usability

Usability-related articles.

WYSIWYG editor usability tip

Written at 14:29, on Wednesday 19 September 2007. Tags: drupal usability webdesign .

Open Source WYSIWYG editing in CMS still sucks, but with developments like the WYMeditor (“What You Mean” editor, built on jQuery) the situations is improving steadily. This editor lets content writers focus on the structure of their document instead of visual layout. As you can see, this editor provides subtle clues about the type of content you’re currently editing with a clever stylesheet. Unfortunately, the WYMeditor is still in early beta, and Drupal’s module lags a couple of versions behind.

WYMEditor in its default configuration

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Table of contents

Written at 22:10, on Wednesday 19 July 2006. Tags: javascript usability webdesign .

Thanks to a fairly hacked-up version of Jehiah’s Table of Contents script, I’ve added my share of progressive enhancement to what are otherwise long and boring articles. I’ve looked at a number of promising TOC generation-scripts, but couldn’t get them to work (the first threw me this Javascript error: span(error). “tagDetail[i] has no properties” while the second returned this error: “this.stack0 has no properties”. The demo’s worked though. Strange). So I returned to this old faithful, and enhanced it somewhat.

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Printing websites

Written at 08:19, on Wednesday 26 April 2006. Tags: usability webdesign .

Printing on the web is still a chore. While CSS offers rich print output via the CSS print media type, both browsers and websites still (mostly) do a lousy job of them. Here are two suggestions for browser makers.

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WYSIWYG text editing in CMS

Written at 17:22, on Friday 11 November 2005. Tags: usability .

As visual designer, I’m used to working with website Content Management Systems (CMS) which generate a lot of markup out of the box for the content. Most of it is hackable or reworkable, but there’s always one X factor (not talking about Idols here): the WYSIWYG editor that is included which often messes up my carefully created stylesheet. Unfortunately, the buggers are often an non-negotiable feature requested by clients and end-users, and offered as a unique selling point by CMS providers since they “enhance the usability”(sic) or lower the threshold for users who aren’t web savvy. Instead of having to write angle-bracket-happy HTML or XHTML, they can concentrate on the actual content and how it will visually present itself. Unfortunately, that’s often also the problem: the editor does both too little and too much.

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Design and usability updates

Written at 17:19, on Wednesday 2 November 2005. Tags: personal usability webdesign .

Just wanted to say all those all two of you feedreaders that I’ve restyled my site a bit. I created it with Halloween in mind, but of course I managed to be a day late with this launch. I’ve achieved the worn look thanks to a set of brushes (via).

My blog anno 2005

Also check out my new contact form, which is now more or less unobtrusively enhanced with asynchronous javascript (aka AJAX). Thanks go to Dustin Diaz for sharing his ajax contact form after much begging and threatening. There are some improvements to be made to make it fully accessible and unobtrusive, for example, it doesn’t handle errors with PHP now, and there’s some hidden text in the contact form which is read by screen readers. But still great work for a 0.9 version!

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Textpattern hacks

Written at 17:15, on Friday 7 October 2005. Tags: accessibility usability webdesign website .

This is just a collection of hacks I’ve implemented for my Textpattern installation, and a note on update management..

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About this website

My name is Jeroen Coumans, I'm a freelance web designer, front-end developer and Drupal ninja from the Netherlands. I love to create beautiful, usable and accessible websites. On this website, you can find my portfolio as well as my personal weblog. Interested in hiring me? I'd love to hear from you.

After completing my BA in Arts and Culture I'm now doing a MA in Communication and Multimedia Design. More …

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Elsewhere

Issuu and Smart Look for a better PDF viewing experience

A plugin that embeds PDF's, Word and Powerpoint files in a very cool, usable and fast Flash interface.

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Palm Pre: everything you ever wanted to know - Engadget

This is the only device I would consider as replacement for my iPhone. Palm seems to have done some essential things right, like contact management by pulling data from various services in the cloud. I love the zoomable UI and the card metaphor for app switching.

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Release:jQuery 1.3 - jQuery JavaScript Library

Some very nice features and performance improvements in this release, among which the Sizzle CSS selector engine (currently fastest avaiable), live events and much faster HTML injection.

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jQuery API Browser v1.3

Improved and also available offline as AIR app.

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A List Apart: Articles: Return of the Mobile Style Sheet

"What can be done for mobile browsers that do not read handheld style sheets, or parse CSS Media Queries? Short of ignoring them, there are two options."

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Mapeed.AddressChooser API documentation | Home

Cool Javascript component that can be used for address collection in forms, combining HTML form and Google Maps for dynamic place retrieval and auto-completion.

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Digital Ethnography

Blog of Michael Wesh, cultural anthropologist, professor of the year, and creator of the video "Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us".

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Components Versus Patterns

Analysis on the differences and commonalities between components and patterns. "Although the two concepts are strongly related, their differences warrant consideration to ensure you are building the type of library that’s right for you."

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The State of the Web 2008 | Web Directions

"Welcome to this detailed report from our first “State of the Web” survey of professional web designers and developers. It includes details and analysis of all the responses to over 50 questions covering technologies, techniques, philosophies and practices that today’s web professionals employ."

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The Curious Case of Twply and Twitter - Bokardo

Excellent interface analysis of twply: "Moral of the story? Design can effectively be used to deceive people. Deal only with those services you know and trust. "

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