Blogging for the first time in a long time from my wife’s computer, because I’m installing my brand new Intel SSD hard drive in my macbook.
Oddly enough I ran into a few things during the install process that I think Apple could improve in their interface. (using Snow Leopard)
Apple should recognize a new unformatted disk [...]
Smashing Magazine recently published “10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines“. Actually great work by Dmitry Fadeyev. I find the list well-written, well documented and the principles are easy to apply (or advocate in your team).
The main points are:
1. Form Labels Work Best Above The Field
2. Users Focus On Faces
3. Quality Of Design Is An Indicator [...]
Sometimes, when doing web development, we forget that not everybody are as familiar with the web jargon as ourselves.
This example from Pixum (internet photo developer) shows a good detail:
The status message from Pixum gives immediate feedback that makes it easy to go to next step
Note that the status message contains a link to the shopping [...]
It has long annoyed me that there is no intuitive, straightforward way to disable smileys in chat programs.
Today I found that these two commands can do it for iChat for mac:
$ cd /Applications/iChat.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/
$ mv SmileyTable.plist SmileyTable.plist.bak
Restart iChat. (tip from MacOSXhints.com: Disable graphical smileys in iChat 3.0 but it works for me on Mac OS [...]
This is one of the most dissatisfying customer experiences I’ve had in a long, long time.
I’m managing a website for a customer and they want to have the AdSense program running on their site. Piece of cake I thought… First off I created a new AdSense account for the domain with my customers contact information [...]
Frustrated by internal systems! I just finished writing a page for our intranet. But now I ended up frustrated with no article published:
First attempt: After spending 10 minutes writing I pressed “save and exit”. but the article never changed.
Second attempt: Spent another 10 minutes writing. In the review I pressed Command+backspace to delete to start [...]
It took me a little while to use the new file deletion principle from Google Groups administrator.
You see the list of files, then click delete on the row you want to delete.The row then appears “selected” (the darker colored rows at the bottom). What confused me was that it still says “delete” followed by [...]
In general it’s good to use the human time formats (1 hour ago, 2 months ago, etc.) that you see in many of the new web applications. In general, the detail level is up the shorter the time span.
Just purchased Jakob Nielsen’s new screenshot-packed “10 Best Intranets of 2009” report, which I plan to use as inspiration in my company.
It might be of value to other Capgemini employees so I purchased the “site license to make copies within your organization and place on your own intranet”. Capgemini colleagues are free to contact me [...]
Here are two different download paradigms presented by Firefox download page and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 download page
(full size)
(full size)
It is interesting to see the difference in prioritation of the actions. Microsoft makes all download actions equally important. Which results in 20 download icons that all fight to drag attention.
Firefox, on the contrary, acknowledges that [...]
Jungle drums pointed me to the brilliant usability principles posted by Google. I decided to quote them below here, because it would be interesting to see what changes will be applied over time.
Furthermore, the principles are really, really good and deserve attention. I like that there is room for performance specific measurements (“every millisecond [...]
It takes a lifetime to become an expert on the usability field. Many developers may be interested in creating usable, successful applications. But the entry barrier is sometimes too high — it’s easier to rely on the usability experts than to know about usable applications themselves.
Although I’m really passionate about usability, I really understand that [...]
My Norwegian friend Eidar just wrote to inform me that their company (Netlife Research) has finally released Bad Usability Calendar 2008. Last year, the calendar got quite popular and even Jakob Nielsen mentioned it in one of his newsletters.
This year, I’m more than ever looking forward to use it. The calendar has — as always [...]
Paypal showed me this splash screen when logging in:
I think this is a useful design pattern that can be valuable to most of our clients dealing with time-sensitive data.
It is time-consuming for an application to check if there are new payments on every request. This check is better off being uncoupled from the actual user [...]
This Friday, Jesper and I had a chat about things we don’t like about the current WordPress WYSIWYG editor. In particular when trying to write code examples in our posts:
Jesper: One change I really would appreciate in the next Wordpress would be the ability to shift wysiwyg/code editor directly on the edit page
(Now [...]
In case you missed the thorough pagination gallery that was published in November: Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices
There are really some good (and bad) examples collected at the page, including these written “best practices”:
Provide large clickable areas
Don’t use underlines
Identify the current page
Space out page links
Provide Previous and Next links
Use First and Last links (where [...]
These days I’m working on the HTML and CSS for this map, but I want to hear your opinions as what to recommend from a usability point of view:
The top map where the cities are placed on the map directly (it’s a HTML list)
The bottom map where the list is to the right of the [...]
Just a quick note to mention that my friend Eidar and his colleagues at Netlife Research in Norway are now preparing the 2008 version of the Bad Usability Calendar. Please do post your proposals as a bad usability calendar is a perfect wallpaper and I have used it on several occasions for raising awareness about [...]
Get ready for a suicide mission: On this blog, we will remove our spam filter completely for one day, December 15th.
Today we got our spam comment number 500,000. Pretty scary to think how much energy, computer power, network traffic is wasted on a completely useless activity: To spoil the content with irrelevant comments.
