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Earlier I wrote how we use Ruby on Rails as rapid prototyping tool at work. Hobo is a promising plugin for Ruby on Rails to speed up development even more. At work, we’ve been looking into rapid prototyping of web applications for quite some time. Hobo might even help us to speed up development even […]

Recently I was recommended taking a look at CrazyEgg which could be a possible candidate for creating heatmaps of user navigation. Rather than to be specific to CrazyEgg, I would like to comment on the general principles and pitfalls when using the methodology that CrazyEgg uses. Heatmap (from CrazyEgg demo site) As I understand, it […]

The new Google Finance has introduced the simplest “import” feature I have ever seen. Just have a look at this promise right above a big text field for inputting data from other finance sites. Copy your portfolio from any site and paste it into the form below. Be sure to get the column headers. One […]

I just saw the very funny usability video called ‘Lexus Self-Parking “Usability” Test‘ (via Matthew Oliphant). Car manufactures stuff more and more electronic gear into our ‘intelligent’ cars – But how does that effect the user experience? The fellas in the video are not impressed. They even get into a fight over how to operate […]

At Justaddwater, we’re introducing a new category: “Best of Justaddwater“. Alexander, the Chief Happiness Officer, came up with a “best of”-category, that I think any blog could benefit from. Absolutely a brilliant idea. At the moment, we want this to completely replace our experiment with a wordpress plugin for measuring popular posts. (Popularity Contest has […]

Joseph Cooney found a fantastic example of a confusing user interface. (via Jeff Atwood). In a comment on Atwood’s blog, Aaron G adds: The people saying that the UI is good “for people who know wget” are only reinforcing my original point that it provides no useful abstraction to wget and is hence useless as […]

I might be stating the obvious here, but it’s sometimes good to be able to back it up by real research. Via Jakob Nielsen’s “Productivity and Screen Size“: The distinction between operations and tasks is important in application design because the goal is to optimize the user interface for task performance, rather than sub-optimize it […]

Google updated their CAPTCHA logic to provide an audio alternative for visual impaired users — or also users that have a hard time reading the twisted letters. Without even mentioning the online petition where almost 5,000 people protested against the original format where only an image was available. From the Google blog – Audio captchas […]