Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest – that is all I have been hearing about all week. I have to admit that I am curious – one of the sites I work with has just set up a page and I have submitted my request for an invitation [still waiting]. I am hoping that this will not be an over-hyped social farce. Then again, I am also think Facebook is an over-hyped social farce – so take this with a grain of salt.
I will be the first to admit that I am severely lacking in this area, despite using JQuery on almost every site I work on. While I have yet to actually view the course I think every bit of information you can find is useful.
The course is offered by JQuery Air. I do not know much about their reputation, but give it a try. Worst case scenario – they get your email address.
Pek Pongpaet has posted a good article at UXMag.com. I have been fascinated by User Experience for years, but admit that I am quite the amateur. I am as guilty as the IT worker in the ‘of course the user will understand exactly what we want them to do.’ Flash forward 3 months, hour 2 on a support call that Customer Service has given up on…
Me: Please click on the green arrow.
Customer: What green arrow?
Me: Which page are you currently on?
Customer: I am on my computer, I don’t have a book or a manual.
Me: I mean which web page are you looking at in your browser?
Customer: What’s a browser?
Me: [pause. sound of head hitting desk] What program are you using to access the internet?
Customer: I don’t use a program, I use the blue picture on the computer, looks like an E. I just want to XXXX, why do you have to make it so difficult?
It all made sense when we built it, our beta test went fairly well [although limited], but in the real world you get such a variety that who knows how it will preform.
I digress – this is an interesting post with some good suggestions for resources I use myself.
Here is a little infographic from testking.com – I would have placed the whole graphic here, but it is a little wide for my site, and besides they deserve the traffic for the work.
I feel like I spend hours arguing for and against certain font choices based on rather ancient stats on what computers have what fonts. I tend to be a minimalist, Arial, Helvetica, Times [New Roman], but with this I might be able to expand a little bit on that beaten path.
Unrelated: I have been working on a site that utilizes fonts from webfonts.fonts.com, which has been pretty interesting. There have been some quirks, formatting and style issues, but in general it has been working out pretty well. If you don’t have much traffic, they have a free service which is useful for testing. For you designer types I would recommend a look at it – it will slow you pages down a little, but overall we have been very happy. I will have a better idea about cost once we launch and are out of beta testing.
24Ways.org has started its Advent calendar for 2010. There seems to be a wealth of information here each year, which can be found in the archives for previous years. The posts tend to span a wide range of topics and not all may be of interest, but I am sure you will find a few that are right up your alley.
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