Simple text fields are a basic widget in Axure library, and one often needed. Instead of just dropping a text field on your interface design, here is a very simple way to implement faint-text (or ghost text) in them, improving the experience and giving it a real-life and one-step-further feeling. Let’s start by dropping your text field on your UI. You don’t even need to name the widget, but please put a text in it (let’s go with « I am a ghost text » in grey and italic, to show it’s a ghost).

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I used to say on my blog that I was a big Omnigraffle fan. And I definitely was. Just as I used to be a big Visio fan. But that was before: since then, I have discovered Axure. For budget or time reasons, most medium-sized agencies (the ones I have worked for at least) prefer not to invest in Axure. It is a complex software, and the licence price makes it a tough decision to invest money and time for the teams for self-training. Visio and Omnigraffle, or even Balsamiq, are definitely simpler to apprehend and start wireframing with. After a few months working with Axure, I figured I would give a few advice, based on my recent discovery of the software, to beginners who were afraid to make the move, just as I was. Please don’t get me wrong: I still like Omnigraffle a lot. But Axure has made my prototyping funnier and a lot more interactive.

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Uh oh, sorry but the page you are looking for cannot be found… Should a 404 error page stop with these very basic words? Nowadays 404 pages have become a creative challenge for websites, and some, like Gog.com or Blizzard.com, have really put some work to create unique and original pages. (There is also Videotron‘s unicorn… The simplest is to check benchmarks like 404notfound.fr.) But creativity is not the core objective of these pages, is it? When you look at the context, 404 pages appear when the user hastried to access a page that does not exist. It could be a mistake in the URL or a broken link on your website. This makes the 404 page’s main objective to redirect the user to relevant content, and avoid him closing the website and leaving forever. Here are a few ideas to improve 404 pages and go over the dead-end they once represented.

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Do users scroll down the pages of our websites, or do they not? That is definitely a good question to be asked. Nielsen still rules, with his 80-20 theory: 80% of users’ attention is focused on the first 20% of the page. Though, some websites choose huge vertical layouts and parallax scrolling. Without going as far as The World’s Longest Website (which is quite extreme), some websites use parallax very well. Personnaly, I love Smokey Bones website. Why not scroll, afterall… The UX in me just advises to help users while scrolling down. And here are a few ideas I gathered for not letting users down… the page unattended.

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Summer sales are an important moment for retailers. What influence do they have on Internet? What kind of behavior can an e-retailer expect from its users? Here is a very interesting diagram by ifop and spartoo.com, with a few figures on consumers’ special behaviors and expectations during Summer sales in France.

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On the 12th January, I had the chance to be invited by the student organization Sorbonne Symposium to their symposium on Neuromarketing. Neurosciences play a role in usability, and the symposium specially covered Functional Magnetic resonance imaging. The idea is to use a scanner (as used in a hospital) to measure the effect a website (or an ad, or any kind of stimulus) has on our brain activity. So we can measure (1) which functional zone is activated in our brain, (2) with which intensity, and (3) whether it is positive or a negative effect.

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