27 Memory Ln. > Websites

This intranet site was my two-and-a-half-year pet project when I was working for a Polish academic ISP.

Intra started fairly simple, holding just a couple of pages. However, one of them turned out to be a killer app, and the small project snowballed into a complicated websiteintegrating many different sources of information.

I tried to make it as useful and usable as possible, relying on

observations, user testing, common heuristics and, of course, experience and intuition. It worked out quite well – Intra successfully incorporated various technologies and techniques (including something today we would call “Ajax”) and to this day remains very helpful for many people in the company.

2001-2003 Photoshop, DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, C++, CGI, PostgreSQL, PHP, SNMP, VBA, Flash

One of Intra’s many subpages

The site’s unique user interface was created in... 3D Studio Max

USS Solaris (now offline) was probably the most ambitious website I ever created. It was considered by many visitors the best Star Trek page not only in Poland, but in the entire World Wide Web.

The website used many advanced features – searchable databases, customizability, personalization, accessibility (down to text-mode browsers), newsletter, guestbook, WAP edition – which back then had to be programmed by scratch using

C++ CGI scripts.

Similarly, the designwas completely detached from content in the pre-CSS times. The visitor was given a choice of one of two completely different interfaces, both very user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing.

USS Solaris also spawned a great amount of graphic designs I created in Photoshop and 3D Studio Max.

1999-2001 Photoshop, 3D Studio Max, Visual C++, DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, C++, CGI, WAP, Flash

A 150-page tribute to... just one song, “Being boring” by the Pet Shop Boys. It’s a beautiful and meaningful song, one that holds a special place in my memories, and creating 10 years of Being Boring for its tenth anniversary seemed the least I could do.

The site includes practically everything about “Being boring” you always wanted to know – including the song and Bruce Weber’s video – and a great deal of information on the

Pet Shop Boys, all packaged in a minimalistic design.

I am still getting emails from fans appreciating the song as much as I do... and not only them. What was particularly delightful was a comment from Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys himself, calling the site “creative,” “fantastic,” “beautifully done” and “very impressive.” Whoa.

2000-present Photoshop, Microsoft Visual C++, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, C++, CGI, Flash

The graphic design of the website was inspired by Mark Farrow’s work

A fairly recent non-commercial website explaining and popularizing Human-Computer Interaction and usability, in theory and practice. As far as I know, this is the first and only Polish website to do so.

Usability.pl is co-created by me and two other Polish HCI experts, Marcin Bober and Marcin Sikorski. I am responsible for webdesign, editing and information architecture, and I also contribute by writing articles and reviews,

2004-present Photoshop, DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, PostgreSQL, RSS

translating articles from English, copyediting, and moderating a complementary discussion forum.

Usability.pl: On designing usable interfaces

The second website I created and the first to actually hit the Web, as well as the only one I ever did using FrontPage – for the rest I

We’ve come a long way, baby

just went and grabbed the nearest Notepad clone.

This was just a simple page about my game editors, with many attributes typical of 1997’s websites(animated GIFs, starry background, frames). More noteworthy is something I wrote on one of the pages: “Each one [of my programs] has [a] similar interface, which I have put much effort to make as friendly and easy to use and easy to use as it was possible.” This was five years before I discovered HCI and usability...

1997 Photoshop, FrontPage, HTML