Usability Post

I've built my experience mainly through exposure to native mobile. I find that the walled gardens and constraints you work within tend to help focus what you're creating. It's easier to tell when something looks or feels "wrong" when you're looking at apps that are built to match the OS's ecosystem, instead of the latest web trends.

When you work with a standardized set of UI elements on a canvas of limited size, you tend to start thinking about the interface in terms of modular actions and tasks, which you can repurpose later when scaling up to tablet or desktop web. You also have a good basis to simplify these tasks further when branching out to wearables and in-car devices.

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At this point, Google, Apple, and Microsoft each have pretty defined ideologies and UI — check out their guidelines:

https://developer.android.com/design/material/index.html

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/

http://dev.windows.com/en-us/design

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Check out some of the sessions from WWDC and Google I/O too:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/

https://www.google.com/events/io/io14videos

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There are also a lot of great blogs out there that have pinpointed info on different parts of interface design. Sometimes these info-morsels can be easier to digest than starting a full course in UX. This is definitely not a comprehensive list, so look around, and get your RSS client fired…

Here is a restaurant website for a UK based chain that we just launched (in Dec 09).

http://giraffe.net

I feel its both attractive and functional. Its primarily supposed to be a website (i.e used from a normal web browser) but will work fine on your iphone.

There is no flash but we've used jquery extensively for 'flashiness'.

There is also prominent twitter/flickr and facebook engagement throughout.

There are menu's (web based and pdf choices), offers and locations. Try googling for 'giraffe menu' - the menu is the top hit.

We spent a while fine tuning the location finder http://giraffe.net/restaurants which uses the google API to provide 'a nearest list' functionality. Once you chosen a restaurant it will also provide you with a list of other restaurants close to your choice.

The site www.usabilitypost.com did a feature on the location finder as we've also done something cool with the location search box.

http://www.usabilitypost.com/2009/11/30/search-dropdown-hybrid-box/

The idea behind the site is simple. Get people to the restaurants. We've had a lot of feedback that suggests that it does just that and we're quite proud of the result.

Three things:

① I believe this only affects macOS, and has no effect on any other platform.

② There’s no such property as font-smoothing. Only -webkit-font-smoothing and -moz-osx-font-smoothing, with their different values.

③ Attempting to control this is highly controversial. You may prefer it one way, but others may prefer it otherwise. See, for example, https://usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smoothing/. (Note that discussion of these things tends to be from 7–15 years ago. I have no idea what the present situation is; I know macOS largely eschews subpixel antialiasing these days, so maybe the effect of this property has changed now, or maybe it literally does nothing, I don’t use macOS.) As a generalisation, you should not do things like this, but leave it to the platform or the user to decide. Features like this don’t tend to end up part of the standardised web platform, because you normally shouldn’t be able to control them, and when people control them, they’re normally doing so in order to work around platform-specific issues, or just because they’re copying and pasting what someone else did without understanding.

I agree, some newspaper's web offerings have been awful in terms of page load and user experience.
Not singling any of them out, but I went to a popular UK newspaper's site; it loads hundreds of assets and almost crashes my tablet, and even once it loads half the screen real estate was taken up by a big advert and tiny font in the article.

The Guardian (and BBC News) seem to be the only ones taking this seriously so far, and maybe coincidence but I now go to those sites a lot more these days when I'm on my tablet.

Some of these companies should take the web more seriously (rather than some side offering they don't really care about) before its too late.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/b2c6502f-7b54-4fde-9695-9ce0b304a7ba

http://usabilitypost.com/2014/05/09/patrick-hamann-on-making-the-guardian-load-under-1000-ms/

Thank you. I've been frustrated with all of the comments making these same mistakes this past month on Hacker News.

Thought: one problem that might lead to the confusion is that in some situations aesthetics is the where the solution to the problem lies (think apparel design or poster design). In those cases, the other problems have long been solved and all that is left to iterate on is the appearance. http://www.usabilitypost.com/2011/11/11/timeless-fashion/

Side note: it's interesting how people are quick to admit Steve Jobs was a genius and built great products, but they fail to take away what was probably the thing he advocated most.

I'm one of those people. Still using US$100 Asus Zenfone 4, running Android K; with 8GB internal memory and 1GB RAM. My phone still looking and running good, no scratches, and no lags. I only use 1.56GB internal memory for apps, nothing fancy, just some apps that I truly need.

The reason I'm not considering to upgrade my Android is because of this article: It's The User Experience, Stupid.[0] I already see Android O in action, and some newest Android devices, but I don't think it's worth my money. So, I'm planning to keep using my 3 year old phone until it's dead.

[0]: http://usabilitypost.com/2008/12/03/its-the-user-experience-stupid/