With respect to the web, a user interface (ui) is the graphical user interface (gui) with which a user interacts with an application.
Etre, a usability group that does eyetracking studies, is posting a series on a study where they looked at the homepages of 20 websites with 40 users. They don't skimp on the analysis either, digging into some detail rather then just showing us the resulting heatmaps.
They are publishing the results from five of these websites:
Some good observations on mouse hover, including some classifications like hover invitaion, hover detail and hover zoom/focus, plus some examples of widgets that work. This kind of classification and nomenclature can be useful...
Lots of good ideas brought together here by authors Luke Wroblewski & Jed Wood about different aspects of how a weblog is designed and can be used.
The offer thoughts on archives to tags and categories to comments, and it is a worthwhile read if you want to build yourself a very usable weblog. I would imagine that a lot of the features that they talk about are available as plugins for Wordpress and some of the other open-source software.
Mike Rundle writes about "Attentional Spotlighting in User Interfaces", outlining that when testing seasoned users of an interface, their familiarity with the interface will bias results, and explains how to overcome this issue.
From the post: Epicenter Design involves focusing in on the true essence of the page (the “epicenter�) and then building outwards.
A great little technique for helping a designer focus on the purpose of the page. An excerpt from the 37Signals Building of Basecamp workshop.
From the article: When someone is asking for an intuitive interface, what they are really asking for is an interface that they, themselves, can intuit easily. They are really saying, “I want something I find intuitive.�
A very interesting read. While diving into "What Makes a Design Seem 'Intuitive'?", Jared M. Spool talks about "the target knowlege point", that is, how much knowledge the user needs to know to accomplish their objective.
Jared goes on to talk about the knowledge gap and some other points, ultimately concluding with Once you understand how ‘intuitive’ works�what makes someone perceive a design to be intuitive�it becomes easier to make the decision as to whether an intuitive design is worth the extra effort.
Here's a great little experiment showing that Design decisions affect what people read
. Using an eyetracking tool users were observed working with different layout versions from the CSS Zen Garden.
At the moment of posting (2005-03-03) they only have two examples up, but they promise more in the future. Looks exciting!