Here’s a quick round-up of a few links that have grabbed my interest over the past weeks; I’d like to write more about them, but time forbids.

Yahoo’s New Application Platform Is Heavy On Social Features

The work that Yahoo (sorry, I refuse to use the exclamation mark) has been doing on open web standards and platforms recently has been fantastic, and the recently-announced Yahoo Open Strategy looks like a logical next step. I don’t agree with this article’s conclusion that this is Yahoo playing catch-up with Facebook, but otherwise it’s a good introduction.

Windows Toolkit Gives Oomph to Microformats

For a company that so often gives the impression (perhaps not always fairly) that it has no time for open standards, Microsoft’s support for Microformats has been impressive. As well as the hAtom-powered Slices feature in IE8, the recently released Oomph toolkit provides in-browser Microformats detection (similar to Firefox’s Operator) and a set of standard CSS styles. Nice work.

Firefox Themes: The Contention Between Visual Hierarchy and Toolbar Customization

A really interesting look at the theory behind the design of the Firefox 3 toolbar and icon set, as well as a general overview of visual hierarchy and interactive design.

I’m not saying that to boast of my geek credentials, but to introduce something I never imagined I’d find: a connection between the two.

Garrett’s famous diagram introduced the concept of the five Elements which make User Experience on the web:

He later distilled those five elements to: Strategy; Scope; Structure; Skeleton; Surface.

McCloud’s book is an analysis of the visual language of comics, and he lists six elements which he says make up any work in any medium: Idea/Purpose; Form; Idiom; Structure; Craft; Surface.

I think you can see where I’m going with this; although McCloud uses six steps to Garrett’s five, the mapping is still quite straightforward:

1. User Needs / Site Objectives = Idea / Purpose
2. Content Requirements = Form & Idiom
3. Information Architecture = Structure
4. Information Design = Craft
5. Visual Design = Surface

Although I can’t be the first to draw the parallel, I think it’s quite nice. It adds extra validation to both concepts, and helps me to convince my friends and colleagues that reading comics isn’t a sign of arrested development.

I recommend both books very highly, of course.

The revamped UI for Wordpress was released in March of this year. It was created by the esteemed Happy Cog Studios, in a process which doesn’t seem to have been much reported on (at least, I can’t find anything) other than in their own portfolio.

For the forthcoming release of 2.7, the in-house team at Automattic (the owners of Wordpress) are preparing a slight refresh of the admin theme, which will focus on layout issues raised in user feedback. In the last few weeks they’ve begun releasing details of the plans; you can download copies of the wireframe proposals, for example.

One aspect of their process I find a little strange is asking users for opinions on layout decisions - without providing demos. I mean, user feedback is good; but it’s hard to make an informed decision on usability unless you actually get to try it out. You might think that something is aesthetically pleasing or logically positioned based on visuals alone, but then change your mind completely when it comes to actually interacting with it. This user involvement is doubtless not harmful, but I’m not sure how useful it is either.

That aside, it’s nice to see another big open source project taking user experience seriously, and making the process transparent.

I’ve been slowly introducing IA into my role over the past three years, and so this is a logical step for me to take. I’ll be sad to leave my current agency, but delighted to be moving to somewhere I’ll be able to focus on what I think are the next hot topics on the web: findability & usability.

In a piece of happy serendipity, there’s a big user-centred design project underway at the moment with the redesign of the Drupal community site and, with it being open software, the whole process is being conducted transparently - which means a great opportunity to study and learn. Leisa Reichelt is leading the discovery and planning stages, and blogging every step; you can read the draft Experience Strategy, how Drupal users were defined, and how to get involved. Definitely worth keeping an eye on.

I won’t be leaving web development behind completely; it’s my passion, I wouldn’t be able to. Especially now that we’re entering into very exciting times with the forthcoming release of IE8; not because of any new features, but because we’ll finally have a completely stable, cross-browser platform of CSS2.1 to develop on. The IE team are doing a sterling job of releasing information about the new browser; for example, discussing developer tools and browser-specific CSS prefixes. Let’s hope they don’t fall into the post-launch silence that happened after the release of IE7.

So, interesting times to come. First, however: a holiday. Back later.

The stall is set out on the front page of the documentation, with two key statements:

We think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems.

Chromium should feel lightweight (cognitively and physically) and fast.

