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.
Cameron Chapman's article on Wireframing - Must Read!
I am sorry to say that most of the projects I work on lack this very valuable step. It is often weeks into a project where missing elements are found and I lament the day that it was decided that we ‘skip’ the wireframing step. In fact it is happening right now.
I have only breezed through this article quickly, but it is bookmarked and ready to be revisited [as soon as I can squeeze it in]. In the meantime I really recommend you take a look yourself at Cameron Chapman’s Ultimate Guide to Website Wireframing.
Special thanks to @boagworld for sending the tweet.
This looks very interesting – automatically converting Flash animations to HTML5 compliant code. This would save me a ton of work, or from omitting content, because it is based in Flash.
I don’t know why, but this seems like it would be pretty interesting to have. I have downloaded it and I am looking forward to playing with it.
Have a look and let me know what you think. Get it at Addy Osmani’s Blog.
Thanks to @smashingmag for the tweet!
Thanks to Boagworld for tweeting this wonderful Pines Notify jQuery Plugin.
It seems to have a whole bunch of features I could employ [although a little too late] into a current project:
I don’t have much experience with jQuery, but I am really liking a lot of the plugins that I have been seeing lately.
Here is a nice, short – and to the point – post about A/B testing and the results it yielded.
I know in most projects I have worked on recently A/B testing has not gone beyond internal back-and-forth. Something I hope to change moving forward. It we could only budget the time to do so.