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“Usability is making your website easy for your visitors to find the information they need when they need it.”

When you are building a web page one of the first things that come to your mind is where to put the most important features so the user find them easily.

So, doing a bit of research I found that most users have a particulary way of looking the screen that is called the  ”F-Shaped Pattern “.

This pattern says that users tend to first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.

Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.

Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

For more information about the F-Shaped Pattern visit this link

Other usability tip that I found is that users tend to focus on people’s faces and eyes, this means that if there is a face in your page users focus on it, next they are going to look what the eyes of the face are watching. So if you are going to place people in your page make sure they watch the content you want to show.

Talking a bit about scrolling, recent studies prove that users are quite comfortable with scrolling and in some situations they are willing to scroll to the bottom of the page. So it is a good idea to divide your layout into sections for easy scanning, separating them with a lot of white space.

There are many of usability advices but I think that the most important is to keep it simple.

If you want that users navegate your page easily and they don’t get lost, your page must follow conventions of web design.  For example:  use blue for hiperlinks, if you use another color the user will have to learn the new color to associate it with a link.

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As Rails developers we are all in love with keeping things simple. As Einstein said: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. You may not agree with the theory of relativity, but you should really agree on this one.


A couple of months ago I started my final major project: an iPhone based application. It’s been a really great journey so far and I’ve learned so many amazing things about iPhone development. I found it very similar in some ways with Rails, being the biggest one the way they both keep things as simple as they should be. Well they both use the MVC architecture, but right now I’m talking beyond that stuff. It’s more about an ideology on how to build stuff, web and mobile applications in this case.

As an idea here at moove-it we thought of having an iPhone application for our faltauno.com project, kinda like facebook does. So the research began on how this could be done, the first (and probably definitely) answer appeared quickly. The guys at iphoneonrails.com have developed ObjectiveResource.

“ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails’ ActiveResource. It provides a way to serialize objects to and from Rails’ standard RESTful web-services (via XML or JSON) and handles much of the complexity involved with invoking web-services of any language from the iPhone.”. What’s not to love in that sentence? I won’t get into it since I haven’t used that much, and who could explain better than themselves?. In case you are thinking it will be too complex to get started, you can download the whole package with an example application that does all the basic stuff you are probably thinking on trying to do right now.

The example is a typical Rails application that can be handled using an iPhone application, which is also inside the example, you should of course have installed XCode. You then start the rails app and the iPhone simulator running the other one, and something kind of magic starts happening. What amaze me the most is the simplicity of the code you’ll need to write (of course ). Really try it out it’s worth it.


Don’t forget to tell us about your experience!

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To enable friendly urls in joomla without error when you acces links in pages, is necessary to modify the file configuration.php in root directory of joomla.

Line to modify on configuration.php is :   var $live_site = ”’;

By default $live_site variable value is empty, only need to put complete direction of joomla web site on it and it will work correctly! , for example :

var $live_site = ‘http://joomla.moove-it.com/’;

Finally, upload modify file to ftp!

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