On Saturday, inspired by Paul Annett’s Channel 4 logo, I decided to build a parallax illusion in the browser.

Here’s the end result: http://maban.co.uk/sandbox/parallax-illusion/

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Government and political party websites are some of the worst designed out there, which is a shame because they often have a lot of important information to communicate. Last year we saw how a strong online presence so positively benefited Obama’s campaign and won the inspiration of many young people, an audience the media claims to be disillusioned with politics. I wanted to see how each of the main UK party websites compared, so I’ve done a comparison of the design and code of 4 of them (plus an extra minor party for the lols).

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I’ve been looking a lot at the use of colours in physical objects recently. Often you’re asked to work on a site where the brand colours are some hideous combination of yellow and blue or red and green, and you’re expected to make those colours work well together.
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In this year’s Future of Web Design conference, Andy Budd gave a fantastic talk comparing User Experience on websites with the hotel industry. He described the need for a good first impression, and the importance of going the extra mile to make the customer feel comfortable and ultimately leave with a good impression.

I worked for almost 2 years in the fast food industry, albeit making and serving fruit smoothies.  Although this could be described as a huge contrast to the hotel industry, I think there are still a lot of similarities because they both rely on good User Experience. The main difference between the User Experience in a hotel and in a fast food restaurant is customer expectations. In a fast food place, customers don’t expect to be served a gourmet meal in less than 5 minutes. They understand that they may have to queue for a short while, that the tables won’t have tablecloths, will probably be a bit sticky and the cutlery will be made of plastic because they don’t have to pay as much. But customers are usually willing to pay more for exactly the same thing, but where they’ll get better customer service.

Here are a few tips I’ve learned from my experience of the fast food industry that can be applied to the web.

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