We talked about it for a bit and came up with this basic goal: Let’s make it really easy for our customers to quickly rate our customer service every time we talk to them. It’s not rocket science, and it’s not a breakthrough idea, but it wasn’t something we were doing. It was time we experimented with the concept. We’d write some software and try it out. We’d call the app Smiley.

via Signal vs. Noise – Smiley: An app in 24 hours. 37signals shows how they went from concept to finished product in 24 hours. The great thing is that it’s a pretty simple app, but seems like a solid concept and well executed.

It is a reset stylesheet. Unlike Meyer’s or YUI’s, it not only removes the default styling of HTML elements, but also rebuilds the new generic rules for the typography, headings, paragraphs, lists, forms, tables etc. It’s light-weight, flexible and browser-friendly.

via Borderleft Labs – Toucan CSS reset. I like it, just in-between a normal CSS framework and basic CSS rest style sheet.

Price isn’t always the first impression that one gets from an experience, but it is a key component on how expectations can be set for a person. A couple of weeks ago I flew Midwest Airlines and I didn’t know anything about them. They had the cheapest price flight so I went with them. Upon arriving at the terminal I saw they had different seats than Southwest which was right across the aisle. Their seats sucked and were uncomfortable. I always figured that all airlines had the same seats, but Southwest had lounge chairs that looked like you could sit down in them all day. Midwest had seats built for a three-year old.

via Drawar – Design The Experience: Expectations. If you set up your site for a bad expectation, the customer gets a bad experience.

How long does it take for a new visitor/customer to be delighted using your product or service?

via 52 Weeks of UX – Time to Delight. Probably the most important and hardest metric. The most important because that is the real job of a product or service to delight the customer. The hardest because you have to go out and ask your customers one by one and find out how to replicate that awesome experience or that one thing that wowed your customers for all of the others.

One of the things missing from Texas Tech’s Computer Science degree is a course in Human & Computer Interaction, or along similar lines. We learn a lot about how to write good software but nothing of how to make people experience delight in using it. And the real key behind good software isn’t how bug free it is, but does the customer absolutely love using that application, if they do you’ve made a customer for life. Apple is the obvious and perfect example of this.

The idea by some web designers that a grid isn’t necessary goes to show how silly some people in our industry can be. Sure sometimes you can simply get by with a design by "eyeing" it, but a grid helps to keep the chaos under control with a bit of structure. Even the best effects and elements won’t carry a design if the grid isn’t there to prop it up.

via Drawar – Sometimes A Grid Can Save You. A grid creates structure to an otherwise unstructured document.

Merely removing warnings doesn’t save our work from peril, but using an “undo” function does. Let me say that again: The solution to our warning woes is undo. With a robust undo, we can close our work with reckless abandon and be secure in the knowledge that we can always get it back. With undo, we can make that horrible “oops!” feeling go away by getting our work back.

via A List Apart – Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo. Rather than use a warning consider using the ability to just undo. Less hassle to do the action and easy to fix in the case of a mistake.

Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries are the three technical ingredients for responsive web design, but it also requires a different way of thinking. Rather than quarantining our content into disparate, device-specific experiences, we can use media queries to progressively enhance our work within different viewing contexts. That’s not to say there isn’t a business case for separate sites geared toward specific devices; for example, if the user goals for your mobile site are more limited in scope than its desktop equivalent, then serving different content to each might be the best approach.

via A List Apart – Responsive Web Design. A List Apart on creating designs that respond to all users and devices.

In the past few days I’ve been revising the CSS compatibility table with information about the latest crop of browsers. There’s no doubt about it: this is IE9’s show. It just supports nearly everything. No hassle, no buts.

Besides, CSS3 selectors are now fully supported by all browsers but one. And that one browser is not IE. It’s, curiously, Opera.

via QuirksBlog – IE’s big leap forward; CSS3 selectors fully supported. Awesome news and big kudos to the IE team for turning IE into a real browser.

You had your chance, Microsoft, and you blew it. There are enough browser makers now that care about the user experience, that care about the developer experience, and that realize what’s important in this community. Even if you did everything right from now on, there’s no amount of promotion, branding, or mock integrity that can change how developers perceive your products. It’s too late.

via Impressive Webs – Dear Microsoft, You Missed the Boat. It’s sad but in nine years the web design community has turned from being enthralled with IE to wanting it to wither away and disappear. It probably doesn’t help that most of the web development crowd has turned to the Mac and Microsoft decided long ago to turn it’s back on IE for the Mac, thus relegating it to a chore to test new designs or features.

The demos have three levels of obstacles for non-Safari browsers even if the other browsers implemented the HTML5 features being demoed (only video and audio; the rest is CSS!) and implemented the proposed CSS features once standardized:

via hsivonen – -webkit-HTML5. Apple promotes open standards by calling them by the wrong name and using the most closed version possible to prevent all other browsers from seeing the effects. Oh and one of the demos doesn’t even work in anything other than the latest version of Mac OSX.