7 posts written by Ranjith Kumar
A UX enthusiast from Chennai, India, my breeding ground is where the line between designer and a developer, gets blurred. I am passionate about building online experiences that create everlasting impression on the user. An ardent reader, a budding writer, a novice speaker and a passionate Internet-buff, i believe in the infinite possibilities of the wired world !
Do drop me a line @ mysticpixels[at]gmail[dot]com, or follow me for some insightful and trendy UX tweets @mysticpixels.
How to Author a Super Accessible Website
Ranjith KumarHelen Keller, the deaf-blind and renowned American author and lecturer, who became world-famous for her passion towards preaching the importance of living a good life, conveyed an important message to the world through her life by overcoming the odds of sight and hearing deprivation. Hers was truly an outstanding case of determination and confidence. There are thousands of Helen Keller's with hearing, sight, movement and cognitive disabilities out there in the world, dreaming and striving to lead a normal life as others. With internet now becoming a necessity in the modern life, it's really important to create applications that are easy to use for all equally – yes those Helen Kellers too. As a web designer we create experiences for the users and put them in the front seat, with our decisions relating to the interface. Equally important as following best practices and standards is to design UI for systems that are accessible to all types of users – Accessible Design, is what we should be aiming for.
An Introduction to Object Oriented CSS
With richer interactions and media heavy pages mushrooming on the web, creating web pages, which load faster and respond well has become a challenge. Separating the content, presentation and behavior of a page using HTML, CSS and JS, is not the only thing that front-end engineers have to concentrate on nowadays. The limelight is now on the performance of the pages, cleanliness and leanness of the code within, scalability and reusability of CSS, and the semantic correctness of the markup. There are a handful of frameworks, techniques and approaches that are built towards this goal of maintainability, scalability and reusability of CSS. Each of them is having its own pros and cons. But, this is not a stage to elaborate on all of them. This article is an introduction to implementing the concept of ‘Object Oriented Programming’ in building CSS for high scale websites and applications, with an eye on maintainability and reusability.
Bridging the Designer-Developer Gap
How are ‘Right brainers’ different from ‘Left Brainers’? Well, this is not a zoology question being thrown at you. If you are working on a team dealing with websites / apps, and if there is a design team working with a team of developers, you probably would be witnessing the answer to this question every single day you work! This is an inevitable fact, and it is this difference that makes the two communities thrive, and the best team is the one which finds a way to converge the collective wisdom of both these ‘species’ into the final stage of their deliverable – An ideal human-machine interaction experience, filled with life and satisfaction. But in reality, most of the teams stumble at this moment, when the ideologies of both of them should be given weight and injected into the final product, and this shortcoming, is the whole essence of this article.
Stay Organized and Stay Ahead of Your Competition
The web is a super highway of information! With the phenomenal growth of the network, and the advancement of technologies, the growing number of netizens are left with a bombardment of choices online, be it spending time on their favorite social networking site, browsing through the ocean of links, or be it just idling around, between tweets born every milliseconds. As design professionals, the most vital resource that we all have to manage well is just one single thing – TIME! Yes, time forms the basic unit of all our efforts and the productivity and the efficiency of a design professional is directly proportional to the time he spends on useful and productive things. Nowadays, with plenty of distractions available online, it has become really hard to get some quality time to be productive. With your FB page and a Twitter client opened in a browser tab, and mail coming every now and then to your inbox, it's a challenge to get work done. Now is the time to keep all those distractions at bay and find out what part of the day you're the most productive and capitalize on those times to get work done.
The Origins of User Interface Terms
“The way that you accomplish tasks with a product – what you do and how it responds – that’s the interface” – The genius HCI expert Jef Raskin defines an interface this way!" Being a UX Enthusiast working mostly on the web, the web UI terminologies and interactions patterns are obviously a part of my daily work life, where I build user experiences by creating wireframes and interfaces which help the user accomplish a task easily. The various interaction patterns have always fascinated me and have left me wondering how closely a human-computer interaction is being related to some obvious real-time objects that we interact with, in real-time – enter the metaphors in Human-computer interaction.
HTML and Semantics – Conjoined twins of the Future Web !
Around 4-5 years ago, my daily knowledge building and socializing activities went like – read books, attend some sessions/training, visit a friend's place, engage in a constructive debate, take a walk @ the nearby park … and so on . But years later … the scenario is slowly changing and I hardly find any time doing at least a few of the items listed above, and a lot more additional items have creeped in to the list! The technology has taken over, and the collective wisdom of humanity, is slowly getting harnessed onto the most powerful medium today – the WEB ! Kids are more concerned about making more friends on their favorite social-networking site than friends at school / college, we talk through comments and write on walls (I would’ve been happier, if we burn that much calorie to write on an actual wall … but this is something else J). The internet is slowly becoming a part of daily life now.
9 Etiquettes And Tips of a Photoshop Rockstar Designer
Hello friends! I don’t think we need an intro to the legendary tool, which has celebrated its 20th birthday last month, since its release, in 1990. Let it be designing those inviting little ad banners, to the finest of hand-crafted webapp UIs, PHOTOSHOP have a special place in a web-designer’s heart! With the bustle of web-designers and photoshopers around the world, every day I feel left behind, seeing the awesomeness in the works of millions of talents out there who manage to outplay me, and as a result, help me rekindle my efforts to learn, every single moment.
