river
This is quite mesmerising—click on an image that takes your fancy; see it surrounded by related images; repeat.
Link tags: interactivity
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4 Rules for Intuitive UX – Learn UI Design
- Obey the Law of Locality
- ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
- Pass the Squint Test
- Teach by example
How do you mark up an accordion? — Sara Soueidan
I love this deep dive that Sara takes into the question of marking up content for progressive disclosure. It reminds me Dan’s SimpleQuiz from back in the day.
Then there’s this gem, which I think is a terrificly succinct explanation of the importance of meaningful markup:
It’s always necessary, in my opinion, to consider what content would render and look like in foreign environments, or in environments that are not controlled by our own styles and scripts. Writing semantic HTML is the first step in achieving truly resilient Web sites and applications.
Your Interactive Makes Me Sick - Features - Source: An OpenNews project
Browsers have had consistent scrolling behavior for years, even across vendors and platforms. There’s an established set of physics, and if you muck with the physics, you can assume you’re making some people sick.
Guidelines to consider before adding swooshy parallax effects:
- Respect the Physics
- Remember that We Call Them “Readers”
- Ask for Consent
Given all the work that goes into a powerful piece of journalism—research, interviews, writing, fact-checking, editing, design, coding, testing—is it really in our best interests to end up with a finished product that some people literally can’t bear to scroll through?
Why Web Developers Need to Care about Interactivity — Philip Walton
Just to be clear, this isn’t about interaction design, it’s about how browsers and become unresponsive to interaction when they’re trying to parse the truckloads of Javascript web developers throw at them.
Top tip: lay off the JavaScript. HTML is interactive instantly.
The First Web Apps: 5 Apps That Shaped the Internet as We Know It
A great bit of web history spelunking in search of the first websites that allowed users to interact with data on a server. Applications, if you will. It’s well written, but I take issue with this:
The world wide web wasn’t supposed to be this fun. Berners-Lee imagined the internet as a place to collaborate around text, somewhere to share research data and thesis papers.
This often gets trotted out (“the web was intended for scientists sharing documents”), but it’s simply not true that Tim Berners-Lee was only thinking of his immediate use-case; he deliberately made the WWW project broad enough to allow all sorts of thitherto unforeseen uses. If he hadn’t …well, the web wouldn’t have been able to accommodate all those later developments. It’s not an accident that the web was later used for all sorts of unexpected things—that was the whole idea.
Anyway, apart from that misstep, the rest of the article is a fun piece, well worth reading.
Jeremy Keith: Paranormal Interactivity on Vimeo
This is the talk I gave at An Event Apart through 2010. It’s all about interaction design with some examples from Huffduffer.