Honest Insights In User Experience Design

Whats new in Version 1.1?

SlideDeck Pro Version 1.1 is out and we’ve added a ton of functionality based off of a lot of user requests and our own ideas. Pro Users, you’ll be getting an update email in your Inbox with a link to the downoad the new version. Lite Users, you’re getting an update too, just visit the Download Page and get the latest version.

What About the Lite Version?

Don’t worry! We haven’t forgotten about the Lite version users. The new 1.1 version of SlideDeck Lite includes all of the Library Improvements listed below and now includes an un-locked stylesheet! You can now place the SlideDeck files anywhere in your file tree, edit the appearance of the SlideDeck, and use skins!

New Ways to Interact with SlideDeck:

• Control Slide Progress – Create a SlideDeck with a multi-step form and control how far your user can progress before answering questions. See this in action on the 90-Day Guitar Guides Quiz. Turn on progress control with the controlProgress option, then move users to new slides with the progressTo() method.
• Hide your Slide Titles – Need more room for your slides? Hide the spines between each slide with the hideSpines option. See this in action on our new Examples Page.
• Auto Play and Cycling – Start playing your slides automatically and even allow them to cycle back around to the first slide after playing through all of them. Turn on Auto Play with the autoPlay and autoPlayInterval option and turn on cycling with cycle option. If a user navigates to a slide or interacts with your SlideDeck with the keyboard or mousewheel, Auto Play stops automatically. You can also pause and un-pause Auto Play manually with the pauseAutoPlay parameter.
• Disable Slides – Have even further control over interaction with your slides. Disable and enable slides on the fly with the new disableSlide() and enableSlide() methods.
• Before and Callback on all slides – Run a function before or after each slide on your SlideDeck with the new before and complete options.

SlideDeck Library Improvements:

• No Flicker Implementation – The short flicker of your un-formatted content before SlideDeck loads bugging you? Us too, so we found a better of implementing SlideDeck to fix it. Download the latest version of SlideDeck and you’ll see the new way of implementing SlideDeck on your website. You can also check out the new way of implementing SlideDeck in the Usage Documentation.
• Firefox half-pixel rendering bug solution – Mozilla Firefox, as great of a browser as it is, has a little rendering quirk that would sometimes cause a single pixel width gap between slides. While this is not something we can fix as its a browser bug, we have changed the way that slides and spines lay next to each other. Now, slides will have padding instead of margin added to their left side to accommodate for the space a spine takes up. You may need to change your slide background images when you upgrade to accommodate for this if you aren’t using a repeating background; just add some padding to the left of the background equal to the width of the spine.

• Easier Interaction – Interacting with a SlideDeck is now easier than ever. Now you can interact with any SlideDeck on a page without having to make sure its assigned to a variable instance first. You can of course still use the old method if you prefer, but this makes it easy to access SlideDecks that may be dynamically created.

  $('#MySlideDeck').slidedeck().next();

  Instead of:

  var MySlideDeck = $('#MySlideDeck').slidedeck();
MySlideDeck.next();

As web users, you are all aware of the horrid things that web designers, developers and advertisers put you through. These are the top 3 things that they need to stop doing!

3. Post-Roll Advertisements

When watching a video, your users are invested (one can hope) and you’d like them to come away from that experience with a positive attitude. Nothing spoils a great video like a post-roll ad the second it’s finished playing. Most of the time, you can’t pause or mute them and they force you to close the window which means: “bye bye potential conversion”. Continue Reading

When it comes to hosting your website, there are three main options available to you: Dedicated Hosting (A physical computer just for you.), A Virtual Private Server (Where many dedicated-style servers are emulated in software and exist on one physical machine.), or Shared Hosting (Where many websites share one server, the server’s settings and its horsepower.)

Dedicated hosting is obviously the most powerful option, but it’s not affordable for smaller projects and can require regular maintenance. Shared hosting on the other hand, is typically better for a small site or blog. The price of shared hosting is usually very affordable, but it comes with a few conditions. How severe these conditions are is what separates the good hosts from the bad.

Below are what I believe are the top 5 most important things to consider when choosing a shared hosting provider. Continue Reading

A couple months ago I wrote about the importance of using social media. This post will show some of the new and current trends in social media, specifically facebook and twitter. Sure, it’s great to throw an icon in the footer of your site to attract followers, but what about actually using social media to provide dynamic content or increase conversions!? The examples below can provide value to your site and your users.

Facebook- Badges
Facebook offers some really cool & simple badges including fan badges, customizable profile badges and photo badges.

Twitter  – Buttons
Pretty basic but these little guys look pretty good. Continue Reading

IE6 is bad for user experience. Set your users free, drop IE6 support and encourage them to upgrade to a modern browser, it will take more than Google to make this happen. In my last post I covered briefly the IE exploit that hit some large companies, notably Google. I also talked about Google’s decision to drop support for IE6 on March 1st for the Google Doc’s Suite and Google Sites. Covered in this post are the benefits of dropping IE6 to you as a website owner, why putting IE6 to rest would mean a better user experience for all, and more reasons to stop supporting the browser.

Why this is beneficial to you as a website owner

When it all boils down, dropping IE6 support saves you time, and that saves you money. In addition your designers will have more freedom in their design and interaction, your developers will be less stressed and frustrated not having to spend hours debugging for IE6. In addition to saving you time, money and making your team more happy, you now have more modern development options available to you, allowing you to enhance your user’s experience. As I have mentioned before, the web is an ever changing environment, new technologies are created everyday. Some stick around and others don’t, but those that do typically rely on modern browser technology and future focussed; they look ahead and not back. As an added bonus you are also helping your users improve their experience and security on the web, the more people that drop support for IE6, the quicker the transition to modern browsers will be. Continue Reading