The Fable of the User-Centred Designer

What a book, very light, professional, and FREE. It’s a must read book and will take 3 minutes max.

The book tells a story on a young man who want to learn about how to become a great designer, in smooth way the author takes you in a user-centred design journey explaining it’s secrets and benefit’s. (more…)

Google New Homepage – Fade-In

Google launched a new fade-in homepage that deliver a new experience to their users, users according to Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience are coming to Google either to search or to use one of their products like Gmail. The new fade-in experience remove distraction for the user intent on searching. (more…)

Steve Ballmer – Innovation Day

Steve Ballmer attending the Innovation Day organized by Microsoft Egypt at the intercontinental City Stars in Cairo 22 April 2009.

I was there, finally saw the legendary Steve Ballmer on his keynote and he is really an amazing guy. I was inspired with his passionate to people, science and technology. His dreams and vision for tomorrow is very interesting, I will leave you with the keynote to see your selves.

Click here to watch Steve Ballmer Keynote (more…)

Conversion ratio and link colors

Does links color affect conversion ratio? Well it does; it’s part of the game.

For years and years there has been that debate between usability consultants and designers regarding standards and it’s affect on usability.
While it has been proven that following standards will enhance the user experience on your site, we still see this debate going on.

In this article I will talk about one of the standards, the links.
(more…)

XHTML/CSS Markup Generator

I came cross a very useful tool for those web designers who are trying to begin their journey with layouts and semantic markup for the first time.

The reason for posting this is that we are missing those people who care about semanticmarkup in the region, till now there are big companies and big names their websites are based on the old 90′s markup, full of tables and embedded and in-line styles. 

Surprisingly, when you speak with people about the correct way of writing the markups you will be shocked of their weak knowledge. I personally don’t think it’s their fault, it’s just that no body educated them the right way and they market is not asking for this kind of knowledge.

Anyway, the tool is really very useful to shorten the time of slicing and writing the layout markup and makes it easy to jump directly to the styling stage.

Check the tool by visiting this page: XHTML/CSS Markup Generator

Fine Arts Session

A colleague (Ahmed Hussam – Creative Manager at LINK Development) asked me to volunteer in educational program at the Fine Arts collage (Helwan University at Cairo, Egypt) to improve students Internet and web design knowledge base. I was very excited to go back to school again but this time as a teacher (I never thought I will be a teacher ever before). Thesession will be about user experience in the web design field, I prepared some amazing slides about this issue and wow; I was amazed my self.

I will post back the updates on the session later.