When it comes to e-commerce, best practices are well-known and studied, and most websites now apply them. But, more important than a one-click purchase, attractive product pictures, clear delivery options and fees, there is something that you can’t afford to fail. The purchase process simply has to work. From A to Z. This morning, I tried to purchase several T-shirts on a famous clothes store in France: etam.com. Here is a 3-steps failures story that made me, in the end, abandon my shopping, a 80 euros shortfall for the brand.

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Mobile and tablets made appear a lot of new resolutions. Though, we still need to improve interfaces for « normal » desktop and laptop computers. In order to design for an optimal resolution, I rely on W3C Schools screen resolutions statistics. And in order to always keep in mind how many people I am potentially degrading the experience for if I design bigger, I sticked the following table close to my sight.

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This summer I attended Scott Klemmer’s (University of San Diego, California) Human-Computer Interaction Class on Coursera.org. Coursera is one of these new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) website, where students from around the world can attend classes given by prestigious lecturers and universities, for free. I love the concept, and was happy to take this class. After 10 weeks of lectures and assignments, I was awarded a Statement of Accomplishment. A good way of learning furthermore!

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Leaving work yesterday evening, I bumped into a new advertising billboard ad for Mc Donald’s. Or was it? At first sight, before even knowing that it represented a picto of French fries, I had a feeling that it was McDonald’s. If you look at this ad carefully though, you’ll notice there is no brand, no name, no address… not many clues about what it is about.

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Last week end, my boyfriend and I were looking for a nice bottle of wine to bring our friends at a dinner. At the wine shop, we discovered a local brewery, called La Brasserie du Mont Salève. They had a lot of different flavors, and a very interesting way of presenting them, with cursors highlighting color, flavor and strength. A good example of information design several good practices:

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I usually rely on W3C Schools screen resolution statistics. Though, here and then we do need to have a precise resolution for a specific device. Of course the resolution can be found on the manufacturer’s website. But it takes some time, and it is the theoretical resolution. In the real world, this data is to be modified according to a lot of system’s elements that are added to the screen, and thus occupy some pixels: web browser address and navigation bars, scroll bars, etc. To be sure about the actual design space available on the device, I use Websitedimension.com’s Live Pixel check. The idea is very simple: a grid with a scale, allowing to easily count how many pixels can actually be displayed in height and width.

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