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In Access by Design: A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers, Sarah Horton offers guidelines for universal usability, along with examples and links to related articles and tutorials.

Shawn Henry’s Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design helps designers and developers create websites, software, hardware, and consumer products that are accessible to people with disabilities, provide a better user experience for all, and realize the additional benefits of accessibility.

The Web Style Guide explains established design principles and covers all aspects of web design—from planning to production to maintenance.

37Signals explains their business, design, programming, and marketing philosophies in their book Getting Real.

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) has developed the InterACT Curriculum which will help students become web professionals by teaching them web standards and industry best practices. Topics range from design and professional practice to front-end development and server-side development.

Mark Boulton’s Designing for the Web teaches techniques for designing a website using the principles of graphic design. The book includes sections on research, typography, color, and layout.

Stumbled upon an interesting series over at A VC called MBA Mondays. Each week Fred Wilson writes a post that is about a topic he learned in business school. So far, topics include accounting, compounding interest, and the time value of money.

Cammy Bean interviews Dr. Will Thalheimer and discusses the most common mistakes e-learning practitioners make when designing e-learning.

Professor Karl Kapp on the differences in instructional design in the corporate and higher education environments.  Notes on the discussion from Cammy Bean.

Anyone who is consuming RSS feeds should check out Shaun Inman‘s Fever.

Why I Like It

1. Easy install
2. Beautiful user interface design
3. The app reads your feeds and picks out the most frequently talked about links
4. The app is usable in Safari and on the iPhone

Suggestions for Improvement

1. Create short snippet videos to explain specific features – this allows users of the app to quickly come up to speed on new topics without having to search through the long intro video
2. Update e-mail with activation code to include notes about how to continue with installation – it was a bit confusing to me what my next step was after obtaining my activation code
3. Provide a visual identifier in the All Kindling or All Sparks view to show if a feed has been assigned to a group

Rating: 4.5/5