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Interface design tips that may be new to you

08 Mar 2005 by Jason Fried

Here are some oldies but goodies from the archives that may be new to you.

The Yellow Fade Technique: highlight changes without getting in someone’s way.

Epicenter Design: start from the inside out.

Context and Perspective: help people relate to objects they can’t touch.

and of course Ryan’s well traveled Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design article.

4 comments so far (Post a Comment)

08 Mar 2005 | Benjy said...

Blog reruns?

08 Mar 2005 | Jon S said...

Perhaps not re-runs but more like the "clip episodes" of the 90s where sitcoms would reminisce about previous episodes in the season.

That's how I see it ;) Great info though!

08 Mar 2005 | Bryan said...

Regarding the Yellow Fade Technique, I wanted to respond to why using an animated gif with CSS would NOT work all the time, especially in IE.

http://dev2.bitwisesolutions.com/Bryan/background/

That itself, in IE, shows how it is slow and stalls IE.

Using JS would make the transitions much smoother

08 Mar 2005 | pete said...

Another link of note is:

http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Usability/usable-XMLHttpRequest/

Implements an XMLHttpRequest example with many neat UI features. Below is a snipit from the link:


One thing I found from other tests is that people do not believe something is saved if it happens too quickly... Yes, you did read that right!

The first application I made using XMLHttpRequest saved the data whenever a field lost focus. It only took a 100th of a second. Most astoundingly none really believed that it was saved. They constantly reloaded the page to "make sure" - taking away all the benefits of using XMLHttpRequest.

So, we need to fake it - making the save process seem longer than it really is. In this example a delay is added + a visual indicator. It works much better and also functions as a confirmation that the application really did save your information.

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