Resources & Acknowledgements

Usability Information about trends on the web DHTML / Javascript code and ideas References and tutorials Tools

Usability

User Interface Engineering's articles challenge many common dogmas about web usability.

John S Rhodes' WebWord.com has a growing collection of articles with an easy-to-use index.

Usable Web is a collection of articles by different authors, with a well-structured subject index.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox articles cover a wide range of usability topics - use the search box at the top of his home page.

Web Pages that Suck aims to teach design and usability by critiques of bad and unusable designs. Their “Daily Sucker” presents a Web site every day and explains what sucks about it. Users can post their comments on the featured site and on Web Pages that Suck's criticisms of it.

AskTog also has some good articles, but you have to be selective - recently Bruce Tognazzini has been expanding his range to comment on usability issues in areas not related to IT or the Web.

If you're interested in usability you should also check out the sites listed in the Information about trends on the web section of this page.

Information about trends on the web

Charles A Upsdell's design issues page is a gold-mine:

• browser capabilities including use of Javascript and plug-ins.
• screen sizes and ranges of colours.
• how long users are willing to wait for a page to load.
• users' motivations.

Charles A Upsdell's browser statistics present only the latest figures but are backed up by comments on changes and trends, including factors which might affect the reliability of the figures.

w3schools.com's browser statistics show trends for about the last 18 months, plus a summary of the main points at the top of the page.

DHTML / Javascript code and ideas

Our expanding / collapsing folders menu is an implementation of Ivan Peters' Joust outliner, a superb tool which caters for most browsers and most of their quirks - check it out!

Mike Hall's site www.brainjar.com has been a great help to us:

• Our drop-down menu is an adaptation of Mike's "navbars" package - we've seen quite a few sites which use it. Mike has withdrawn it because he no longer wants to support Netscape 4, but it's available from some of the Javascript libraries. Does not support Netscape 6, but could fairly easily be made to.
• His "Javascript Crunchinator" is a very effective and bug-free Javascript compressor - we use it to make our scripts faster-loading and harder to steal.
• Mike's code inspired us (!?) to use an object-based approach for almost all our Javascript.

The Table of Contents menu featured on this site was developed by Dieter Bungers of the GMD (German National Research Center for Information Technology). We found it via www.siteexperts.com

For ideas and code to brighten up your pages, browse around 24fun.com - most of the material is written by Peter Gehrig and Urs Dudli, a couple of Swiss guys who admit to being crazy. If you want to use their code, check the browsers and versions required - a lot of their material is for IE only or even IE 5+ only.

References and tutorials

w3schools.com's tutorials are especially useful if you want to know whether a particular technique will produce the results you want, because they:

• cover a wide range of subjects and have a good set of indexes.
• are very concise.
• have working examples with control panels which allow you to try out your own variations and to copy the code.

webmonkey's tutorials are good for someone who wants to learn a new technique from scratch because they:

• cover a wide range of subjects and have a good set of indexes.
• cover each subject in a logical sequence, with links to tutorials on related subjects.
• generally provide downloadable examples (complete with images, databases and whatever else is needed), which you can use as templates.

RichInStyle.com is a superb resource centre for Cascading Style Sheets:

• tutorials
• how well each browser supports each CSS version
• problem areas in the standards
• tutorials
• style sheets which work in all browsers
• tools

Tools

Some tools we've found very useful:

There are thousands of excellent freeware and shareware tools available on the web. Two excellent sources which provide good search facilities and reliable reviews / ratings are:

• TUCOWS
• webattack.com