January 2013 Meeting Report

We started the January meeting with a follow up to our previous discussions on user interface design. We looked at website redesigns by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the United Kingdom. Both of these sites have simplified approaches to accessing information. I also suggested looking at Jakob Nielsen’s article Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice and Power Users, not so much for the review itself but for the methodology. Watch for the interface issues raised there. (And for a counter to Nielsen’s review, check out Why Jakob Nielsen's Windows 8 critique is old-school thinking.)

We then spent some time looking at Microsoft’s Expression Web 4, a program for editing web pages and managing sites. It is a powerful application that has been replaced by other programs, so it is now available as a free download from the Microsoft Expression site.

We finished up by starting on responsive design for tables. Some of the techniques for styling tables to make them responsive rely on CSS3 pseudo-class selectors. We began on that topic by using zebra striping as an example. We looked at some pre-CSS3 techniques and noted their drawbacks. Next month, we will start on the CSS3 way to stripe tables, and that will lead us on to techniques for styling responsive tables.