From a PCWorld Article...

Simpler Surfing
The user facing an unfamiliar system wants the answer to several standard questions, says Mander: What is this thing I am looking at, and what can I do with it? Icons should be designed to give some clear indication of what sort of application or document they will give access to if clicked, just as buttons on a physical device should be appropriately captioned.

Web page text and graphics elements often give little indication of which are page links, which are application links, and which are inert.

"You get people running their cursor over a page to see where it turns into a hand." Complex processes should have an "inductive" communications style, the "wizard" type that leads you through step-by-step, rather than the still prevalent "deductive" style, "where you have to look at the available tools and deduce what you can do and how you do it."

Where am I? A user should have a clear picture of their progress through a process, or their current location in a Web site map.

How do I get back to where I was before? "Press the back button" is not always the answer.

When Things Go Wrong
And, perhaps most crucially, when things go wrong: How do I make it stop? For example, if you want to stop a print job, it should have minimal consequences in terms of requiring other stages of the process to be redone.

Simple pages in "good basic HTML" are not just for disabled users and those out in rural areas with slow links, he says.

"Some of the slow modem users might be the very people you most want to communicate with. Venture capitalists sometimes stay in hotel rooms, and it would be embarrassing to hear 'we're having second thoughts about financing your venture because your Web site [response time] sucks'."


posted by Tom Termini at 3/19/2003

Did .NET Really Beat J2EE Flat? Can It?
http://www.fawcette.com/javapro/2003_03/online/j2ee_bkurniawan_03_11_03/

.NET and J2EE Battle for the Enterprise
http://www.fawcette.com/dotnetmag/2002_05/magazine/features/pokelly/default.asp

A few other interesting J2EE and .NET articles from that issue:
http://www.fawcette.com/dotnetmag/2002_11/magazine/departments/guestop/default.asp
http://www.fawcette.com/javapro/2003_04/magazine/features/dsavarese/

posted by Tom Termini at 3/14/2003