Over time certain conventions and best practices have been developed to help improve the general usability of websites during their design and build. This roundup of ten usability crimes highlights some of the most common mistakes or overlooked areas in web design and provides an alternative solution to help enhance the usability of your website.

Crime 1: Form labels that aren’t associated to form input fields

Using the ‘for’ attribute allows the user to click the label to select the appropriate input fields within a form. This is especially important for checkboxes and radio fields to give a larger clickable area, but it’s good practice all round.

Crime 2: A logo that doesn’t link to the homepage

Linking the logo of a website to the homepage has become common practice and is now second nature for (most) web surfers to expect the logo to head back home. It’s also worth mentioning the logo should appear in the top left.

Crime 3: Not specifying a visited link state

Visited link states do exactly as they say on the tin. It’s not the most advanced CSS selector, but it’s one that is often overlooked. Give users a visual clue as to which link has already been clicked.

Crime 4: Not indicating an active form field

You can use the ‘:focus’ selector on lots of elements, but it’s super handy when used on inputs and textareas to indicate that the field is active. Add CSS styling such as a highlighted border, or a subtle change to the background color.

Crime 5: An image without an alt description

This is straying a little into the realm of accessibility, but it’s still an important consideration! Remember to always add a descriptive alt attribute to your images, unless of course they are used for decorative purposes, then the ALT attribute can be left empty (but should still exist!). When using an image as a link, enter a description of where the link goes.

Crime 6: A background image without a background color

It’s common to use background images behind passages of text, but it’s worth remembering that if background images are disabled by the user, there needs to be a similar tone in the form of a background colour to avoid the text becoming unreadable.

Crime 7: Using long boring passages of content

There’s nothing more off-putting than landing on a webpage that’s laid out as a continuous passage of text. Break up your content with images, headings and clear sections to make it easier to scan, read and digest.

Crime 8: Underlining stuff that isn’t a link

Everyone knows that text that’s underlined, or is a different colour is likely to be a link. Don’t go confusing people by throwing in underlined text elsewhere! To draw attention to a certain word, try using the strong or emphasize tags instead.

Crime 9: Telling people to click here

The words click here have been around since the dawn of the Internet, but have been shunned aside in favour of more usable options. Using the words click here requires the user to read the whole sentence to find out what’s going to happen. Instead, describe what’s going to happen in the actual anchor link text.

Crime 10: Using justified text

This is another tip that’s heading a little deeper into accessibility but is also an important point to consider. Justified text might look at neat and square to the eye, but it can generate some real readability problems, particularly for Dyslexic users who can find it troublesome to identify words due to the uneven spacing of justified paragraphs.

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Source: Line25

Jan Oliehoek is a photo manipulator now located in Leiden, Netherlands. Jan’s works always surprise people by showing unexpected and interesting combinations. This Dutch talent is also an expert of combining work with fun, something we can learn from besides his awesome Photo Manipulations techniques. Want to see more insight? Check out the interview we conducted below!

Q1. Thanks for taking up the interview. I read an interview of you done in 2007, you said photoshop is just a hobby for you and wouldn’t turn it into your profession. Have you changed your mind or do you still take it as a hobby?

Thank you for asking me, I’m honored! I am still photoshopping as a hobby, but I do occasionally create something for a client. Every now and then someone will stumble upon my website and ask me for a project. The nice thing about treating it as a hobby is that I can be quite picky about what I do or don’t want to do. Of course, the downside is that I don’t have a lot of time.

Q2. Many of your manipulation works feature animals. Any specific reason for that?

It’s not really a conscious choice, I would say. I try to create images that are both photorealistic and impossible at the same time. There are countless ways to accomplish this, and combining several animals into one hybrid is one of them. On top of that, I find that some animals just look amazing and beautiful. If on top of that they are then photographed by a really good photographer, I am already more than half way in creating a cool image without even having touched it yet.

Q3. Does your Masters in Biology background have an influence on your work? If so, how?

Outside of the fact that I see a lot of beauty in nature, I don’t think my study has had much influence on my work. I have received some comments on my animal hybrids by people who associate them with genetic manipulation. I even once received a very long message from someone who accused me of playing God and asked me to stop it. For me it’s very simple: I like making pretty pictures. I’m more interested in photo manipulation than genetic manipulation nowadays.

Q4. Your works always make people Wow. Where does your inspiration come from?

Here I have to give some credit to the website worth1000.com. Almost all of the images you’ll find on my website were originally entries to photoshop contests on Worth1000. They run daily contests that have themes, like ‘create your dream house’, or ‘integrate a celebrity into a famous painting’.

The advantage of these contests is that you always have a starting point: the theme. From that starting point, I just start brainstorming and typing a lot of search terms into photography stock sites like www.sxc.hu. I really let the source pictures take me by the hand. Sooner or later I will stumble upon a photograph that gives me a great idea and from that point on it becomes a sort of landslide. The photographs take me into a certain direction, but along the way this direction might change several times, depending on the next source picture I find.

So I guess you could say my main inspiration comes from random photographs I see on the web that somehow trigger my brain. Over the last year I’ve been trying to force myself to take the opposite route: start with a detailed plan, perhaps even a rough sketch, and assemble the image piece by piece until the outcome matches the original plan. I must admit this is a lot harder (at least for me), but it also gives a lot more satisfaction when it’s really finished and turned out exactly how I wanted it too.

Q5. How would you describe yourself and your artwork?

That’s a tough question. Looking through my own work, I have to conclude that almost all of them are a bit bizarre. I want my images to be eye-catching and I like making people do a double take when they look at them. When I get comments on my work, it actually pleases me a lot more when people write ‘Huh??’ or ‘WTF?!?!’ than when they write ‘nice work’.

Q6. What are you up to now? And would you mind sharing with us your future plan?

Like I mentioned above, I am trying to change my workflow a bit. I don’t enter too many contests on Worth1000 anymore, because I want to prove to myself that I can create what I want without someone else handing me a theme. I have to admit it’s hard though.

In the meantime, I’m trying to teach myself some 3D-modelling, texturing and rendering. That’s a slow process and a long term plan, but my dream is to be able to really create whatever I want from scratch, without any source images. That way I can really say that the end product is all mine. An alternative would be to study photography and shoot all my own photographs, but knowing my preference for bizarre subjects that probably wouldn’t be practical.

For now, the goal is to explore the world of 3D. Please ask me again in ten years though, since I’m only just starting and the world of 3D is very big and quite overwhelming.

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Source: The Design Inspiration

8 Cheat sheets you shouldn’t be without…

Adobe Photoshop CS2

Adobe Photoshop CS3

Adobe Photoshop CS4

Adobe Illustrator CS4

Gimp

Ruby On Rails

HTML

CSS

Have you wrote a cheat sheet?? or know any more cheat sheets we should add to this post feel free to let us know in the comments.

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Source: hv-designs