At work as part of the employee planning and performance initiative, we have these things called GAOs. It’s an acronym. For what I have no clue. It’s basic goal setting and tracking. Every review period I put the same goal. Goal: Establish myself as a world class interaction designer.

I keep that goal there to remind me there is a lot to learn. There are a bunch of great designers out there who could put me to shame in their respective design category. I like to set the bar high even though it means I’ll either jump right through it (or sometimes under it). I expect my manager to keep my feet to the fire and grade me fairly based on how they think I’m progressing.

Sometimes it’s the humility of failing miserably, sometimes it’s the reward of getting it right but for me it’s the learning along the way that makes me a better designer. So far I don’t think I’ve quite reached the peak but I’ll keep climbing.

What motivates you?

Last night I received a real brain twister of a question from @ganarce on my Twitter page. He wanted to know if there was a way to align data within a table using a decimal point “.”. Seemed like a fairly routine type of formatting (invoices, data etc.). Without massaging the data ahead of time to all have the same number of characters before or after the decimal point.

I went to the W3C to for an explanation on horizontal alignment. Ah ha! there it was. Easy enough:

col align=”char” char=”.”

Unfortunately there is little or no support for this attribute amongst the Browser community. I found a method using JQuery that seems to work with IE, FF and Chrome.

Happy formatting!

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

-Sam Walton

I love the simplicity of this quote. It cuts through all the B.S. and puts every employee on watch. The customer/user has the power to decide your company’s destiny. If you’re not out there listening to them, understanding what they want and building products and services to meet their needs, they will fire you. And they won’t feel a bit of remorse about it.

Use visual hierarchy as a method to guide the user. It should show relationships and priorities between elements on the page. If communicated well, it should be clear to the user what the preferred course of action should be. Without visual hierarchy the user is left trying to decide what information is more important. Not all hierarchy is based on size. Here are some other methods to indicate to the user what is most important.

Focus:. The layout indicates where users need to look first.

Flow: The eye flows smoothly and naturally by a clear path through the surface, finding user interface (UI) elements in the order appropriate for their use.

Grouping:. Logically related UI elements have a clear visual relationship. Related items are grouped together; unrelated items are separate.

Emphasis:. UI elements are emphasized based on their relative importance.

Alignment: The UI elements have coordinated placement, so they are easy to scan and appear orderly.