A List Apart

The ALA 2010 Web Design Survey

Nobody has ever compiled even the most basic data about the salaries, titles, educational background, and so on of people who make websites—nobody, that is, but the readers of A List Apart. Other surveys compile helpful data about which software packages web designers use to do their work, and which technologies they’re keen on, but only the A List Apart survey gets down to the business of business. It’s time once again to let your voice be (anonymously) heard. As you have each year since 2007, please take a few minutes to complete the survey for people who make websites. Details...

Findings from the Web Design Survey, 2009

The findings are in from the survey for people who make websites. Once again, we have crunched the data this way and that, figured out what the numbers were telling us, and assembled the sliced and diced data-bytes into nifty charts and graphs for your edification and pleasure. As in years past, what emerges is the first true picture of the profession of web design as it is practiced by men and women of all ages, across all continents, in corporations, agencies, non-profits, and freelance configurations. Details...

Forward Thinking Form Validation

When users complete a form to buy your product or sign up for your service, you want to reduce mistakes and guide them to success. Now, with HTML5 form input types and attributes, you can set validation constraints to check user input. With CSS3’s new UI pseudo-classes, you can style validation states to make form completion quick and effortless. Details...

Testing Accordion Forms

Web forms let people complete important tasks on your site; web form design details can have a big impact on how successful, efficient, and happy with the process they are—especially details like form length. Enter accordion forms, which dynamically hide and reveal sections of related questions as people complete the form, allowing them to focus on what matters and finish quickly. How do your smallest design decisions affect completion speed? Which design choices make these innovative forms feel familiar and easy? Which choices make them feel foreign and complex, leading people to make errors? Details...

Strategic Content Management

Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we’ve installed and customized the CMS? Details...

The Look That Says Book

Hyphenation and justification: It’s not just for print any more. Armed with good taste, a special unicode font character called the soft hyphen, and a bit o’ JavaScript jiggery, you can justify and hyphenate web pages with the best of them. Master the zero width space. Use the Hyphenator.js library to bottle fame, brew glory, and put a stopper in death. Create web pages that hyphenate and justify on the fly, even when the layout reflows in response to changes in viewport size. Details...

Apps vs. the Web

There's an app for that, and you're the folks who are creating it. But should you design a web-based application, or an iPhone app? Each approach has pluses and minuses—not to mention legions of religiously rabid supporters. Apple promotes both approaches (they even gave the web a year-long head start before beginning to sell apps in the store), and the iPhone's Safari browser supports HTML5 and CSS3 and brags a fast JavaScript engine. Yet many companies and individuals with deep web expertise choose to create iPhone apps instead of web apps that can do the same thing. Explore both approaches and learn just about everything you'll need to know if you choose to create an iPhone app—from the lingo, to the development process, to the tricks that can smooth the path of doing business with Apple. Details...

Good Help is Hard to Find

Help content gets no respect. For one thing, it is content, and our horse-before-cart industry is only now beginning to seriously tackle content strategy. For another, we assume that our site is so usable, nobody will ever need the help content anyway. Typically, no one is in charge of the help content and no strategy exists to keep it up to date. On most sites, help content is hard to find, poorly written, blames the user, and turns a mildly frustrating experience into a lousy one. It's time to rethink how we approach this part of our site. Done well, help content offers tremendous potential to earn customer loyalty. By learning to plan for and create useful help content, we can turn frustrated users into our company's biggest fans. Details...

Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings

Too many kickoff meetings squander the busiest, most expensive people's time reiterating what everyone already knows. If every meeting is an opportunity, why waste your first one? By asking stakeholders tough questions before the kick-off, and using the meeting itself to explore ideas and build relationships, you can turn a room of mutually suspicious turf battlers into an energetic team with shared ownership of the end-product and the kind of bond that can sustain the group through the challenges ahead. Details...

No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas

You can't create what clients need when you're too busy saying yes to everything they want. As a user experience designer, it's your job to say no to bad ideas and pointless practices. But getting to no is never easy. Proven techniques that can turn vocal negatives into positive experiences for you, the client, and most importantly, the end-user include citing best practices and simple but powerful business cases; proving your point with numbers; shifting focus from what to who; using the "positive no"; and, when necessary, pricing yourself out. Details...

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