Different definitions of affordance that have developed are explained in the following sections. The original definition described all action possibilities that are physically possible. This was then refined to describe action possibilities of which an actor is aware. The term has further evolved for use in the context of HCI as indicating the easy discoverability of possible actions.

The basic rule is: 10 to 15 words per line. For liquid layouts, at 100% font size, 50% column width (in relation to window size) is a good benchmark for most screen resolutions.

Users often leave Web pages in 10–20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people's attention for much longer because visit-durations follow a negative Weibull distribution.

People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.

It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.

While the keyboard users in this case feels as though they have gained two seconds over the mouse users, the opposite is really the case. Because while the keyboard users have been engaged in a process so fascinating that they have experienced amnesia, the mouse users have been so disengaged that they have been able to continue thinking about the task they are trying to accomplish. They have not had to set their task aside to think about or remember abstract symbols.

Daring Fireball:<br />
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> But what interests me about all this is the underlying war going on between those playing the pageview game, and those that hate the pageview game. To put it another (simplified) way: the war between quality versus quantity.<br />
Siegler comes close to getting it, but falls short. Pageviews, as a metric used for directly billing advertisers, are a scam. Publishers game it with sensational link-bait articles and bullshit tricks like breaking articles into multiple “pages”. Advertisers get stuck paying for valueless impressions. Readers get stuck with the sensational bullshit articles, the tricks (like breaking single articles into multiple “pages”), and suffer through too many annoying ads surrounding actual content.<br />
It is, as Jim Coudal and I argued at SXSW, a race to the bottom. Be careful of the “everyones” who say pageviews are imperfect but the best we can do. They’re the ones who are happy with the web as a market for bullshit.

Instead, what I’m seeing more and more of is ridiculous pagination for the sake of juicing page views. Take for example this article which was seeded sarcastically to Newsvine the other day. It’s from a site called Associated Content. The article is a lousy 1504 words and it’s broken up into four pages! I’ve read cover letters that are longer than that.

Fivesecondtest helps you fine tune your landing pages and calls to action by analyzing the most prominent elements of your design.

You should take time to design your URL structure. If there’s one thing I hope you remember after reading this article it’s to take time to design your URL structure. Don’t leave it up to your framework. Don’t leave it up to chance. Think about it and craft an experience.

Fitts's law (often cited as Fitts' law) is a model of human movement in human-computer interaction and ergonomics which predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to and the size of the target. Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer display using a pointing device. It was proposed by Paul Fitts in 1954.

The success of third-wave tools [Instapaper, Readability, et al] is in part a reaction to the excessive (and frankly poor) designs that dominate most web pages today. Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 may have been commercial and creative successes, but they've left a legacy of cluttered designs in their wake. And that's not the designers' fault. Led by the dual demands of shoveling readers towards as much content as possible, while cramming as many ad impressions as possible onto each pageview, modern content sites are design disasters, with multiple layers of headers, sidebars, menus, widgets, banners, skyscrapers, and calls to action competing for attention and, often, completely drowning out the narrow bands of true content that they surround.

Best-selling author, designer, and web standards godfather Jeffrey Zeldman has once again updated his classic, industry-shaking guidebook. Substantially revised in collaboration with Ethan Marcotte, this third edition to the foundational web standards text covers improvements and challenges in the changing environment of standards-based design.

"This is a pretty unusual UI element. Gmail may be the only application using anything like it." Opinions vs. Data: http://j.mp/aBkEoC

"Say you download a document from your company’s intranet to proofread. You look up a few words as you go, and you make some edits before sending it to your boss. If you’re anything like me, the task involves Safari, Pages, Dictionary, Finder, and iChat; with every application relying on the ability to take a file or a snippet of text from your current work context and send it elsewhere. On iPhone OS, where every app lives in a sandbox and dedicates itself to a single task, this kind of work isn’t a walk in the park. Copy and paste make things possible if you take the time to switch between apps, but the experience sucks, so developers add convenience features, web service integration, and custom URL schemes. Apple provides some great APIs for integrating with the system utilities, but they’re slow moving. There’s no standard MFTweetComposeViewController, and there probably never will be."

"Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you're reading."

"There are many books and articles on typography, but considerably few explore typeface selection and pairing. With the floodgates poised to open and the promise of many typefaces being freed up for use on websites, choosing the right face to complement a website’s design will need to become another notch in the designer’s belt. But where do we start?"

"For the past month, I've been away from the computer screen. Now I'm back reading on it many hours a day. Which got me thinking: How do we read online?"

"We made a timeline message more punchy, credible, and viral through 5 rounds of redesign."