For the past month, I've been away from the computer screen. Now I'm back reading on it many hours a day. Which got me thinking: How do we read online?

Lazy Eyes - How We Read Online from Slate

This is pretty cool :]

PodiPodi is an experimental project in Interaction Design born with the aim to give web designers a way to enhance their websites with two new levels of interaction.

PodiPodi

It's hard to build a website that will please everyone. Some people respond best when they see basic facts on a clean page, others when they have a lot of charts and graphs at their fingertips. Now researchers at MIT's Sloan School of Management hope to make websites better at selling products by making them adapt automatically to each visitor, presenting information in a way that complements that person's style of thinking.

Adapting Websites to Users from Technology Review

If you have a fetish for input buttons don't forget to check this out.

Here is a LIVE demo showing how input buttons are rendered in your browser. The 'Standard' column will look different depending on your operating system. The '+ Border' column shows the same buttons with a red border added. (This removes the default button style as seen in the first column.)

Buttons Padding Demo by Chris Hester

All the animations used throughout the company site I’ve written with jQuery, the greatest JavaScript library on the planet (yeah, I went there). jQuery makes client-side scripting not only super-easy but a blast to write. I’ve written about jQuery before and how much I like it (I even recently gave a talk to that effect) but have long wanted to break down how it powers our little portfolio slider. (I won’t go into too much detail about jQuery itself — I leave finding introductory tutorials elsewhere on the intertubes as an exercise to the reader.)

Using jQuery to Produce Rich User Interfaces from OnWired

Website Optimizer, Google’s free website testing and optimization tool, allows you to increase the value of your existing websites and traffic without spending a cent. Using Website Optimizer to test and optimize site content and design, you can quickly and easily increase revenue and ROI whether you’re new to marketing or an expert.

Google Website Optimizer

If you’re interested in analyzing and optimizing your page layout - here’s some extremely useful tools that you can use to help.

7 Incredibly Useful Tools for Evaluating a Web Design from Six Revisions

How User-Friendly is your Site? from Demo Girl

User interface isn’t a subject specific to computers. Every object in the real world has an interface and understanding it is crucial for a correct usage. Some objects are well designed and can offer different types of good reactions when we interact with them. Others aren’t that good and the designer might have missed the point.

Ten UI Lessons from the Real Worl and More UI Lessons from the Real World from Component House