Category Archives: Design

UX of British Road Signs

By colin | Published: May 28, 2010
James May from Top Gear interviewed Margaret Calvert, the woman who designed the motorway (freeway) signs in the UK in the 1950s with her former Art Professor, Jock Kinneir. The two of them were responsible for almost every sign in the British highway code. She shares some interesting insight about the choice to use lower [...]
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Spoons vs. Sticks – How signaling can enhance user experience

By colin | Published: March 17, 2010
The best coffee shops in New York provide spoons to stir your coffee rather than wooden sticks or plastic stirrers. Spoons are more effective than plastic stirrers and wooden sticks at mixing sugar and milk in to coffee. However, I don’t think that’s why coffee shops offer spoons. I think they provide spoons because it [...]
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Links should always be blue and underlined

By colin | Published: March 10, 2010
So you thought it would be clever to make your links pretty? Don’t do it! If you’re short on time, follow these simple rules: Unvisited links should be blue and underlined Visited links should be purple and underlined Active links should be red and underlined Searching for “links should be blue” turns up enough reading [...]
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Building things from scratch creates a better user experience

By colin | Published: February 1, 2010
When I started building Mimi and Hy‘s web store for my friend Allison, I wanted to prove to her that Shopify was better than her existing solution, so I took the standard and free Vogue theme and customized it with her colors and logo. This was a great way to get a store up and running [...]
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