usability

Responsive design > mobile sites

There are individuals and companies who still believe it would be in their best interest to maintain a 'desktop' version of their website, and a completely or mostly-separate 'mobile' version of their site, and this belief (especially in the corporate arena) was strengthened by a recent (2012) report by the Nielsen Norman Group, Mobile Site vs. Full Site, which recommended a separate mobile site with stripped-down features and different design. The idea of having a mobile-optimized design is good—but not with the cost of making it a stripped-down version of your 'full' site, as Nielsen seems to recommend.

Mobile PNC Website

There are many problems with having separate versions of the website, especially as we near a point where many sites are accessed more on mobile devices (tablets, smartphones), and less on traditional desktop computers:

jQuery Code to Select Textarea or Text Input Field when Selected

On one Drupal site I'm developing, there is an 'embed code generator' in one of the site's forms. This embed code capability is similar to Twitter's embeddable timeline widget, in that a user can select some parameters (colors, mostly), then some code (usually an iframe with the contents provided by an external site) is printed in a textarea, which the user can select, and paste into his own site's HTML.

To help the user in the task of selecting the code, the entire contents of the textarea or textfield is highlighted when the user clicks any part, which ensures that the user will get every last bit of code without having to select and drag his mouse around the text box (sometimes I've seen people missing part of a tag, which makes the embed fail to load). That's what we want to do, inside our own Drupal form.

First, in the drupal form itself (or via an hook_form_alter()), we need to attach a javascript file in our custom module (in this example, I assume you have a module called custom.module, and a js file named 'custom.select-helper.js' in your custom module's directory, inside a 'js' folder):

Designing for the 80%

Recently, an article on Accessibility appeared on Planet Drupal which caught my eye, so I clicked on it. When I was taken to the article page on d7ux.org, the banner across the top of the page caught my eye (as it was intended to do!):

Our UX Principles:

  1. Make the most frequent tasks easy and less frequent tasks achievable.
  2. Design for the 80%.
  3. Privilege the content creator.
  4. Make the default settings smart.

I think those four principles, especially numbers one and two, should be the driving force behind any web or product design.