I get a LOT of emails from a variety of industry sites that I opted into, but I admit that many go unopened.  Well, this morning from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, I received one with the title "Does SharePoint Destroy Intranet Design?"   Being chest deep in the planning stages of a few SharePoint intranet projects, it was worth the look and it paid off to help clarify some thoughts our team has been batting around.  Whether you are building a public website or an intranet, it does ...

Was a tough week for Adobe when both Steve Jobs and Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager of Internet Explorer, both came out questioning various aspects of Flash.    Well, some disclosures are in order...Northridge is a Microsoft partner and we use a lot of their technology.  We also do a good bit of Flash development.    Both Jobs and Hachamovitch hit on the reliability, security, and performance issues of Flash.  Yes, there are some of those for sure, but there are certain t ...

Join Northridge’s Dottie Hodges and Eric Werner at the upcoming Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) Nonprofit Technology Converence (NTC) this April 8-10, 2010  here in Atlanta!   We’ve helped develop two great sessions on the conference agenda, and would love to see you there.  We’re also going to be onsite for the whole conference so if you’d like to set up a time to chat, drop us an email. Here’s a quick glimpse into our sessions: Architecting Your Site For Search Engine Performance: And ...

We often get asked by clients about what percentage of the market various browsers have when we start to develop cross-browser test plans. For many clients with analytic tools, we can see specific to their users what browsers people are using. In the general sense though, this is a good resource to just get a sense of how things are standing. It is updated monthly so is a great resource: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp ...

And change out some colors. I remember SharePoint 2003 when I would talk to developers about how much we can customize the user interface.  It really wasn’t much more than the above reality. As our design team works closely with our SharePoint development team with the MOSS 2007 platform, we continue to push further into interesting realms. Shortly after 2007 was released and we were working on our first project, we would get some grief for various rounded edge treatments. I often find myself ...

The Web Marketing Association awarded the site a “Best of” in this competitive category for the Interactive Advertising Competition.  http://www.freedomopsnet.com/ It’s very rare that we get to (and want to) develop an all Flash website. We had the opportunity to do that when working with a new product line of military figures. It just seemed like the right tool for the job. Adding to the complexity of the project was the level of functionality under the covers. Users set up personal profi ...

That said, Mr Nielsen knows a lot about user experience.  More importantly, Mr Nielsen spends a lot of time researching user behavior. It is this constant research and analysis that provides useful information to our community. My favorite study ever done was the eyetracking survey done several years ago. I still refer to it often when explaining to clients and even new designers how to approach information design of a specific screen. We have split seconds to do a few things as the user scan ...

Whenever I begin to dig into a new client’s analytics, I often start with the Bounce Rate.  This is the percentage of single-page visits to your site.  If you are spending a lot of money on pay-per-click or other methods and you have a high Bounce Rate, you need to often ask yourself these three questions: Are the people I am driving to my side truly qualified prospects? Are the pages that I am driving users to optimized in terms of layout, message, etc? Is the ad content consistent with ...

With the release of Version 2.0, it seems as though Silverlight is definitely headed in the right direction. Version 1.0 showed some promise, but the lack of solid native User Interface controls was definitely an immediate handicap to be overcome. With Version 2.0, there are more than 30 UI controls shipped with it. Where Flash definitely has some great ability to do some interesting things with presentation, the development process is not the best. We still look to use Flash primarily for pu ...

Was recently asked by a client what resources exist to dig into the whole world of user experience. I am the worst at adding and maintaining bookmarks, so most of my sites reside in my brain. This is by no means an extensive list, but just a little bit of a start on the topic: http://www.useit.com/ http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/index.php http://www.uxnet.org/ http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/usability_resources/index.html http://usableweb.com/  http://www.nngroup.com/reports ...