Currently we get [...]
I have recently been working with usability an internal timereporting system in Capgemini. Due to time and scope limitations, there has been focus on the “low hanging fruit”.
Here are some of the lessons learned.
Take a look at Khoi Vinhs brilliant article If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software:
Enterprise software, it can hardly be debated, is pretty bad stuff. The high-dollar applications that businesses use to run their internal operations.
[...]
If you work at a big company [...]
The blog software Wordpress is just released in version 2.3. One of the new additions are a feature that can rescue and correct links when users accidentally follow a link in an email broken over 2 lines. Or following an old link that the blog author has renamed.
We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a [...]
Asa Raskin has made a really useful example of how to implement undo easily in user interfaces. Here’s the example file (linked directly to a page at his company Humanized). Try deleting some items and then press undo.
Note how there is no confirmation when you delete and the items can come back pressing undo.
I [...]
When asking a user about personal details you should also tell what you are going to use it for. Basically it’s always good practice to have a privacy policy available on your website so users can see what data is being collected about them, how it is uses etc.
Many cooperate websites have privacy policies. They [...]
You might know this example. It works this way in Adobe Photoshop.
Drag to adjust numberic value
Mouseover the input box, hold down Cmd + drag left or right to increase / decrease. Hold down Cmd + Opt or Shift key and drag can change the value in decimal or 10 interval. This shortcut works in [...]
Two very interesting videos about Google
The new innovative improvements to Google Maps… View the demo video (it’s just a few minutes):Via Jacob Hage’s blog.
My favorite is the drag-and-drop replanning of routes. Danish competitors are lightyears behind here…
If you have not seen it: Check out Douglas Merril (CIO at Google) talk about innovation at Google. [...]
A colleague of mine — and I don’t consider him lazy — told me today, that he would refrain from participating in a product forum because he had to register as a user. In his opinion, it was an interesting debate of a product missing an essential feature. An employee from the company had already [...]
While being on vacation in beautiful Toscana, Italy, i’m trying out the Opera Mini browser on my Nokia 6233 cell phone. It is actually possible to use the blog administration software on the browser (log in, navigate, write posts, etc.)
But it sure is not easy! There are lots of issues in the interface that easily [...]
Open new windows is a no-no for several reasons. Frequently readers probably know this already, but since I’m often seeing this on Danish web pages, I think it’s time to reopen the discussion with new considerations.
Unless you warn them, Web users are likely to expect the new page to load in the current window. Unexpected [...]
Sidebar note to the related article “Open New Window Still Has Usability Issues“.
If your applications open links in the same window, users can actually decide for themselves how they want to open the window. Current browsers support these keyboard shortcuts:
Click a link and holding Shift key opens link in new window
Click a link and holding [...]
Here is a good writeup from New York Times on why Flickr fails “The Mom Test”:
Flickr was the wrong tool for that job. The terminology is confusing — quick, what’s the difference between a Photo Group, a Photo Set and a Photo Stream? Worse, it takes seven mouse clicks, two pop-up menus and two dialog [...]
Interaction Design Day, Copenhagen
I’m here live blogging at the Danish Interaction Design Day 2007 in Copenhagen (link in Danish). This post is probably the only one I’ll live blog today, as I only attend part of the conference.
The mini conference is a fine mix between trade show and presentations. Best thing is to meet [...]
I’ve been the proud owner of a MacBook Pro for a couple of months now. This is my first real experience with a Mac and my expectations where, not to say the least, great. I of cause expected some transition issues, me being a long time Microsoft Windows user and all – But the problems [...]
Update: CPU fan speed can be controlled. See updated notes below…(2007-11-06)
I got a new laptop from work last week. Swapped the old Dell D600 in for a sparkling new (IBM) Lenovo Thinkpad T60p. I really like the new one. Things I have noted for now:
Much brighter and better screen
Lovely keyboard which is a pleasure to [...]
Yesterday BBC published a short article entitled “Web 2.0 ‘neglecting good design’“. The journalist apparently attended a talk by Jakob Nielsen where he talked about usability issues in Web 2.0. The article is basically just a summary of the talk, and the main focus is that many websites, in the rush to be more Web [...]
Why is it that my laptop gives me this warning:
AFTER the computer shuts down, so I see it when I plug it in and turn it on again?
In my opinion, the autocomplete input boxes have a very low discoverability because they’re basically just textfields with added JavaScript.
Google Suggest’s interface has an added line of text trying to explain and to make it easier to discover the _hidden_ functionality: “As you type, Google will offer suggestions. Use the arrow keys to navigate [...]
Many of today have extremely advanced features and functionality. But the trend towards simpler, slicker user interfaces points towards hiding some of the functionality. Hiding functionality is — in my point of view — a very good thing for usability.
A usable website (or application) is:
What’s a usability blog without a post about door handles?
Daniel Szuc just pointed me to this photo from Joe Goldberg (via webword).
Form usability revisited. In case you missed it, here is why to prefer top-aligned labels on form elements
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