Notes from Luke Wroblewski

"Usually the main navigation system is your site's organization progressively revealed in visual form. I say progressively, because each level of information in our schematics most often translates to one set of navigation menu options. And while the first level of navigation should show up on every page in our site, putting the entire organazation on each page is likely to add lots of clutter and just confuse our audience. As a result, we frequently reveal each level of organization only when a user selects its "parent" category."

Page 48-49. - Site-Seeing A visual Approach To Web Usability by Luke Wroblewski

"Your audience will be confident that they can get through your site if they know they can count on a set of consistent links to be there when they need them... Retaining consistency within a navigation system means keeping the location, order, amount, and relative visual characteristics the same throughout the site. A continually moving navigation system with disappearing options is a surefire way to diminish user confidence."

Page 50. - Site-Seeing A visual Approach To Web Usability by Luke Wroblewski

How to include a Blog on you web page.

It seems like a simple enough task, but adding copy from a blog into a static web page proved to be more complicated than I originally thought. Mr. Wiggins was kind enough to tip me off to Magpie, but my irrational fear of PHP kept me looking. My new found love, jQuery lead me to jFeed but I wasn't able to get my FeedBurner feeds to work in Firefox under OS X. I finally found my answer in a blog on Vandelaydesign.com. The short version is FeedBurner its self has an application called BuzzBoost under the publicize tab. Activate it, configure it, and it creates a small chunk of JavaScript to paste into your page. Hopefully when Google crawls my homepage it will index my sourced in posts. Read the original if you need the nitty gritty.

Notes on Memory I'd like to Remember.

My edition of The Essential Guide to User Interface Design is from the 1990's, but it is still a fantastic book. A new edition is out, if you are interested.

"Memory is not one of the most developed of human attributes. Short-term memory is highly susceptible to the interference of such distracting tasks as thinking, reciting, or listening, which are constantly erasing and overwriting it. Remembering a telephone number long enough to complete the dialing operation taxes the memory of many people. The short-term memory limit is generally viewed as 7 +/- 2 "Chunks" of information (Miller, 1956), and knowledge, experience, and familiarity govern the size and complexity of chunks that can be recalled. To illustrate, most native English-speaking people would find recalling seven English words much easier than recalling seven Russian words... The human active vocabulary (words that can be recalled) typically ranges between 2,000 and 3,000 words. Our power of recognition is much greater than our power of recall, and this phenomenon should be utilized in design."

Page 58-59. -The Essential Guide to User Interface Design by Wilbert O. Galitz