If I had a million dollars for every time a client asked me to add more features, or more appropriately stuff and jam more features into an already bulging application, I would have published a book, bought a mansion, and maybe a small island somewhere in the South Pacific.

Usability is nothing new. What is new is the use of the term usability by anyone and everyone. It has become the de-facto buzzword across the design world. There are so many definitions and differences of opinion across the web on what usability actually means. Let’s take a look at the dictionary definition:

Websters defines usable as the following:

1. capable of being used
2. convenient and practicable for use

More To This Story:  UI Design Lessons: Are You Driving Your Application Usability Off A Cliff?

Greetings to all the readers old and new. I haven’t published a lot of articles lately because I keep them in draft for quite awhile. I have many currently being revised. As such I want to  let my readers know that they can expect at least 2 articles a month. That’s pretty much all I wanted to let everyone know. If you have a particular topic you would like to have discussed please contact me or leave a comment.

Thanks again!

The design forums are now open! The design of the forums and usage is still in beta. I want to start fostering more communication with those interacting with this site. I felt the best way to do this is to put up a discussion based forum.

You can either use the forum to dscuss articles posted here in more depth or bring up completely new discussions. Perhaps you want to have an article written on some UI design topics that are important to you.

You must sign up on the forums in order to post and comment. This is mainly to reduce spam. I want this to be productive and valuable information and discussion. Spammers will be banned. All accounts must be approved!

UI Design Guide Discussion Forums

I will add a link on the site navigation to the design forums later when I know everything is working as expected. As always you are encouraged to sign up on UIDESIGNGUIDE and comment on the articles. I want your feedback to improve the articles and the topics covered. I have many articles in the writing process. I hope to cover lots of topics ranging from (ajax proto-typing, to more example web application wire frames, mocks, etc).

Thanks for being a loyal UIDESIGNGUIDE reader!

Over the course of time I’ve developed my own hybrid proto-typing approach for graphical mocks. There are several benefits I have discovered by streamlining this hybrid process.

What are the benefits of Hybrid Prototyping & Mocking?

• More reliable layouts that fit expected content layouts (better predictability)
• Quickly create complex and realistic widgets
• Rapidly develop new HTML controls
• Use each tool (expressions, notepad, Photoshop, illustrator, acrobat) to its strength

More To This Story:  How Can I Speed up Proto-typing & Visual Design Mocks with Hybrid Design Proto-typing?

Welcome to my first in a series of design processes instructions and examples. These are setup in such a way as to walk you through development cycles in relation to creating, producing, usability testing, execution from a UI Design stand point.

I’ve been wanted to get back to the core of this blog for some time. I think I finally have made some time to do this. For anyone that has missed out the original core of this blog is to examine the brainstorming, creation, and execution of an application. This can easily be a process that any company or individual can follow when creating a web application. Size of the application has no bearing on whether these principles can be applied.

More To This Story:  UI Design Series 1: Web Application Design Where’s The Vision? What’s The Value?