. As a thriller! Some may argue the current CSS 3 Spec is already a huge page-turner, and would sell millions as it is, but the W3C, in a bold move to make Web Standards hip (as in cool), hired famous writer Dan Brown to novelize the upcoming standard.

Brown is the author of famous novels such as The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, both of which have been recently made into movies, so we should expect a work of the highest standard of fiction. Keeping this in mind, here is an artist’s rendition of the cover of the soon-to-be novel:

Oh yeah, and judging by the direction things are going, you should expect to see this in bookshelves across the World as early as 2017. And, sources say, the movie tie-in is coming in 2018.