PUBLIC MARKS from sbrothier with tag usability

Humans, though cute and cuddly, are not without their flaws, which makes it a challenge to design for them. By understanding how the wet, mushy processor works in these hairy little devils, you can design interfaces and web experiences that will have them hopelessly devoted to your brand. Aarron will introduce you to the emotional usability principle—a design axiom that identifies a strong connection between human emotion and perceived usability.

UX (User Experience) is all those elements and factors related to the user’s interaction with a particular environment or device which generate a positive or negative perception of the product, brand or device. UX is subjective and focused on use. The standard definition of UX is “a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service”. These factors are related to design and usability, but also to the emotions and feelings generated in the user, accessibility, brand trust…

Almost sneakily, the New York Times rolled out an update of the trusty hyperlink on its website’s stories. New code embedded in the pages allows you to link to and highlight individual paragraphs and even sentences.

In January 2000, T-Online asked us what we’d do if we could design a browser from scratch. Our answer was “Tabs”. Eight years later Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, asked me what I think a new tab should look like. The answer after days of mailing back and forth: “Forget tabs!”

I love labels in Gmail. Most email programs use folders, which only let me put mail in one place at a time. With labels, I can organize mail in multiple ways. Combined with filters to automatically label incoming messages, Gmail offers powerful ways to organize email.

collection snippets of good designb

A simple online usability test that helps you identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces.

Baekdal.com now features a completely redesigned commenting system that tabs into the power of social networks. Instead of manually typing in your name, you simply press a button. How amazing is that...

Featuring a clean, well-organized interface, Stanza Desktop is expressly designed for reading digital publications, including electronic books, newspapers, PDFs, and general web content. Stanza Desktop is built from the ground up to make reading on your Macintosh or Windows laptop or desktop an enjoyable and hassle-free experience. It gives special attention to details that are usually overlooked in other software readers such as hyphenation, text columnation, automatic text scrolling, and user-friendly page and chapter navigation. Lengthy content that can be tedious to read using a web browser or PDF viewer is easy and natural with Stanza Desktop.

Stanza is a free application for your iPhone and iPod Touch. Use it to download from a vast selection of over 100,000 books and periodicals, and read them right on your phone. It’s a wireless electronic library that stays open 24/7.

Mega drop-down navigation at Basecamp and Rails Guides site Matt Mar 25 16 comments Latest by Jonathan Jakob Nielsen says mega drop-down navigation menus work well. Given that regular drop-down menus are rife with usability problems, it takes a lot for me to recommend a new form of drop-down. But, as our testing videos show, mega drop-downs overcome the downsides of regular drop-downs. Thus, I can recommend one while warning against the other. We’ll +1 that. A good, related example from our world: The project switcher in Basecamp. switcher Design Decisions: Basecamp Project Switcher [SvN] explains how we redesigned the project switcher from a normal drop-down to a mega drop-down.

Compulsion is a simple, easy to use tool that makes video clickable. The clicks become links that turn the video into an entire interactive universe of your design. You can offer or sell those links for click and shop, gossip, trivia, news, music, more video, or anything you can imagine. Compulsion does not alter the original movie file, and can be used before or after your video is published. If you want to add or change links later, no problem.

We just rolled out a new comments system today at Digg. Redesigning one of the busiest and most vibrant comments areas on the web is pretty intimidating. Every day quite a few thousands of people participate in the comments and many more read the comments even if they're not participating. Despite its shortcomings, many people are familiar with the current system and forcing people to adapt to an altered version isn't something I took lightly.

Disqus is a powerful comment system that easily enhances the discussion on websites. In minutes, connect your community with those of over 25,000 other websites. Track conversations across the web, plus bridge discussions with your favorite services such as FriendFeed and Plaxo. Next »

Beginning today, we are rolling out a completely rewritten comment system. Some users may notice the changes immediately, and others may notice the new stuff several days later. In other words, this is a rolling release, and since it may contain some bugs, we'd rather only a subsection of the Newsvine population be exposed to it at this time.

These are just different ways of displaying what can be a rather long list of comments.

By far the most complex portion of the comments system was how dynamic it was going to be. Threads would be zipping in and out, we’d be creating 90% of the HTML dynamically in the DOM from JSON, posting and editing over AJAX, etc. It was during design that Micah and I also plotted to remove script.aculo.us and replace it with the smaller jQuery library. The entire comment system is, in fact, a series of jQuery plugins.

Digg has added a new comment system which, in an apparent effort to fight "comment abuse", hides replies automatically. Comments can be expanded either through clicking on 'View Replies' or using the 'Expand Tree' button in 'Comment Display Options'. The Digg Up and Digg Down buttons also have new icons.

The Comments service provides a full-featured commenting engine for your web site. It is implemented as a lightweight widget and is incredibly easy to install on any static or dynamic web page.

Hola! We’re excited to launch the new Comments system – we’ve listened to your requests and feedback and have incorporated many of your suggestions. Some highlights include:

After months of work behind the scenes, vague promises up front, and half-assed hacks, today we are very excited to take the wraps off exciting new stuff for Lifehacker commenters. In order to make having conversations with your fellow readers here easier, we've just rolled out a major revamp to our site commenting system. Fresh out of the oven, our all-new "threaded comments" system organizes comment replies more logically and makes discussing the post at hand—and other users' reactions to it—easier to do and digest. Hit up any post with comments to start tinkering with the new system yourself, or read on to get the full rundown of what's changed and why.

I’ve made another improvement to the comments system, and this time I think it’s pretty innovative (well, I think the last one was as well, but I do like this one). This only works 100% correctly in Mozilla, and I’m not sure why. IE and Opera get 90% of the way there, and that’ll do until I figure out what the problem is. Anyway, on to the idea…