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I just finished listening to a great interview with usability expert Steve Krug over at Boagworld. Mr. Krug wrote one of my favorite books on website usability, Don’t Make Me Think, and is latest, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, appears to be a nice follow-up. His main point is that productive user-testing doesn’t have to be anything complicated—it can be a simple 15-minute observation with two or three people.

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Adobe Flash is the current champion of online video (although I believe Netflix uses Microsoft’s Silverlight), but YouTube is showing us that things may change in the near future. HTML5 supports video without any plugins—it only requires that your browser support HTML5. This is really cool. While I do love Flash and all it can do, I’m all for a high-quality, free alternative to presenting media online. Finally, I’m beginning to get excited about the next generation of HTML.

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Why do I constantly have to remind myself that being busy is a good thing? Should I really be worried that this website hasn’t been updated since August of 2009? Nope, not one bit. Why? I have work coming out of my ears and that is way more important than what my next blog post should be. So, is it important to blog and tweet and Facebook? Sure it is—when you have time. But if you’re overflowing with work, don’t sweat it. Just be thankful!

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I have often avoided fancy effects and such in favor of simplicity. My list of compatibility issues does not need one more addition to make development more complicated. The question that always arises is, “does the effect enhance the site enough to justify more time and money?” Just lately I was reminded again that the answer is often “no”—sometimes simple is best.

Starting with fancy

While working on the new Omni product page for Baron Services, I thought it a perfect candidate for the “lightbox” effect—you know, the screen goes dark and a small, inset window appears with an enlarged image, video, or other content. I set up the page and it was beautiful. It even tested well in all the major browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer (versions 6 through 8), Safari, and Opera. However, one person at Baron Services was having trouble, and I could not reproduce the issue.

Simple solution

It turned out that the anomaly was Internet Explorer 8 running on 64-bit Windows Vista, and I could not figure out what was going wrong (I don’t have 64-bit Windows Vista to test). We had two choices: spend time and money trying to make the “fancy” version work, or drop back to a simplified, yet usable version in favor of wider compatibility. It was an easy decision—simple won by far, and it was not only a matter of budget. We needed to get a working version out quickly, so time was an important factor as well.

The final version incorporates a simple browser pop-up window so that the user still gets the feeling that they do not really leave the page, much like lightbox. No, it’s not quite as fancy, but it works and it launched on time and within budget. That makes both the users and my client happy.

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I love Dan Cederholm’s books Web Standards Solutions and Bulletproof Web Design. As a reader, I get to pick his brain and see how he analyzes web design problems and provides solutions that are attractive, practical, and accessible. He has now announced a third book—Handcrafted CSS—with that same approach using more modern techniques. From the website:

Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design is an attempt to share some of these details that matter most. By encouraging “progressive enrichment” to utilize advanced CSS and CSS3 properties that work in browsers today, to reevaluating past methods and best practices. This book will show how craftsmanship can be applied to flexible, bulletproof, highly efficient and adaptable interfaces that make up a solid user experience.

There's also a video version on DVD that can either be purchased separately or bundled with the book.

I’ll be pre-ordering mine tonight.

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