UX
The Many Faces of the Hyperlink
The World Wide Web is built on links. It thrives because links are everywhere. There are links to the various pages on individual sites. There are links from one site to another. There are links in e-mails to websites. There are links in PDFs and documents to Web pages. Chances are, you used a link to get to this article. Yet, when it comes to setting up a website, styling and consideration of links is often overlooked. Or worse, specific choices for links are made that end up hurting the usability and interaction of your website. … Continue reading Online Retailers: Help Your Customers Find Your Products
One of my favorite (only because it has the best, low-price selection) sources of quality fabrics has horrible UX on their store site. Horrible to the point that I’m only able to do rudimentary filtering because I understand the GET variables they use to display their catalog. In fact, I wrote a post to help non-developer users figure out how to filter the catalog by changing the URL. The fact that I had to do either of those things really bothers me as a front-end developer; your users should never have to resort to manipulating the URL in order to filter or find products. … Continue reading
Trigger AJAX Error Event
When I was new to working with AJAX functions—especially in the realm of form submission—one hurdle I often encountered was how to handle processing errors in my back-end script and give meaningful feedback to my users. I didn’t understand how to designate a response as an error instead of successful processing. Early on, I sometimes employed a dirty hack of prepending any error with the string ERROR: and then adding in some quick checking to see if that substring existed in my response text. While that may get the job done, it’s not good form. It causes convoluted code usage, thumbs its nose at existing error handling functionality and makes future maintenance a headache. But there is a better way by simply utilizing your processing language’s inherent header and error handling functionality. … Continue reading
