Weekly Links and Comments

mattias — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 12:38:44 +0000

Mad Libs Increase Form Conversions with 25-40%

This week saw a lot of discussion on “Mad Libs” on how conversion for forms could increase dramatically by using forms with inline elements and a narrative format. LukeW writes about a test where vast.com saw an increase in form conversions with 25-40%

Ron and his team ran some A/B testing online that compared a traditional Web form layout with a narrative “Mad Libs” format. In Vast.com’s testing, Mad Libs style forms increased conversion across the board by 25-40%.

Read the full article on LukeW’s blog.

Mad Libs Do Not Increase Form Conversions

A guy named Patrick McKenzie tried the Mad Libs technique on a form and came to the conclusion that in his case with his users, the result was the opposite. I think that he has a point in that you must test on your users and not just listenting to “facts” from others. But to be honest he could have set his test up better. The best thing with this post is the comments.

Read the full article at Patrick McKenzie’s blog

Buzrr

A colleague of mine, Dennis Hettema has released a Google Buzz Aggregator/Counter named buzrr that makes it easier to find trending and popular topics posted on Google Buzz. There are some tools as well for integration into you website. Interesting to see where this is heading. Good Job Dennis!

How to get better at UI Design

I found this good article at http://ui-patterns.com on how to get better at UI design. It categorizes parts of the job needed to build and design better UI’s.

Make sure you follow me on Twitter

I post links each and every day with focus on User Experience and Web Development on my two twitter accounts, make sure you follow me there: @uxs and @hising. UXS is more focused on design, user experience and usability while hising is more on web development in general and somewhat more personal. See you on Twitter!

10 Web Development Links for You

mattias — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 16:12:44 +0000

It has been a good week for all people working with web development, below I have listed some of the things I think stood out this week.

Google Chrome OS

When Google announced that they were about to launch an Operating System, a lot of people said that they “knew it” and some said that “they had to” and some reacted to that the OS was not built on Android. I felt like when I watched Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis, if I had looked close enough, maybe I could have realised that it was coming, but I was actually pretty stunned by the news that Google will enter the OS-market. The best thing from my point of view is of course the tools people will be using for building applications on top of it, plain web development tools! The Google OS is the Web Developer OS. I will write a longer post on Google Chrome OS later this week where I try to analyze how Google Chrome OS will change how we look at Web Develoment and Web Developers.

BBC Future Media Standards & Guidelines

BBC released their JavaScript Library Glow as Open Source and the library is part of a bigger web development strategy from – BBC Future Media and Guidelines.

Specialist Working Groups, with representation across the BBC, are responsible for considering industry trends and developments in their respective divisions, and defining appropriate standards in response to these developments.

From what I have seen, the documentation and size of the project can only be compared to the YUI-project driven by Yahoo.

Custom Taxonomies in WordPress 2.8

I believe that WordPress will become a big player in the Web Content Management area the next coming year. A lot of people see WordPress as a blogging platform only and complain about the code quality. I think that we are starting to see really good features such as Custom Taxonomies which opens up for very specific solutions built on top of the WordPress platform.

Web Form Validation – Best Practices and Tutorials

I have always liked the problem of client-side form validation on the web and wrote a piece on the subject a couple of years ago, best practices for web form validation, and last week I noticed a peek in traffic as I was linked (somewhat hidden though) from an article on Web Form Validation by Smashing Magazine. The link was to my form validation framework jForm who are in the idea-stage.

Interactive jQuery Selector Test

The guys at the jQuery Blog blogged about this interactive selector test script for jQuery. I like the idea, but would like to see a bigger selector (XPath, XSL, Regular Expression) as an add-on to my favorite editor TextMate

Online Regular Expression Testing

Like a natural law, you will turn to documentation when you need to write a regular expression. This online tool for testing regular expression are the best one I have seen yet, but as mentioned earlier, I would like to see a bundled solution not only for the web but also as plugin to different editors.

SlickMap CSS

Very niched design solution to problem a lot of designers, developers need to solve from time to time, how should we present our Sitemap in a slick way that do not force me to write HTML to scare the kids with. SlickMap CSS solves that problem for you. These small design solutions often becomes standard toolsets as both developers and users find it very handy to use them (Lightbox). Go visit SlickMap – A Visual Sitemapping Tool for Web Developers.

Google Page Speed

Google hired Steve Souders to work on Web Performance, he earlier worked as Chief Performance on Yahoo. Yahoo has done a great job with YSlow Firebug extension making it easier to find bottle necks and easy to solve performance issues on your website. Now Google launches a similar program and add-on for Firebug, Google Page Speed, I bet Steve has something to do with it.

Raphaël JS

This library helps you with your work online with vector graphics using JavaScript. Raphaël currently supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+. The demos are really neat. I think that the good support for different browsers together with the ease-of-use API can make this a hit. It is about time we start seeing bigger use of non-flash vector graphics online.

JavaScript Regular Expression Library

XRegExp is an Open Source JavaScript library that provides an augmented, extensible, cross-browser implementation of regular expressions, including support for additional syntax, flags, and methods. Go check it out.

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