http://seanlandry.com/blog user experience designer and CSS addict Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:50:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en As many of you know, I left Iron Mountain in November to join a new start-up in South Boston called MeYou Health. Since then, we've built a really solid core team and are jamming everyday on creating fun user experiences for the Web and mobile devices designed to help people ... http://seanlandry.com/blog/2010/02/25/whats-going-on-at-meyou-health-2/ As many of you know, I left Iron Mountain in November to join a new start-up in South Boston called MeYou Health. Since then, we've built a really solid core team and are jamming everyday on creating fun user experiences for the Web and mobile devices designed to help people ... http://seanlandry.com/blog/2010/02/25/whats-going-on-at-meyou-health/ If you're like me, you spend a good deal of time mocking screens. If you are working in an application with users then you often need to create fake user names for your screens. Since I can't stand using John Doe and quickly run out of names I decided to ... http://seanlandry.com/blog/2010/02/04/fake-usernames/ 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 ... http://seanlandry.com/blog/2009/10/20/setting-the-bar-high/ 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 ... http://seanlandry.com/blog/2009/10/16/aligning-data-with-a-decimal-point-using-jquery/ "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 ... http://seanlandry.com/blog/2009/10/15/favorite-quote-of-the-day/ 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 ... http://seanlandry.com/blog/2009/10/14/a-little-about-visual-hierarchy/ Previously I wrote about how to shorten your CSS rules with padding and margin. Here are two other ways of reducing your rules and making your stylesheets less cluttered. Border If you have a container with a border that is one pixel wide, black and is the same for all four ... http://seanlandry.com/blog/2009/06/15/css-shorthand-borders-and-colors/ CSS offers the ability to shorten your code in a few instances to make it more tidy and easy to maintain. Here's an example of how to shorten your margin and padding rules. This rule: .mydiv { padding-top: 12px; padding-right: 3px; padding-bottom: 6px; padding-left: 9px; } Is exactly the same as this rule using shorthand: .mydiv { padding: 12px 3px ... http://seanlandry.com/blog/2009/05/28/css-shorthand-padding-and-margin/ Relative position is one of the most understood of all the CSS positions. Once you understand how it is supposed to be rendered it can be a powerful design tool for your more complex layouts. To understand relative positioning first we need to take a look at static positioning. By default ... http://seanlandry.com/blog/2009/05/19/css-relative-position-simply-explained/