Here are places it’s useful to use Ajax: (This is a collaborative wiki list – feel free to add your own ideas to it) Form driven interaction. Forms are slow. Very slow. Editing a tag (the old way) on a del.icio.us bookmark? Click on the edit link to load the edit bookmark form...

Mistakes made when developing with Ajax .

Introduction Anybody who has written software for public use will probably have received at least one bad bug report. Reports that say nothing ("It doesn't work!"); reports that make no sense; reports that don't give enough information; reports that give wrong information. Rep...

There is an ongoing debate about whether offsite links should automatically open up in new browser windows. I believe that they should. An offsite or external link is one that leads your visitors to another domain, separate and apart from your own website. It is similar to rea...

As part of our New Ventures program, Adaptive Path worked with Sphere, a San Francisco-based startup, to develop and refine their weblog search engine. Project lead Ryan Freitas discusses the approach he and the Sphere team took to develop the application. There is no shortage...

Thomas Watson Jr., the man responsible for transforming IBM into a computer giant, famously declared that “good design is good business.” Like most maxims, Watson’s observation is both widely cited and widely ignored. Traditionally, investing in design has been considered both...

Five years ago, Robert Reimann wrote a seminal article for the Cooper Newsletter called “So You Want To Be an Interaction Designer.” Like many people, I read the article and said, yep, that’s what I want to be. I took Reimann’s (good) advice and found both work and training as...

There are plenty of excellent books and articles out there, including many written by the contributors to this publication. While most of those works gracefully walk the inexperienced developer through challenging layouts and teach by literal example, few of them acknowledge t...

Here in San Francisco, Apple buffs are rejoicing at finally getting an Apple Store of our very own. (Sure, there’s been one across the Bay for months, but it’s just not the same.) As the newest of Apple’s five “flagship” retail stores, the San Francisco Apple Store reflects th...

For years now, the “ROI of User Experience” has been sought as a means to justify larger corporate investments in web design. Although ROI methodology can be a useful tool for prioritizing possible web development projects, by itself ROI is not the answer to building a stronge...

Over the past year, I’ve evaluated the search experiences on a number of popular content sites. With the help of author and interface designer Darcy DiNucci, I picked apart the search and result designs from sites like Apple.com, NASA.gov, SchwabFoundation.org, and a variety o...

Ninety percent of all usability testing performed on Web sites is useless. This is not to say that it doesn’t have a significant role to play in user experience design. When done right, usability testing will improve your Web site and your development process, but the current...

Contrary to all the books, articles, Web sites, and workshops that suggest otherwise, the biggest problem in user experience design today is not one of practice. Any competent practitioner can dip into the current toolbox of methods and create a satisfactory product. Right now...

I did some research recently at OpenSourceCMS.com — a fantastic site that lets you play with dozens of CMS installations — and left pretty depressed. What I experienced was obtuse and complex software that was packed with gratuitous features at the expense of usability and use...

In the days before Google, search engines like Excite, Hotbot, and Altavista larded themselves up with content in a desperate effort to delay users beyond the two pages of a search activity — search box and results. The goal was “stickiness,” discouraging people from leaving y...

Ever since Alan Cooper’s 1999 book The Inmates are Running The Asylum was published, everyone is mad for personas. They’ve permeated the highest and deepest levels of organizations, and have become a standard interaction design tool. Whole projects are now built around creatin...

The proliferation of usability labs is a sign of success for the field of user-centered design. Whether it’s a low-rent lab comprised of a couple adjacent conference rooms, a video camera, and a television, or a fully decked-out space with remote-control cameras, two-way mirro...

“…looking at a company’s homepage is like reading its palm…” This truism appeared in a recent Business Week article about Yahoo. The author goes on to say that Yahoo’s relatively static, but crowded, homepage suggests infighting beneath, as corporate departments battle it out...

If anything about current interaction design can be called “glamorous,” it’s creating Web applications. After all, when was the last time you heard someone rave about the interaction design of a product that wasn’t on the Web? (Okay, besides the iPod.) All the cool, innovative...

The goal of this tutorial is to demonstrate a system for manipulating a database without writing SQL queries. I introduce a number of concepts including the DataObject and DataAccessObject which together allow developers focus on manipulating data without needing to write, or...

Ever wondered how different popular sites function? The key to this answer is a dedicated server. Such a server that is completely owned by its user thereby avoiding all of the handling and supervision of a shared server.Dedicated servers span different sizes with anywhere fro...

Be inspired. Some tips that can be useful for website developers.

(...)I'll warn you right now, this is going to be a long article. More than likely, I'll put a version of this up on the MySQL developer zone and PHP zone. This article is intended to highlight various basic topics concerning proper methods of handling connections to MySQL dat...

The Registry is one of those Patterns where once you understand it, it seems so incredibly useful. Think of it as a basket; using a Registry you can add data (both values and objects) to the basket, and retrieve them as required from other parts of an application. Since all su...

If you're a webmaster, you should definitely read this!

This article is covering password hashing, a subject which is often poorly understood by newer developers.

IntroductionIn this article I will try to give a view of what is the custom caching with php, why and how we can use it.In the modern days, most of the sites are database driven. That means that your site is actually an application which retrieves data from a DBMS ( database m...