Category Archives: Commentary

On Sunday, I ran my first 42.195 km race ever, the ING New York City marathon, the 40th edition of the most iconic long-distance running event. I would like to thank New York for the amazing atmosphere along the route, … Continue reading →

I’ve pretty much hated advertising for as long as I can remember but since I’m managing or helping manage ads for work, I figured I would try running some on my own site to gain some first-hand experience. If you’re … Continue reading →

A visitor named Kevin dropped me a note asking for more details on site dimensions (or here about Stèles). His email address unfortunately bounces, so I can’t reply to him directly, but here’s what I wanted to say: My point … Continue reading →

Bazaarvoice is an American company providing the infrastructure and operational support for online “customer voice” services to brands and retailers, typically in the form of systems to facilitate consumer reviews of products offered on e-commerce sites. They brought together their … Continue reading →

The web site of France’s serious evening newspaper Le Monde, as well as the newspaper itself, publish weekly a translated version of the BreakingViews.com columns (no free content on their own site). The print version allows for a quick identification … Continue reading →

Many features of the 2004 election CNN site are developed in Flash. It probably cost a few arms and legs (most of our clients could not afford the price tag), but the overall feeling of quality struck me as a … Continue reading →

When the first visual browser (Mosaic) was released, things started to go wrong with web building: web technologies started to be misused, to achieve effects they were not (yet) designed to achieve. While a very common and natural drive, this … Continue reading →

The DLE project we’re working on for the RINO Noord-Holland is tricky. We have gotten some really good ideas from Willem-Jan Renger, in a conference we organized in the summer of 2003. We have got some technology on the way. … Continue reading →

We’re studying users. We’re documenting objectives and constraints. And then we try to come up with a navigation. What I’ve been missing all along is the notion of dimensions. I used it in a couple of posts (about Stèles and … Continue reading →

This is going to sound pretty obvious to most UI designers out here, but pull-down menus and page scrolling offer two confusingly different outcomes to the same “downward movement” interaction. I have observed that mixing them creates significant usability problems … Continue reading →