Howells.

I randomly discovered this excellent Slideshare deck by interface designer Johan Ronsse. It contains some wonderful nuggets we should always bear in mind when creating interfaces:

• The power of good defaults — make sure your users have access to the most obvious options first (a good example is optgroup’ing the most likely/popular countries in a massive country select)
• The only benefit of customising a select is making it fit with your design: you lose all the very useful, native functionality a select provides
• If you don’t have the time or skill to customise UI controls (which is hard), it’s best to stick to the boring defaults that work
• (But at the same time if nobody took any risks, there’d be no UI innovation)
• Always leave that little annoying “View larger Map” link in when you embed a Google Map. Otherwise it’s a nightmare – especially on a mobile device – to see the map in full view.
• Alternatively, just embed a static map and link to Google Maps. Nobody uses the embedded map functionality anyway.
• Use outlines, subtly, referring to Google Maps place names, which have white outlines, and the left and right arrows of Facebook’s photo viewer. Your controls should always be visible regardless of their background
• If you use lightboxes to view images, make sure the image occupies the whole screen, and don’t use animated transitions (I’m very guilty of this myself…)

☛