Whats my deliverable?
Jul/090
Identifying the correct deliverable for a IA/UX project can be difficult. If your a developer its easy, its code, if your a copywriter its .. well.. copy.
Peter Morville at Semantic Studios has written a great post on UX deliverables (some time ago now.. but better late than never) where he identifies a raft of possible deliverables.
Whilst most are a step in the process and I imagine most UX projects would require a combination of these I love the idea of delivering a “proverb”.
He’s even packaged them up into a wonderfull “treasure map”.
Peter Morville's UX Treasure Map
Whats the weather like?
Jul/090
A very exciting thing happened to me about a month ago… I got a new job.
That may not sound unusual but I’ve been at my current job for 6 and a half years and its going to be a big shock to the system. I had a great time at Lateral Systems and ill be sad to go but its time to move on.
My new role will be User Experience Architect @ The Weather Company. They have several web properties, including the flagship WeatherZone, and it will be my job to help them fine tune the existing sites and integrate some exciting new data. As you can imagine there is lots of data to play with and everyone has a keen interest in the weather so I’m very excited to embarking on this new journey.
Ill let you know how I get on but I’m sure the forecast is fine and sunny 
Fixing the zoom:1; IE fix?
Jun/090
Much has been written about the “magical fix” that *{zoom:1; } has on IE6 and IE7. By using this to force hasLayout onto IE a lot of the display issues we are used to are fixed easily.
BUT.. as i’ve just discovered… it can also create some of its own problems.
I had an issue reffered to me where IE6 was rendering some text way out of alignment, it seemed like a float clearing problem but clearing didnt have any affect. So I removed the zoom declaration and and that removed the problem, but restored a bunch of other problems the initial zoom:1; had fixed.
So, I had to find a way to reset the zoom property and the answer is “normal”. I also has to use * to apply it to ALL items in that box.
Mashable Web Design Toolbox
Nov/080
Mashable have created a great list of sites that do everything from creating heatmaps of your site to making fav icons!
Browser here Browser there.. Browser’s everywhere!
Sep/080
Well its an exciting month for browsers what with Google entering the fray and Microsoft dropping IE8 Beta 2 to the public.
Much has been written about both so I wont delve into it too much but to say I think its very exciting.
Google's business is the web so its no shock they've built a browser and that they seem to have done it well. The javascript engine is lightning fast and I havent found many layout problems. Whilst Mozilla have done a great job with Firefox I expect to see Chrome surpase it in browser stats within a few months and start to eat into IE's % also. Maybe it will also give MS another jolt towards a better browser.
Live Validation
Aug/080
A very neat solution to javascript validation..
"LiveValidation is a small open source javascript library for making
client-side validation quick, easy, and powerful. It comprises of two
main parts. Firstly, it provides developers with a rich set of core
validation methods, which can also be used outside the context of
forms. Secondly, it provides your visitors with real-time validation
information as they fill out forms, helping them to get it right first
time, making the forms easier, quicker and less daunting to complete"
Pretty Emails
Jun/080
Now im not the biggest fan of HTML emails but I can understand how they are valuable from a marketing perspective. Microsoft really threw a spanner in the works last year when they released Office 2007 that featured reduced CSS support in Outlook. Much was written on the reasons for this but none the less it has set html emails back a couple of years.
The good folks over at Campaign Monitor have put in a lot of work into evaluating what email client supports what and how well and have produced a great guide.
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