Design

Mobile Web Design

The article series Mobile Web Design may be over a year old, but with the current land rush for .mobi domains, it's even more relevant today. It comes in three parts: State of the Mobile Web, Methods to the Madness, Tips and Techniques .

Golden Rules for Bad User Interfaces

In case you were looking to drive your users crazy and have them marching to your door with torches and pitchforks, the SAP Design Guild has a list of Golden Rules for Bad User Interfaces.

100 Random Colours

Screen shot of the '100 Random Colors' site

Here's one for the designers: the 100 Random Colors site generates a page like the one shown in the screenshot above, with 100 squares in random colours and their RGB values. There's some JavaScript/DHTML behind the page, which lets you rearrange the squares by dragging and dropping.

Screaming Users Considered Good

Edvard Much's 'The Scream'I'm not sure how I'd react if a user of something I'd developed came up to me and called it "the most white male fascist tool I’ve ever had the misfortune to use."

Dan Russell, one of the writers at Creating Passionate Users did the right thing when it happened to him. He took a deep breath and asked "And what made you feel this way?"

It may not be pleasant to deal with a customer who's all fired up about your product or service for the wrong reasons, but as the article Screaming Users Considered Good points out, you can learn a lot from users who are struggling with it, don't "get it" or have had a strong negative reaction to it.