Fat Agnus

A novice will usually blame the equipment and show distrust where an expert on the other hand will understand the equipment and know its limit and believe it to be reliable and predictable.

An industrial designer once described to me how he viewed ordinary equipment such as car doors and radios. Earlier in his career, he would feel irritation when he encountered something that was poorly designed. Eventually he learned enough about how thing were manufactured to appreciate the reason for poor design. He did not excuse the designs but had reached a point where he could look at most common appliances and devices, recognize the mechanisms inside them, and imagine how the design engineers had chosen to have the equipment constructed.

- Gary Klein (Sources of Power - How people make decisions)

A good friend present me with a link concerning on how to design information and I must say that is rather interesting.

Everyday the Internet grows larger with more information and millions of users are surfing the Internet for it. So if you are a company, blogger or someone else that is putting information onto the Internet, then you should be concerned with how you present it to the users. And that is where information designing comes into the picture. We all know how to put text online, but a lot of people don`t know how to properly present it. Many just goes with what they think looks pretty and that it not really the way to go. When you want to present some sort of information, then you have to think about readability and that is not as easy as it may sound.

How to do it

Good information is more then just a well written text; because even a great piece of information can be presented in a very bad way that make the user move onto a new website. So how can you archive this? If you are truly dedicated to become better at designing information, then I will strongly advices you to read webtypography.net, even though it is a work in progress, there are a lot of good advices about how to design information.

The most important part

Ok, so now we know a bit more about how to format any text so it will enhance the readability, but we can`t really use these newly learned powers for anything if we don`t understand that a letter is not just a letter. Different languages consist of different letters and what might looks fine for you might not look fine for someone in Russian, so it is time so understand the value of Unicode. Lets turn to Joel Spolsky, he has written a pretty good article about what every developer should know about Unicode and Character sets.

Now you are ready to do information design. Good luck.

As tribute to Jakob Nielsen, the King of usability, I have made this askjakob.net in his honour.

Some hate him and some love him, but we can`t deny the fact that he is one of the main reasons that many of us think about usability when we develop some sort of software.

Feel free to visit the website anytime.

Here are a few of his books:

• Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity
• Prioritizing Web Usability

Happy reading.