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.

These are just the basic ways that email is useful in providing a positive user experience. And despite the rise of social networking email is still the primary way for out-of-app communications.

via 52 Weeks of UX – Email, the Glue of UX. Email while being an unreliable (in that when it fails it fails completely) automated communication tool, is an easy and cheap and generally effective communication tool.

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.

Right or wrong, companies who care little about the design of a customer’s experience are often thought to care little about its customers. Poor design encourages people to believe in a brand’s ham-handedness, in its cloth-eared reluctance to listen and respond. If openness, communication, and accountability are the bellwethers of clarity, then poor design is a smudge—a flaw that seems to hide rather than reveal. That was the problem with my breakage scenario: The marketing guy preferred to hide from people, withholding information and feigning incompetence rather than fulfilling what seemed to be a sincere obligation.

via Dustin Curtis – The Clear War by Kevin Mattice. A designer’s job is provide a seamless experience not to trick customers.

If you could redesign any brand, which would it be? This was the question asked us recently by Viewpoint, the bi-annual magazine about trends, brands, futures, and market strategies. Hmmm, we thought. What company or organization is doing super-cool, interesting, worthwhile things, and is completely undersold by its logo or brand? Within minutes we were in unanimous agreement on our subject for this project: NASA.

via BaseNow – A Proposal To Go Where No NASA Logo Has Gone Before. The spin they put on the NASA logo is awesome and beautiful.

Mere mortals don’t think of things on their computers as “files.” People think about digital representations of things the same way they think about real physical things: they think about photos, videos, text documents, articles, and people. A “file” on a computer is just a universal container for one of those things.

via Dustin Curtis – The Death of Files. Let’s throw out files and just have apps that operate on a database of files. Store the files behind the scenes and open an app to work on a file or series of files.

This is an interesting concept particularly for the more novice user and simple series of files (movies, music, documents) but does it scale to a programmer being able to manipulate a series of different types of files for a project, same thing for a movie editor or a graphic designer, that’s a different question. The basic design concept I would implement would be an OS level database of files, file types and applications.

Any new application would register with this database adding file types or registering as being able to manipulate a particular file type. The OS could handle storage of all files with applications requesting that certain files be organized together in a manner to be accessible say as a project. This would also allow the OS to take advantage of more efficient storage and backups of the underlying data. The OS could separate out core OS level information, from applications, from application and user level storage. This allows for one click backups of all these different levels of information (backup the whole computer, backup the OS, backup applications, backup my preferences and files for my user account). The iPhone, iPad and even iPhoto and iTunes are great examples of this occurring where the details of files are almost completely hidden from the end user.

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.