Tabs

Moving the tabs above the address bar, and using a lighter shade of blue to match the bar, does well to give the impression that each tab is a separate entity; this is actually one of my favourite features of the user interface. However it’s not without its problems, as the post 10 reasons Firefox won’t be worried about Chrome points out; when multiple tabs are opened, there’s no way to see what they relate to. I can’t see this happening too often, but it’s an issue nonetheless.

Downloads

My second favourite feature of the UI is the downloads bar; unlike the default of Firefox, for example, it’s unobtrusive and well integrated, opening in a shelf along the bottom of the browser instead of a new window over the current tab. A large arrow appears briefly to show you where the downloads bar appears, and a faux-dropdown presents you with actions when you click on it.

Status Bubble

The least effective area of the UI, for me. After taking the decision to remove the status bar, the Chrome team had to come up with a way to display link destinations; their Status Bubble is a good solution in principle, but in practice is too small and too discreet, and the light grey text on a pale blue background is hard to read on a bright screen.

Over-all look and feel

I think they’ve done a good job with the visual design. The stated aim was to make the browser area unobtrusive, and while that’s not been 100% successful, it has been partially achieved; Firefox’s grey chrome looks imposing next to Chrome’s pale equivalent. I like the way the options have been hidden away, removing the menu bar which has been around since the early days of Netscape.

It must be remembered that this is still a pre-release version of the browser, and I’ve no doubt that more changes will be implemented in future versions; even so, it’s obvious that a lot of time and care has been spent on getting the interface right. While a lot of these features are available in current browsers already, the UI team have done a good job in taking the best and combining them with some solid design principles.

Interesting factoids: The original design used the golden ratio, and was inspired by The Designers Republic’s work on WipEout.

The first we heard about Chrome was with the release of the in-depth introductory comic (by Scott McCloud). Some good early reaction came from Jon Tan, and The Usability Post; Download Squad have a more comprehensive round-up, and Wired provide an interesting behind-the-scenes look.

Update: Jesse James Garrett talks about Chrome and future user interfaces, while Portfolio.com decode the comic.

After using it for an hour or so (I’m using it to write this) I’m pretty impressed; it’s fast and light, the tabs work well above the location bar, and the ‘omni bar’ is a pleasure to use. It’s built on Webkit, like Safari, but is a much better offering than Apple’s browser (certainly on Windows, at least). All of that said, I still can’t see it making a huge impact on the browser market.

First of all, while faster than its rivals, it doesn’t seem that much faster. And while the omni bar is more intuitive than the equivalents in Firefox 3 or IE 8, it won’t be too long before those browsers implement their own, improved versions. Browsers, more than any other type of software, are quick to borrow the best features from their competitors.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, the majority of people don’t care what browser they use. It’s taken Firefox years, and a lot of word-of-mouth and marketing, to chip into IE’s market share, despite its obvious advantages. Chrome’s security, detachable tabs, and so on, may be great features to those who care about that kind of thing, but to the average user they mean nothing; that’s the barrier that every non-native browser has to break down.

I’m happy that Chrome exists, because it’s got some good features (and no doubt will have more still by the time it leaves Beta) and is the first real attempt at a next-gen browser; not only that, but I believe it will make other browser makers raise their game. But as for taking a huge chunk of the market: I just can’t see it. Not yet.

Webmonkey have a nice round-up of the new features, so I won’t bother repeating that; instead, here are my first impressions after an hour or so’s use.

First of all, the user interface. It’s more polished and usable, and has Firefox-alike features such as the Smart Address Bar and tab grouping, which are becoming de rigeur for modern browsers. One minor niggle: I’d prefer visible close buttons on inactive tabs.

Of all the new features, the one that I like the most is Web Slices, which uses the hAtom microformat to create active page areas; I’ve covered this before, in more detail.

The most important part (for me, at least): the new rendering engine is much better than the creaking Trident. It’s much faster (even running on a virtual machine under Virtualbox), which is especially notable when dealing with Ajax-heavy sites such as Yahoo! Mail and Google Docs. It passes the Acid 2 test with flying colours, although manages only a paltry 21 on Acid 3.

But where it counts - rendering pages quickly, and to standards - it does a great job. I’ve seen a few pages with a few quirks, but hopefully this is down to either known bugs in pre-release software or non-compliant CSS.

Over all it’s much more stable and a big improvement over Beta 1 - and, of course, previous versions. Fingers crossed, the final release will iron out any remaining problems and uptake will be fast, allowing web developers a stable set of browsers to code to.

This doctype will trigger standards mode in all current browsers, so you can start using it straight away*, secure in the knowledge that you can still validate your code.

* Note: See the first comment, below.