sugarenia.com

EDIT: Mr. Rosenfeld was kind enough to offer a discount code for all Sugarenia.com readers: with the code SUGARENIA you get -10% while purchasing any of their books. Now is the time to get them, guys!

At first, I was kinda hesitant to go on and buy such a niche book - after all, what’s so exciting about coding and designing web forms?

Wrong.

Mr. Wroblewski’s book taught me that web forms are all kinds of designer fun, and this is not a euphemism. It’s just what the author says:

Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout, registration, and any task requiring information entry.

Imagine how many times you decided not to join a service just because of its scary registration form - or how many times you’ve mistakenly filled in your credit card number to a checkout form that didn’t support multiple formats of input.

Get the point?

Web Form Design is a simple, well-written book: it seems to have borrowed the blogging way of stating facts, and this is a good thing: simple, coherent writing, to-the-point explanations and the ubiquitous “Best Practices” list of points in the end of each chapter strike a chord: it’s a specialized blog turned book! That’s not too bad, is it?

Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski is a book highly recommended for interface designers, both on web and more traditional media. It can help everyone that wants to improve her skills in laying out inputs and textareas, and make you feel good too in the meanwhile.

You surprised me, mr. Wroblewski. Pleasantly, I might say. I think I’ll get Site Seeing too.

luke wroblewski, web form design, site seeing

We all love Flickr. It’s a mostly simple and beautifully designed site that really works. Thing is, over the years it evolved into something much more than a photo sharing community: new features were added, others were polished, some were dropped. That’s a good thing; evolution is the core of success of every service, after all.

The other day I found myself looking at the Flickr footer, marvelling at how well, undistinct it all was. It’s a set of links that looks kinda thrown together in lines, with a reduced font-size and not enough white space to boot. So I thought, hey, can this be done differently?

This is what I came up with, after 10 mins or so:

Some explanations:

• I dropped the table Flickr uses, I don’t see its use anyway, even in its current form, it can easily be done without it. I used an unordered list containing a level 6 header and another unordered list with the links.
• I removed the Activity section - it was too vague and the only thing that I check anyway is my comments, a link that I have moved to “You” column, since it sounds more appropriate.
• I dropped the “Order Prints” link - I understand Flickr and its need to get some money, but let’s be frank here, who’s gonna use a footer link to order prints? Highly unlikely.
• I also dropped the “Last 7 days” link, since its content is contained in the “Last Month”  section anyway.
• I moved the unlabeled series of links to a separate column called “Flickr”.

I don’t know if it’s better, but in my eye, it’s more evident. You can clearly identify the different link blocks, and use of white space eased the procedure of scanning and finding a particular link. Sure, it takes more space than the previous one and it’s probably not suitable for every page, but this is a matter of IA, a whole different matter.

flickr, redesign, footer

Leave it to Hotmail to ignore all unwritten laws of icon semantics.

While I was searching for a particular e-mail the other day, I stumbled upon this:

Any idea what this icon signifies? No, it’s not “go down a level”. No, it’s not “expand”, if that’s what you were thinking. No, it doesn’t mean “go south and wait for the icebergs to show up”.

It means “empty folder”.

Yay for semantics and conceptual models!

I know, I know. Hotmail is a dead service, probably. But I can’t resist beating on this particular dead horse.

hotmail, icon, semantics

Hello there, Squared5.

Thanks for the work you put in making MPEG Streamclip for Mac OS and giving it to us for free! You’re cool.

You know what’s not cool though? This:

I mean come on. There must be at least half a dozen ways to make this window more usable.

I’ll be frank: I don’t really like video editing apps. In fact, I hate them. I fiddled with MPEG Streamclip for about half an hour, trying to find how on earth I can cut a segment of my clip. For the record, I failed. A friend told me how, the next day.

Le sigh.

mpeg streamclip, squared5

…give it cherries!

It’s all work work work these days, both at work (duh) and home. So I decided to give myself the luxury of this awesome looking delicacy tomorrow, because hey, I’ve been working hard all week.

My advice: do the same.

Photo courtesy of yummy web place opensourcefood.com, member gingerslice.

chocolate, brownie, cherries