Food for Thought

Today I would like to review some design/dev blogs with great characteristics of usable “How To” type articles. There’s an abundance of tutorial style articles, but nothing is worse that hitting a tutorial that confuses it’s users. If you are starting up your own blog, or already running one

I wrote an article called “Do You Eat and Run?” last year and wanted to add on to this article to express my concern for some designers/developers out there. Looking back at some of my emails and comments, I’ve noticed a trend in some who want to achieve certain techniques without properly learning prerequisite foundation and knowledge.

A couple of weeks ago, a co-worker and I had a nice little debate about whether the       “+” / ” -” for an accordion/toggle element should be left aligned or right aligned.

Following my instinct, I felt it was appropriate that it should be left aligned since most readers read from left to right, and having the “+” / “-” icon close to the label on the left also gives it that extra indication that this element is collapsible. I also saw it closely related to how file trees are represented in common applications.

I just want to do a recap of what happened about a week ago. I had been sharing a dedicated machine with my partner for a few months, until one Friday morning, the site just never came up. I had assumed it had something to do with exceeding bandwidth and running out of memory, little did I know, the entire machine had crapped out and had wiped everything out.

Are you the type of designer/developer who eats and runs? I don’t mean going to a party, chowing down, and then taking off as you just went there for the feast. I’m talking about the type of designer/developer who cruises around the blogsphere finding what they want, copy + paste, then get’n the hell out.

Although there is nothing wrong with this since most bloggers who share their techniques and code are giving back to better the community, you may be cheating your self out of a good lesson.