Tag: usability

Harry Brignull:

Normally when you think of “bad design”, you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind.

Use for good, or use for evil.

Found by Michael Angeles:

“If for any reason you are unwilling or unable to click the giant button, please email us…”

Gotta say, it pops and can’t be missed. DESIGN PATTERN.

Derek Sivers:

In the case of a hotel room: I had already reserved the room, planned my trip, and checked in before realizing they were going to force me to use their unique non-standard interface.

For you website designers: your design choices are like this light switch. Your users have already come to your site, now they’re forced to use your interface.

In my view, interaction design has almost nothing to do with art. The art that may occur on the web is graphic design. Unfortunately, many don’t know how to draw that line.

Make smart choices when it comes to the interactions. Make bold choices when it comes to the presentation of those interactions.

37 Signals:

I have to think (and experiment) every single time I want to decipher one of these keyboard “shortcuts”. Why is it that only the command key (⌘) actually has the symbol printed on the key itself? And what’s up with the symbol for the option key (⌥)?

Apple and usability usually go hand-in-hand, but the keyboard shortcuts are a huge exception. Why not just put them on the keyboard? Too ugly?

The biggest issue one might have using the web on an iPad:

When I sat down to a redesign of the Gameplan admin interface I suddenly came to a realisation, :hover doesn’t work. It’s entirely possible I’d skim read this somewhere, but somehow the implications for my design work had passed me by until I saw an iPad in use.

For many, we often think about how many clicks a user goes through to complete a given interaction, and it somehow feels like the use of hover can alleviate part of that friction. If you care about the iPad or the similar copycat devices sure to appear before too long, that option is fading away quickly.

Of course, we can all take heart in the fact that well-done progressive disclosure is possible regardless of the number of clicks or taps involved. It’s about ensuring that every step in the interaction is clear and valuable more than it’s about fewer clicks.

It’s another one of those constraints that might make us all better designers.

As with all Nielsen publications, take this with a bit of salt, but it’s certainly worth a thorough read.

On putting destructive action triggers near other UI triggers, this example coming from Gmail, where the Send and Save Now buttons are adjacent:

I can tell what you’re thinking. Did he click Send or Save Now? Well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement of composing that angry email, I kind of lost track myself. Good thing we can easily undo a sent mail! Oh wait, we totally can’t. Consider my seat, or at least that particular rash email, ejected.

Yukio Ota designed the “Running Man” exit sign, which competes globally with the American red “EXIT” sign. The running man is thus the child of both rigorous science and starry-eyed utopianism, and it’s now in use all over the globe.

This is part five of a pretty great series from Slate about the language of signs.

Ota, like many designers of pictograms, is a bit of a romantic about the power of symbolic communication. The first real innovator in the field was Otto Neurath, who developed ISOTYPE, a system of pictograms intended to help workers between the world wars relate to Europe’s increasingly industrial economy. […] Like Neurath, Ota believes that through graphical icons, we can transcend our cultural and linguistic differences and speak to one another as global citizens. […]

If you use an auto-complete or type-ahead-find feature in your input boxes, you should be considering accents. This has a nice overview and some sample code.

Phil Gyford:

For some time I’ve been meaning to test my small collection of PDA/smartphone gadgets to see which of their methods of input was quickest. The iPhone’s software keyboard? The Newton’s handwriting recognition? Palm’s Graffiti? With the possible imminent arrival of a tablet from Apple that will save the world, it seemed a good time to get round to the test.

John Siracusa looks at his reviews of the OS X preview releases and the first 10.0 release.

What’s most amazing is how gracefully things seem to have improved in those ten years. The old screenshots now look dated and sometimes downright ridiculous, and Siracusa’s evaluations were nothing short of dire in the beginning, but it’s slowly and steadily become the clear market leader.

One of the best things about Apple is their willingness to put something out that might be a bit of a reach, and then to go back and iterate and fill in the gaps. They pay a boatload of attention to making it a great experience in the first place, but they are always willing to acknowledge that improvements can be both subtle and major.

Seth Godin:

Put aside your need for a step-by-step manual and instead realize that analogies are your best friend. By the time there is a case study in your specific industry, it’s going to be way too late for you to catch up.

If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard a client ask who else in their space has used a specific design solution…

Ev Williams:

The larger point, though, is that this feature should make Twitter a more powerful system for helping people find out what’s happening now that they care about.

A good explanation behind a new feature that will quickly affect millions of people, especially important since the new retweet mechanism has a little quirks worth understanding.

A little late to this, but the guys at Steepster, a tea review site, have a fantastic post about how they overhauled their ratings system:

It turns out that the average rating for products on sites with 5-star scales is around 4.3. To us, this says that we need to dive deeper — zoom in to a level where it’s clear what the difference is between a really great tea and the best tea you’ve ever had.

There’s a lot of great thinking here. Rating scales are like identity systems in apps — easy to overlook them, but it can have a huge impact on the final product.

From CXPartners:

We can offer three design tips to ensure content below the fold is seen.

