I'm Abdelrahman Osama a user experience consultant, maybe the first in the Middle East to jump to the standards and utilize it in designing better user experience, here is where I blog about UX, Web standards & best practices.
Webdesign survey
Here it comes again the time of the year where we all invited to participate in the webdesign survey for our profession own good, just as last year.
Take the survey and invite others by putting this banner in your blog.
I took the results from last year and filter Middle Eastern results alone to get up with this Middle Eastern webdesign survey for 2007, I added some notes I noticed, take a look.
August 2, 2008 Community , Web in the Middle East , business
37signals drops IE 6 support
Yesterday 37signals announced that they will drop IE 6 support starting from August 15, 2008 so they could achieve better experiences.
Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress.
Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products on August 15, 2008
This move some how reminds me when Steve Jobs announced he will drop Power PC's and use Intel, every body was waiting for the G5 PowerBook etc... so what to do is to sacrifice something to gain other alot of things.
As an HTML/CSS coder I understand how much pain they pass through to get there interfaces work with IE 6, and I understand to achive some experiences they don't have other choice than to drop IE 6 support.
It will be nice if there interfaces doesn't crash on IE 6 only some options and additions don't work, but if there's no way but to crash the interface onIE 6 they don't have other choice, only a message stating the cause of the problem and showing the links of IE 7, FireFox & Safari, will be nice, I'm sure 37signals understands that perfectly.
July 4, 2008 Community
Really interactive websites
Living web sites that grow, develop and evolve to suit the taste of the people that read them are now finding their way on to the internet.
Roger Highfield - Web pages have 'come alive and started breeding'
According to the article scientists at Creative Synthesis are evolving a software that tracks the behavior of a visitor and what attracts him and what's not to improve the site experience for each visitor, by every refresh of a page features changed.
This is an awesome new technology that can enhance user experiences very much, can you imagine, tracking a visitor day by day, see what he uses the most what's not, and focus on what he needs the most, The more you use the site the more it gets to know you and adapt more to your needs.
Once the blog went live, control of the design was out of their hands.
Roger Highfield - Web pages have 'come alive and started breeding'
That is really awesome, I didn't see real application of that yet but if it is applied nicely, it will be a revolution in user experience, I mean by applied nicely not to surprise the user by every refresh with different navigation position, links switched, headers or links colors changed, etc....
The transition should be done gradually so the user adapt to it smoothly, I guess people at Creative Synthesis are smart enough to already know what I'm saying, and I hope we see an application of this technology out in the wild, see how far will it get.
April 18, 2008 Design , Experiments , User experience , inspiration
Martian Headsets (web standards war)
I just finished reading Martian Headsets by Joel Spolsky, explaining what is standards in general and why things may get wrong in the way like it happens to the web standards.
A war between Idealists
& realists
running on Mars, who will win?
March 18, 2008 Web standards
WaSP Street Team
WaSP has just announced the Street Team what a great idea, letting every one make his mark in supporting the standards.
There first project is great, its objective is to move old books that contains old, harmful information about the web from the libraries shelves to the archives, go on make your mark.
And don't forget to add there button to your site. linking to http://streetteam.webstandards.org.
March 11, 2008 Community , Events , Web standards
Focus on details
A little secret I just discovered, "focus on details" bosses / clients don't understand sketches or mockups.
That's all for today, C U soon.
