Nick Harris: Creating a Pleasant User Experience

NewsGator codemonster Nick Harris has been on a tear lately, authoring a four five-part series on creating a pleasant user experience:

• Part I: Expected Behavior
• Part II: User Feedback
• Part III: Language
• Part IV: Many ways to do the same thing
• Part V: Trouble shooting

Definitely worthwhile reading for software developers.

Comments

[Shawn Oster]

Nick, thanks for the heads up on the articles.

Oddly enough they reminded me of a completely off-topic question: You've talked a lot about consuming feeds and how many sites have non-standard, broken or just plain poor feeds and as someone about to write code to produce feeds I was curious if you had any suggetions or helpful hints/locations.

I'm basically looking for "An Overworked Software Developers Cliff Notes to Producing a Valid RSS Feed"

[Trisha Parks]

I'm not yet done reading but this articles are interesting...

[Nick Bradbury]

Shawn, this earlier post of mine may be helpful:

http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/fixing_funky_fe_1.html

And also check out this post from the Google Reader team:

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2005/12/xml-errors-in-feeds.html

Here are a few other tips:

* Use unique identifiers for your posts, and don't change them. We frequently see feeds that contain duplicate or missing GUIDs, and we've even seen some sites change each post's GUID every time the feed is retrieved.

* Don't use HTML in any element other than the description.

* Properly escape HTML in your descriptions (or use CDATA sections).

* Include each item's publication date, since otherwise an aggregator can only show when an item was received.