Less is more – don’t be tempted to cram everything above the fold. Good use of whitespace and imagery encourages exploration.

Stark, horizontal lines discourage scrolling - this doesn’t mean stop using horizontal full width elements. Have a small amount of content just visible, poking up above the fold to encourage scrolling.

Avoid the use of in-page scroll bars - the browser scrollbar is an indicator of the amount of content on the page. iFrames and other elements with scroll bars in the page can break this convention and may lead to content not being seen.

Nate Eagle on the PBS Design blog:

There’s nothing terribly difficult about hitting cmd+click for me: I’ve got two able arms with able fingers attached to the hands that join them, but Twitter’s completely right that I always want its links to open in new windows and that I appreciate not having to think about it. Twitter’s my base, man: I want to have my place saved while your picture of your adorable bull-dog loads in another window.

The answer? Inconclusive, but I can identify with Nate’s indecision.

With URL shorteners like tr.im on shaky ground, lots of folks are starting to roll their own URL shorteners. We’re using spkr8.com for speakerrate URLs.

If you’re doing this yourself, you should be using the Short URL Auto-Discovery protocol, and you should start using the bookmarklet to find those custom short URLs yourself.

This may be my favorite A List Apart article ever. Patrick Lynch presents a thoughtful, well-argued position on behalf of visual design on the web:

Recent design writing and interface research illustrate how visual design and user research can work together to create better user experiences on the web: experiences that balance the practicalities of navigation with aesthetic interfaces that delight the eye and brain. In short: there’s lots of evidence that beauty enhances usability.

There’s not a whole lot that’s incredibly new here, but Lynch’s argument — which includes conscious and sub-conscious cognitive processing and a discussion of the difference in role between classical (clean) and expressive (Comm. Arts) aesthetics — brings a lot together quite nicely.

Hopefully the non-visual designers reading this appreciated it as much as I did, and the visual designers didn’t stop reading three paragraphs in due to the relative lack of graphics and long paragraphs :)

Microsoft and Google presented the results of their user performance tests, and Brady Forrest at O’Reilly has a nice synopsis:

Here are Brutlag’s and Schurman’s final points:

• “Speed matters” is not just lip service
• Delays under half a second impact business metrics
• The cost of delay increases over time and persists
• Use progressive rendering
• Number of bytes in response is less important than what they are and when they are sent

These are pretty consistent with the conclusions we’ve already had, and corresponds pretty closely with the talk I gave up in Halifax last month, but it’s great to have some metrics attached.

Joshua Porter posts a good reminder about how important even the smallest copy can be:

Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word. It’s the small copy that has the biggest impact. Don’t judge it on its size…judge it on its effectiveness.

It’s also some of the most fun copy to write, especially if your product has a really strong voice.

It’s an old standard that body copy should have a line length shorter than 75 characters per line. But on the web, the acceptable number is higher. From a post I did today at Viget, I cited research that demonstrated that users can easily handle 95 characters per line or higher:

What is the new standard? Tough to say, but 100cpl seems to be within the range of feasibility. There may be a good opportunity for some new and more thorough research in this area that could offer some valuable new insight.

I suspect this is due to print being a largely-vertical medium, and the web (especially since widescreen became prevalent) is more and more horizontal.

Mike Davidson resurfaces a problem that just can’t seem to go away: WYSIWYG editors suck.

I could go on and on for another hour about details, but after going through all of the WYSIWYG editor machinations we’ve gone through, I’m left wondering why the web development world still hasn’t figured this out yet. We can write an entire e-mail application, a replacement for Excel, and whatever the hell these things are, but we can’t replicate a toolset we’ve had in MacWrite since 1984?

I agree with him that the WYSIWYM Editor seems to get the closest, besides WordPress’s hacked TinyMCE, but someone has to solve this problem and productize the results.

Ben de Castella has an interesting take on the impact of the aforementioned engineering-centric design philosophy at Google:

While people may not be prepared to shell out for PC software, mobiles are a different story. Mobiles are the ultimate lifestyle accessory and one that consumers are used to paying for, even if indirectly through operators. While design may not be too much of an issue when you’re getting something for free, when you’re shelling out hundreds of dollars it suddenly becomes more important, particularly when it is something that goes everywhere with you.

I don’t think it’s a matter of one or the other. All parts of the team need to value and understand the thought/design/engineering process of the rest of the team in order to come to the best conclusions. Apple seems to indeed embrace both design and engineering, while Google seems to only embrace the latter. This is a legit criticism of the G1 to almost anyone except developers, unsurprisingly.

Userfly tracks mouse motion, keystrokes, and clicks of your users so you can piece together their experience and see where your design might be falling flat. This looks disgustingly impressive.

FeedbackArmy is an interesting little product, using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to quickly and inexpensively get some usability or product feedback for any site. For $7, you get ten responses from reviewers in a matter of minutes.

It’s probably not the world’s most valuable feedback, but if you need something in a pinch and for almost zero budget, it definitely looks like a worthwhile option.