This screen shot is taken from a Virtuozzo Power Panel, which despite my complaints here, has some nice features for managing a VPS.

As you can see they use a light shade of red for the red zone, and then red for the black zone.

Here is something I hadn't ever pondered: the tradeoff between usability and user experience:

Freeways are usable, since they take you from A to B in the most effortless way. But they are also utterly boring. A twisting mountain road on the other hand is exiting. But far from usable.

Yahoo has released a User Interface Library and a Design Pattern Library along with the Yahoo User Interface Blog. All very cool stuff, thanks Y!.

Last week I was reading about the 5 Second Test. It's a usability test given to focus groups. You give the tester a goal, and then flash the page for 5 seconds. If the user can complete the goal the test passes.

I must have missed this when it was first published over a year ago. Ryan Singer from 37Signals published a paper called: An Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design.

Ryan provides a pattern for designing user interfaces, it is not about software design patterns as you might expect.

Seth Godin has a great post called The persistence of really bad ideas, in which he rants about how web developers always seam to use select boxes for picking states and countries:

There are fifty states. This is a problem.