27. June 2008 00:18 by Janko in Tutorials | tags: ,

It has become a standard to disable a user to start another postback while the current is still running. I believe that you already know about Ajax loading indicators and that you use them to notify users that the postback is in the progress. But there are a few more options you could use.

First let's see the most common way to notify a user that the request is being processed, and that is to display Ajax loading indicator during postback.

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19. June 2008 11:21 by Janko in Tutorials | tags: ,

How many times have you heard form a client that they want "outlook-like" web user interface for their application? Me, probably a hundred of times. When I asked customer what exactly they like about Outlook user interface, I often got a similar answers. They use outlook everyday and are very familiar with the layout, look and behavior. So whenever they asked me can they have something like that, I always said "Why not"!

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16. June 2008 16:19 by Janko in Reviews | tags: ,

crazyeggCrazyEgg is a service that will help you visualize the usage of your website. How? Simple, by tracking visitor's activity on your pages. It shows you what's hot on your website, where users click and shows you very detailed information for each click by creating very detailed and graphically rich reports.

It has free and paid plans. Free plan is ideal to test this service. You can set up test for up to four pages and maximum number of 4000 clicks. Paid plans costs from 9$/month to 99$/month. I recommend you to start with free plan and then upgrade if you find this service useful. I believe you will.

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9. June 2008 23:28 by Janko in Tutorials | tags: ,

In my previous article "Labels in form layouts" I wrote about how I have implemented "underlined labels" on web application forms. However, due to complexity of web appications I developed I often needed to find a way to focus a user on a current context. When I discovered jQuery I decided to use it because of its powerful features.

Since the forms were often very complex and had (too much I would say) controls on them, I needed to focus a user's attention on the current context. I first thought to highlight the current row.

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6. June 2008 12:02 by Janko in Tutorials | tags: ,

One of the requests that I often had is to refactor the presentation layer of web applications. One of the things that purports is a form layout refactoring.

What is so important about form layout?

First time when I was thinking of the best solution I remembered that I read a great article "Web Application Form Design" written by Luke Wroblewski. Luke explained how label position can affect web form usability. He described the advantages and disadvantages of common label positions and how visual elements fit in this. To put it in short, there are three common ways to position a label associated with an input field:

Vertical labels

Vertical labels

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