Topic: Web Design
Articles relating to general principles of web design and not necessarily specific languages and frameworks.
Pharmaceutical Quality System Software Design
Posted in Tech
on March 3rd, 2012 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
jQuery,
AJAX,
Web Design,
Django
I don't know much, or anything, about how software for pharmaceutical quality systems is designed, so this is a speculative article about how I think it might be done, and I may not come up with any good answers about how they do it after defining the requirements. So this is just for the mental exercise. By "quality systems," I mean computer systems that replace paper documents in a traditional quality system. So, for example, out of spec investigation reports, inspection reports, nonconformance, deviations and so on. LIMS systems expand this to include absolutely all raw data. All modern computerized quality systems evolved from paper-based systems from before the computer era, and in my view the place to start is to examine the specifications and capabilities of the paper system and see how it can be replicated in a computer-based system. I'm imagining this as if I wanted to get into this business, how would I make the product, although that's not something I seriously intend.
Jumpy Web Pages and AJAX
Posted in Tech
on April 28th, 2011 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
AJAX,
Web Design
Go to www.cbc.ca/news - one of the things you will notice is that after the page loads, AJAX elements are continuously loading which causes bits of the page to jump around. This can result in you clicking on a link you didn't intend as the page jumps around under your cursor if you are not content to wait for all the AJAX to load, and in attempts to scroll the page being very choppy and unpleasant. I'm only using CBC as an example - a lot of AJAX heavy pages do this. I submit that this is an example of bad use of AJAX and bad design overall, as it irritates the user and makes a worse user experience. Proposed rule: When using AJAX to load content into a web page, reserve room for that content in the page's CSS and do not allow it to shove bits of the page around as it loads unless you have a damn good reason to.