"I'm happy to announce that Yahoo! is releasing the results of a usability study that we did for OpenID. Our test subjects were several experienced Yahoo! users (representative of our mainstream audience) who were observed as they tried to sign into a product review site using the Yahoo OpenID service."

We regularly list down free stuffs available for designers, developers, general users. Today, we are listing 25 Most Stunning And Free Icons Set. These icons are high quality and can be used anywhere you want but we suggest you that don’t forget to read the license detail before using anyone below.

20 Amazing jQuery Plugins and 65 Excellent jQuery Resources...

The current version of selenium RC does not support firefox 3, which can cause all kinds of headaches when you try to run FF2 & 3 on the same box. This quick hack will enable you to use selenium RC in firefox 3.

A good UI should fade away, putting content in the front seat — it should be transparent. Sometimes there can be too much ‘UI’ — controls and buttons that are too strong and distracting win over content in their battle for attention.

Mozilla has just announced its Developer Tools Lab--headed up by a new group that will focus on "the research and development of developer tools for the open web." According to Mozilla officials, "the primary initiative of the newly formed squad is to create Web development tools that make life better for Web developers

All CSS Properties Listed Alphabetically

All the cool kids are using CSS to separate content from appearance on their sites. Here is 101 resources that will get your feet wet with CSS, teach you some new tricks and techniques, clean your code, and hit the ground running with pre-made layouts.

An example of what a bored Google engineer does during a slow weekend: He writes a Java application using an annealing algorithm that finds the most optimized layout and color to reproduce an image using nothing but Lego blocks.

Validation is a very important aspect in web forms development and should be planned carefully. Well designed validation can favorably affect the user experience and can speed up the filling of forms. Poor validation can make considerable damage to the system and user experience. Not having any kind of validation is out of the question.

If you’re like me, you probably often find yourself never fully satisfied with your work — always making tweaks and changes, always finding things you don’t quite like and reworking them. This applies to a lot of creative endeavors — perhaps you’re working on an article for your blog, putting together a report or writing an important email. The thing is, even after making changes, there are still things you can tweak, things which aren’t quite perfect yet.

One of our early goals for Google Chrome was to make the browser as fast as we possibly could. But in addition to raw speed, we wanted it to be highly responsive. After all, it doesn't matter how fast pages can be loaded if the user interface is locked up!

I’ve just been browsing a site of a service that I’m trying out, and while I like the site and a lot of the interface, I came across a little design hiccup. One of the sections had a tabbed navigation menu that didn’t quite work. Here’s a screensho

For a programmer, the system time in milliseconds is the fastest and easiest way to work with time. The problem is that understanding and working with milliseconds is easy for computers, but not for humans. HumanTime changes this. HumanTime formats and parses time in a way that is easier to read and understand.

In this second part, Jeff shares the remaining best practices he's uncovered in his research.

Modern day user experience research methods can now answer a wide range of questions. Knowing when to use each method can be understood by mapping them in 3 key dimensions and across typical product development phases.

Every designer & developer loves handy tools that simplify frequent tasks. And, even if you’ve a complicated software that does the same thing, usually it is much more effective to run a tiny, fast-loading application that does the job. This is a list of 27 functional Adobe AIR applications that can help a web designer to design & develop better and faster.

Google has been number one in search for quite some time. This article explains three things that an alternate search engine could do to take the search game to the next level. It proposes that Microsoft Live Search could be the next big search engine, however if Google implements these three key features, one would think they would be unstoppable.

Of all the resources utilized during a project, the team working on the project is the most complex to manage. When motivated, your project team can take up Herculean tasks and not break a sweat but when things go wrong there is little saving the ship unless you find a way to change course in time. Motivation is a complex art, while the rule of the thumb is appreciation and reward, the same incentives do not work on all individuals.

Microsoft windows keyboard shortcuts. You might know most of these shortcuts, but probably not all of them. If you have more keyboard shortcuts, please let me know :)

Long web forms could be scary for users and they could encourage clients to fly away from your site. Although that, it is difficult to make them shorter, specially if you need all that information you are requesting.

Learn some of the new features of ASP.NET 3.5 - including LINQ, Update Panels, Update Progress controls, etc.

Jakob Nielsen has written some damn smart things about usability, and his work has probably done great things for the web in general. You hate to beat up on a guy like that, but c’mon, it is beyond ridiculous to me to be a self-proclaimed god of usability and have a site as awful as his. I’m not the first one to say it, and I won’t be the last. (Great article on a group makeover from 2004) People have been talking about it for years. Jakob even acknowledges it himself:

We found a 9% improvement in the usability of About Us information on websites over the past 5 years. But companies and organizations still can't explain what they do in one paragraph.

Lately I have been writing a number of articles that I would consider to be more critical thinking based, so I thought that it may be interesting to do more of an opinion piece. In the past the article I wrote about bad blog design was successful, so I felt covering web design in general could be helpful as well. It is important to note that in this article I am referring to “web design” as the whole process of creating a site, not just the visual aspect.