Build your website based on evidence, not false beliefs!

UX Myths collects the most frequent user experience misconceptions and explains why they don’t hold true. And you don’t have to take our word for it, we’ll show you a lot of research findings and articles by design and usability gurus.

Myth #22: Usability testing is expensive

Myth #21: People can tell you what they want

Myth #20: If it works for Amazon, it will work for you

Myth #19: You don’t need the content to design a website

Myth #18: Flash is evil

Myth #17: The homepage is your most important page

Myth #16: Search will solve a website’s navigation problems

Myth #15: Users make optimal choices

Myth #14: You are like your users

Myth #13: Icons enhance usability

Myth #12: More choices and features result in higher satisfaction

Myth #11: You need to redesign your website periodically

Myth #10: If your design is good, small details don’t matter

Myth #9: Design has to be original

Myth #8: Stock photos improve the users’ experience

Myth #7: Graphics will make a page element more visible

Myth #6: Accessible sites are ugly

Myth #5: Accessibility is expensive and difficult

Myth #4: Design is about making a website look good

Myth #3: People don’t scroll

Myth #2: All pages should be accessible in 3 clicks

Myth #1: People read on the web

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Wireframe Showcase is a user-contributed wireframe and UI sketch gallery. I quite like the idea and it’s good that designer can share their ideas with sketches and wireframes.

Here is a nice presentation form NetTuts as they try to build a iPhone App, of a service called Appcelerator which allows developers to build native desktop and mobile (iPhone in my case) apps using the web technologies that we already know, like JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby and PHP! This is a alternative to Abobe AIR but it’s also supports mobile platforms. I recommend this platform for anyone who doesn’t have Objective-C experience.

Learn More.

This is something created by Eren Emre while playing with the new CSS3 features like the transform & box-shadow. This is a awesome example which proves the power of CSS3.

See yourself how to do it

    var Event = new JS.Class({
        include: JS.Observable,

        fire: function(data) {
            this.notifyObservers('fire', data);
        }
    });

JS.Class is designed to make JavaScript behave like Ruby in terms of its OOP structures. It provides Classes and modules with Ruby-compatible inheritance, Subclassing and mixins, Singleton methods and eigenclasses, Method binding, Ports of various standard Ruby modules, including Enumerable, Hash, Set, Observable, Comparable, Forwardable.

The library looks pretty interesting, the documentation is good and there are a lot of cool modules. I have to try it.

What do you think about it? Write down your thoughts and experience with it.

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Before any tangible designs are made, any experienced designer should know that the first thing you do before any sort of web development project is map out a rough sketch first. Although most sketching is done on blank paper, many developers have now started using sketch templates for their web applications. This is definitely the most productive and organized way to start probably one of the most important phase of the application design process. Below are resources and templates to download or print off for designing your next great project!

Find out more and download you sketching paper

Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave’s presentation slides from the SXSWi talk are up. Here’s a summary:

User experiences are your everyday experiences—anything from operating a car, to making a pot of coffee, to ordering a pair of shoes online. User experience is the result of your interactions with a product or service, specifically how it’s delivered and its related artifacts according to the design.

In this presentation Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave will explore the ten characteristics of a great user experience. They will cover all aspects of user experience design such as user research, information architecture, information design, technical writing, interaction design, visual design, brand identity design, accessibly, usability and web analytics. Nick and Raina will also explain how following the ten commandments can boost your web sites, web app, or mobile app’s ease of use, appeal, conversion rates, and more.

Read more on Nick’s site.

Design, develop, and deploy feature-rich Magento online stores with PHP coding.

If you are a PHP developer who wants to understand the architecture of Magento, learn how to extend the system with PHP code, add new features, and integrate Magento with a third-party CMS, this book is for you.

You are expected to be a confident PHP 5 developer. No experience of Magento development is expected, although you should be familiar with the operation of Magento. No experience of the Zend framework is expected.

What you will learn from this book

• Install and upgrade Magento to get ready for development
• Get familiar with the architecture and internal structure of Magento
• Learn about the best modules available and what they can do for you out of the box
• Build a Shipping module for your Magento store to give users options for receiving their items once they have paid for them
• Create a payment method for Magento and the various aspects that go together to complete the payment process
• Speed up your module creation process using the Module Creator script
• Build a basic brand-management module for Magento to manage brands and display their details
• Integrate your favourite CMS into Magento including a walkthrough of integrating WordPress into Magento
• Create, update, delete, and retrieve customer data from within Magento by implementing the customer API
• Integrate Magento data into an existing external web application or script using the Magento Core API
• Import/export files to retrieve and store information from and to external sources using Excel Spreadsheet or CSV data

Find out more

Some interesting examples of beautiful sketches for website prototypes for your daily inspiration, collected by Antonio Lupetti on woorkup.com.

