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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 […]

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 […]

Thanks to one of our dear readers we just discovered a bug in our commenting system that basically meant that you could not leave a comment on any of our posts. This has now been fixed and you can now again tell us your thoughts. Of cause we should have noticed, since the amount of […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

Last week our old DVD player stopped working, and we decided it was time for a technological quantum leap. So I ordered this DVD/harddisk recorder: Amitech 736 with all the right buzzword features: DVD player/recorder Built-in harddisk (I ordered the 250GB version) Digital tuner as a supplement to the analog tuner (better quality of recordings) […]

This video by Dr. Ariel Shamir from Siggraph 2007 demonstates an alternative to traditional cropping vs. resizing of images. As images on web pages target many different screen sizes, this alternative describes a way to measure the least significan lines in a photo and “stretch” images along these lines. What an interesting video. It will […]

I just realized that the netbank I use logs me off when I request a page which the bank defined as “outside the netbank”. In my case I was at the net bank page watching my account. I pressed “search” to search for how to find the IBAN/BIC/SWIFT code for international transfer of money. This […]

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 […]

Reboot was very good this year, and after meeting people like Mathias Müller-Prove (works with user experience on OpenOffice and did another presentation), Matthew (works in AllPeers — a company that does an interestning firefox plugin, that I unfortunately never got a demo of). This inspired me to have a conversation about “the humane interface“… […]

Back in December I read somewhere that MySpace had taken over the position as the most visited website from Yahoo. The sheer numbers of pageviews and visitors were gigantic, in November, Comscore reported: News Corp.’s MySpace recorded 38.7 billion U.S. page views last month, compared with 38.1 billion for Yahoo, according to comScore Media Metrix. […]

I’m not pirating music or films, and I will gladly pay huge sums of money to huge world-wide record companies and film studios. But if they insist on protecting their publications with DRM, I will in turn insist only to pay half the price at the shop counter in return for less accessible content. It […]

Thomas Baekdal and I have translated and are now publishing Bad Usability Calendar 2007 in Danish. I can highly recommend using this calendar in projects as wallpaper. But good luck on using it for actual planning. This year’s version contains advice regarding AJAX, overwhelming use of graphics, advertising, and much more. Download Bad Usability Calendar […]

I’ve been waiting for this with excitement: Eidar and the rest of NetLife Research in Norway have finally released the 2007 version of Bad Usability Calendar. Direct download: Bad Usability Calendar 2007 (1.2 MB PDF) Very nice to see that the calendar actually is released under a Creative Commons license, so you can translate it […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

Perfect wallpaper for any project room. The Bad Usability Calendar from Norwegian company Netlife Research. At UI 11 last week I was fortunate to meet Eidar (photo) from Netlife Research. His usability firm made a Bad Usability Calendar, which is absolutely fantastic. I’m putting the link here directly, as their pages are in Norwegian. Bad […]

Yesterday the W3C released a Candidate Recommendation document called “Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0“. With this document W3C is offering a set of guidelines to help web developers deliver a better user experience to mobile users. The deadline for providing feedback to W3C is the 27th of August 2006 and all developers are encouraged to […]

Hi, this is Luis Villa, Thomas and Jesper’s former colleague at Capgemini Spain. They couldn’t make it to @media in London last week, so they asked me to give a summary of the event. London @media 2006 was a Conference about frontend and web user interface in all its dimensions: strategy, design and building and […]

Since last time I wrote on the various definitions of user experience, Bryce Glass, Mike Kuniavsky and Thomas Baekdal have made excellent points on the subject of providing a single, clear understandable definition of user experience. Also, I attended Jesse James Garrett’s seminar (“defining the user experience” – my notes) last month, and got a […]