Even with the radical website title, I think it deserves a mention that UsabilityMustDie celebrates its fifth anniversary. Congratulations to Chris McEvoy! Keep up the good and humorous work. My favorite of Chris McEvoy’s work is the Jakob Nielsen spoof article “Why Ajax Sucks (most of the time)” where he basically just replaced “Frames” with […]
Here is an example from Amazon.com, on how to encourage people to participate. Users have to vote for the deal they like the best. This way, people are encouraged to do an active act. Unless you vote for it, you’re not even able to buy it for that price. Very encouraging. Amazon could really collect […]
The other day I noted that the Restart button in Windows probably appeared because of buggy software. It was a frequent task that people used often, hence there was a value in combining the two steps (shut down, then start) into one Restart action. This is a lot like the “save” button, where I heard […]
Below is my argument that some user interface widgets are introduced only because of buggy software. First let’s have a look at Windows Vista. Joel Spolsky is picking on the 24 people that designed the Off button in Windows Vista: Choices = Headaches. I’m sure there’s a whole team of UI designers, programmers, and testers […]
Recently I contacted Frank Spillers (of experience dynamics) in order to update wikipedia with citations in an article he originally crafted. In the article on progressive disclosure, I added two sources for Jakob Nielsen’s quotations. Frank had originally only provided one source for both quotations, and a Google search couldn’t even help me finding the […]
The most influential talk I have heard this year is Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice. I cannot recommend this talk enough, so I was thrilled to see that Barry did a similar talk that’s available on Google Video. Google TechTalks April 27, 2006 Barry Schwartz Paradox of Choice (one hour video). If you’re […]
I was asked today on which best practices exist in documenting user interfaces. Especially with focus on documenting how and where the user interface (GUI) communicates with backend services. The format I usually use is: Screenshot Description Preconditions Postconditions Explanation: Screenshot of the entire page or content area Description of the page purpose. Primary action […]
Daniel Szuc tipped me about The Usability Toolkit, now available from Sitepoint. I just ordered a set, and I’m really looking forward to this, as I remember Daniel mentioned the toolkit when I met him at UI 11 last month. Understand usability and get the tools to put it into practice Learn the essentials with […]
“Make this page my home page” Do you remember this from the pre-bubble era? Lots of websites had a link like this. Who used it by the way? I didn’t! Here’s Altavista homepage from February 2000. Image from Internet Archive Now it has gotten even worse on blogs. From Matt over at 37Signals, “It’s the […]
Today is World Usability Day. Here on Justaddwater.dk, we have celebrated with finally scrapping our blog archive. Instead we are now just showing the latest 50 articles on the front page, followed by a link to the previous 50. Those are in turn followed by a similar link and so on. The concept of archives […]
Jensen Harris who’s the Group Manager of the Microsoft Office User Experience Team has for the past year been blogging about the new and exiting user interface of upcoming Office 2007. The new user interface is a complete redesign of the old Office that users have been accustomed to for years. I’ve taken the liberty […]
I conducted a little research today on our intranet. We have a links list that can be personalized to your preference. It turns out that 88% never use it. Of 4,264 users, only 524 people have edited their links list. That’s 12% that uses (or at least have used it at some point). I am […]
Our Norwegian friends at Netlife Research have opened for suggestions to next years Bad Usability Calendar. I already used the 2006 calendar with great impact in my professional engagements, and I’m really looking forward to next year’s version. To make a calendar for 2007 that has the same level of unusual unusefulness, we would like […]
It is no secret that all versions of Internet Explorer on Windows prior to version 7.0 has a flaw in its PNG renderer. The flaw basically involves the rendering of the alpha transparency and means that the images cannot fade nicely into the background. The IE PNG bug explained In the screenshots below you can […]
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