Jason Fried is at 37 Signals. Love or hate them, their products do exactly what they advertise and do them well. Jason took an hour to show, through their projects, how you can take your Ikea-esque site and make it into a hand-crafted, high quality project. In each of the points the theme is clearly craftsmanship.
- weak normal strong: sometimes emphasizing an element can be better done by de-emphasizing the surrounding elements
- anticipate the flow, sharpen the focus: make mouse clicks and selected fields work for the user's movement through tasks.
- copywriting is interface design: words are just as effective as graphics in the goal of successful design. Be explicit and communicate naturally rather than in tech-centric jargon.
- timing is everything: factor in erroneous mouse targeting and necessary crossover in selecting on:hover elements. Additionally, very few things happen instantaneously in nature; we are much more accustomed to seeing things change.
- Photographic memory: remember user actions, thereby removing the need for settings and preferences
- Extreme detail: things that really may be overlooked but will be loved by your development team and take quality to the next page. Eliminate error messages, make little known features your audience can discover and enjoy (If you are using a framework, you can install these features across your projects).
Fried notes that they don't use comps, don't use wireframes. Basically he says they make rough sketches (with fat markers to avoid getting to detail oriented) and then go straight to the code. This is interesting.