When you start designing a new website it’s very useful to sketch out a first idea of page layout using paper and stencil. This approach help you define easily a working draft of the final version of your website. In general this is a top-down process: you can start sketching first the main sections and then adding more details progressively.

If you are a graphic or web designer you should understand the importance of color combinations. Nice colors and color combinations are much coveted among graphic designers, interior designers and landscapers. You must have used Kuler in Photoshop CS4. ColoRotate is a similar kind of online color palette creator that lets you browse through the color palettes, create new palettes and share them with the online community.

There is a sliders mode as well. This will bring up color sliders for editing the colors. You can choose various modes like RGB, CMYK, LAB, HSV, HLS, NCS while adjusting these sliders. You won’t need to remember the color values and jot them down as you can download the palettes directly in .act format.

You can also browse through the palettes , sort or search for palettes based on tags. There’s also a very information description about colors and how the human eye perceives colors, color models. Checkout Learn Colorotate

Today, Jon Lebensold from ZendCast has put together an video introduction to Doctrine 1.2 integration with the Zend Framework. Doctrine is a fantastic ORM (object-relational mapping tool). If you’ve jumped from NHibernate or Hibernate and are itching to have a powerful tool for handling database relationships, Doctrine is probably your best bet.

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It was quite common to use Zend_Db_Table as base models class, but it was simply not practical. When you start dealing with relations and hierarchical data types it starts to get really tricky, because simply Zend_Db_Table doesn’t provide an extensive enough functionality. So half a year ago Zend Framework developers started to look for better solutions.

An alternative (and a very powerful one at that) was found in Doctrine – an object relational mapper tool that sits on a database layer. Doctrine 2 will even be the first ORM with seamless integration between the Zend Framework (and Symfony). He briefly touches on what some sample code might look like and the command to build out your model classes from predefined YAML files.

After evaluating possible solutions I decided to stay with Doctrine for a long time. I don’t know any other solution coming, I definitely don’t want (mainly because I don’t have time) to invest on creating my own library and Doctrine is simply awesome when you get used to it. After all this time I can say that it was a right call – Doctrine is on a way to being officially supported in Zend Framework

He then goes on to talk about the benefits of Doctrine and why it can save time. Well worth a read and following the rest of the series.

• Zend Framework and Doctrine [First Part]
• Zend Framework and Doctrine [Second Part]

One important interaction indicator on the web is the mouse cursor. The default cursor arrow changes into a pointing hand when you hover over links for example, which indicates they are indeed links and can be clicked on. It also changes into other things to differentiate context, for example it can change into a text input cursor when hovering over text fields to indicate you can type there.

When styling your website with CSS, in some cases you may lose the correct cursor type for certain elements. It’s important to retain this indicator as it will inform the user about how the item they’re hovering over can be used (see affordances). The solution is easy: if the cursor type is wrong, specify it using the CSS “cursor” property.

Continue reading more comments and examples on the the original post on from Usability Post

Learn how to Create a Retro Animated Flip-Down Clock is a tutorial published by Nettus. They are showing how they create an animated flip down clock inspired by the 70’s. Using the Mootools framework, we are trying to replicate the flip action of the pads and make it as lifelike as possible. With it’s retro styling, it could be a really neat thing to add to your website.

The technique that they suggest is interesting and I see this tutorial applied on a maintenance page, something like “Back online in …. “. Pretty cool

Social media has become an integral part of modern society. There are general social networks with user bases larger than the population of most countries. There are niche sites for virtually every special interest out there. There are sites to share photos, videos, status updates, sites for meeting new people and sites to connect with old friends. It seems there are social solutions to just about every need.

Webdesignerdepot has reviewed the history and evolution of social media from its humble beginnings to the present day. Their conclusion is that Social media has come a long way since the days of BBSs and IRC chats and media continues to evolve on a daily basis. With major social networks and social media sites making changes and improvements on an almost daily basis, it’s sure to keep evolving in coming years.

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Flex 3.0 CSS Properties List

The guys from teehanlax+lax have designed a iPhone application that introduces a new optional home screen. A screen that doesn’t require you to scan for red dots with numbers inside of them. Instead it would display information and notifications of things that are new and relevant to you.

I think their propose is quite interesting and awesome and Apple might implement it.

View here other screenshots.

Blank extension for building “System > Configuration” area of Magento admin interface.

You can download ActiveCodeline_CoolDash from Inhoo.net blog, there you can find also the original module announcement.