A Few Notes On Responsive Design

I've been doing quite a bit of work involving responsive web design lately, which is why I thought I'd share a few useful resources I came across. First, there's an article by Luke Wroblewski about the importance of considering mobile devices first for websites and web applications. Ethan Marcotte describes foundations and some techniques of responsive web design. An article by James Young deals with 'the top responsive web design problems and how to avoid them' Brad Frost wrote about responsive navigation patterns, e.g. how ... Read more

“Developers Just Can’t Design!”

Time and time again I hear statements such as: Developers just can't design! I think this point of view is mistaken. Not only does it state that software developers have a somewhat innate inaptitude for design but to some extent it also implies that for developers design is something not worth comprehending. „Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." There's a huge misunderstanding in this mindset: Design is not about painting. Design is not about drawing ... Read more

How-To: Instant Website Optimization for Retina Displays

Last month I recommended an article by Reda Lemeden about designing for Retina displays. Today, as a follow-up, if you will, I'd like to suggest reading a how-to by Kyle J. Larson on website optimization for Retina displays. 'Instant Website Optimization for Retina Displays' describes the process of creating and optimizing various website elements such as images, fonts, icons and backgrounds for high-resolution displays. The author starts off with creating high-density images and continues to outline various optimization tools and techniques. Furthermore, the ... Read more

Huge List of Useful Twitter Bootstrap Resources

Bootstrap Hero has compiled a Big Badass List of Twitter Bootstrap Resources. Have a look at this useful list of tools and resources. By the way, Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone! Read more

Mailbox acquired by Dropbox

That comes as a bit of a surprise: Mailbox, the latest attempt in providing a modern, mobile-first user experience for eMail, has been acquired by Dropbox. I hadn't expected Mailbox to be acquired that quickly after their carefully orchestrated and much-hyped launch. I hope they continue working on their vision. Though I have one or two smaller gripes about missing features, there's a lot of potential in their design. Read more

Great Review of ‘The Design of Everyday Things’

At UsabilityPost there's an excellent review of Donald Norman's seminal book 'The Design of Everyday Things' that not only describes the book but also tells a whole lot about user experience design. Read more

User Efficiency vs. Machine Efficiency

Nice example on how machine efficiency doesn't necessarily equal user efficiency: For example, which of the following takes less time? Heating water in a microwave for one minute and ten seconds or heating it for one minute and eleven seconds? From the standpoint of the microwave, one minute and ten seconds is the obviously correct answer. From the standpoint of the user of the microwave, one minute and eleven seconds is faster. Why? Because in the first case, the user must press the ... Read more

Zipf, Pareto and The 1% Fallacy

Nice article about power laws and their implications on market shares and supposedly low hanging fruit: The 1% fallacy Read more

Acceptance Testing With PhantomJS and CasperJS

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit browser that allows you to call, test and scrape websites from the command line. In the developer's own words: PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG. CasperJS is a testing and scripting framework that builds on PhantomJS. Again, in the developer's own words: CasperJS is an open source navigation scripting & testing utility written in Javascript and based on PhantomJS ... Read more

Big-O Notation Explained Nicely And Concisely

John Cook has a post that nicely summarizes Big-O and related notations. Read more
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