Whitney Hess has put together the first part of a series of articles for those looking to get into user experience design. The first part is a collection of resources to get immersed in the topics of the field. Whitney writes:

The best way to learn a new language is to go to a country where it’s spoken and immerse yourself in the confusion. Soon the unfamiliar will become familiar, and before you know it you’ll be fluent.

If you’re interested in getting to know more about user experience, I recommend doing the same. You may choose to simply understand the terminology, or become conversant. You might later decide to tackle some of the more complex concepts.

Read Part 1 on Whitney’s blog, Pleasure and Pain.

jQuery Tools is a collection of the most important user-interface components for today’s websites. This single JavaScript file weighs only 5.8 Kb. This library contains some useful JavaScript tools like tabs, tooltips, accordions, overlays, smooth navigation, great visual effects and all those “web 2.0″ goodies that you have seen on your favourite websites.

And above all, the library is constantly maintained and updated. Expect to see new releases coming out on a regular basis. This library is dual licensed under MIT and GPL 2+ licenses

Have a look at demos >>

ClickTale makes some observations about scrolling based on their research of users’ browsing behaviors around “the fold” and “attention”.

Read the rest of this entry »

A better ways to organize fonts by creating a spoof of the Periodic Table of Elements.

The Periodic Table of Typefaces covers a number of major fonts and includes information about the family and classification of each, the designer, the year the font was designed, and a ranking as cribbed from a number of internet sources.

As with traditional periodic tables, this table presents the subject matter grouped categorically.  The Table of Typefaces groups by families and classes of typefaces:  sans-serif, serif, script, blackletter, glyphic, display, grotesque, realist, didone, garalde, geometric, humanist, slab-serif and mixed.

Raymond Selda has published a tutorial about how to Create a Tabbed Content Rotator using jQuery and the interface library called jQuery UI. This effect can be used effectively on your homepage to present customers with your products and services. Very nice user experience!