I am providing registered members of a website a weekly mailing which contains URLs to private pages on the website. For usability purposes, I don't want the user to have to provide their credentials after they click on the URL. I am using the ASP.NET Membership provider model. Question How can I implement this so that the user ca...
I'm building a Flash app (as3) that allows users to embed photos of themselves in a scene--think carnival-style cutouts (or faceInHole). I like the interface design for image manipulation at FaceInHole, which puts anchor points and a skeleton around the boundaries of the uploaded image and lets users drag the image to change its positio...
Hi all, I'm a software developer, and I'm going onto a project now that involves implementing a website using ASP.NET (3.5 / 2008, using the Web Client Software Factory). I've been tasked at creating a UI / UX Design Document for the project, however I don't really know where to start. I've been on one project in 3 years where there wa...
I am working on a old J2EE struts app which has very bad UI design. Most of the pages are misusing the screen real estate like there are uneven spaces among dropdown, labels, text boxes etc. Alignment of different items on page is not very efficient leading to space wastage. And sometimes users are forced to use unnecessary scroll bars w...
We've all seen the popular lightbox effects on the web (e.g. JQuery Lightbox and Shadowbox). Yesterday I got into a discussion with a client who is completely enamored with lightboxes and wants to use them every time a form is submitted including: Login forms - click the login button and the lightbox appears with the user name and pass...
How can I change the select ("highlight") color of an TextField in actionscript 3? I've got an input textfield with white text on a black backdrop and as a result, selections are invisible, which is horrible for usability. Thanks! ...
How should i sanitize urls so people don't put 漢字 or other things in them? EDIT: I'm using java. The url will be generated from a question the user asks on a form. It seems StackOverflow just removed the offending characters, but it also turns an á into an a. Is there a standard convention for doing this? Or does each developer just ...
I'm trying to replicate an HTML SELECT element (drop-down-list or combobox) in Flash (AS3). In most browsers, when you have one in focus and you type something, the combobox will try to find the value within its options and show the closest one. I was wondering what kind of algorithm is used for that. I don't think its Levenshtein or si...
What would you do if your site visitors disabled JavaScript? Do you block them? ...
I've got a bit of a usability issue that I'd value some input on. The initial page to my site contains two groups of controls, one for users to login, the other for new users to activate. The issue is with the latter. When users signup for the service, they recieve an activation code that's in the form XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX. At the momen...
I know this questions seems extremely open ended. I will try to narrow scope. I have been struggling for some time as to include or exclude real time user performance stats in an application gui. Does anyone have any info on the harm vs gain in including these stats in an app? i.e. number of emails answered, number of customer calls ...
I'm working on a web application where we have a modal panel/dialog popup to collect user data. The form within the panel has grown large and we've suggested splitting the form across multiple tabs, but our client has suggested adding scrollbars within the modal panel. Are there usability issues with scrollbars within a modal panel? I ...
Over the past few days, Ive asked a few questions to solve my font problem. I was using a variety of obscure fonts for my design. I was using @font-face, and trying to figure out ways of making my backup fonts in the family change size if they were used. It has been way too complicated, and I have decided to simplify things and use a mor...
I'm trying to present a view on the iPhone which asks a user for any 2 of 3 values and using them to calculate the third value. I'm struggling a bit with the usability. One option is to have three rows each with a label, textfield and button. Whichever row the tapped button is on is the value that will be calculated. I'm not terribly fo...
Can we use just <a href="#"> for "back to top" button at bottom of the page? I think it will work always in all browser. We do need to define any ID . When we click on this <a href="#"> it takes to page top always. or what are other best practices to use "back to top" button. ...
Is it best to use whatever we want to use in <h1> Should be same in <title>? Is it good for SEO, Accessibility, Usability, in any terms? <title>How to decide What should be chosen to make heading bold <strong> or <h3/h4/h5>? - Stack Overflow</title> <h1>How to decide What should be chosen to make heading bold <strong>...
Should we always use all these pseudo selectors with different colors? a:link { color: blue } a:active { color: white;} a:hover { color: white;} a:visited {color:green;} Basically we define these for links in the main content area, but then the problem is that it overrides all side bar links, navigation links, etc also, then we need t...
The talk of internet town today is the SNAFU that led to dozens of Facebook users being led by Google search to an article on ReadWriteWeb about the Facebook-AOL deal. What ensued in the comments tread is quickly becoming the stuff of internet legend. However, behind the hilarity is a scary fact that this might be how users browse to al...
A large number of (dare I say most?) sites do not make the labels clickable for their checkbox and radio inputs. It seems to be a huge usability gain for very little effort. Are there any compatibility/functionality/usability issues with using <label> that would discourage developers from using this tag? Edit: Even StackOverflow seems g...
What are the usability, accessibility, screen-reader, or any other development, functionality, or cross browser issues with <iframe>? Is there any alternative for <iframe>? And are there any JavaScript/jQuery or server-side techniques which can decrease the usability, accessibility, or screen-reader issues with <iframe>? Why has the ...