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Jul 25 / 5:49pm

A Case Study of “Designed By Developers”: Stack Overflow

My eyes puked from the motion sickness of not-knowing-where-to-look-oh-my-god-everything-is-everywhere-ness of the page. It’s a typical case of ‘designed for developers, by developers’, and I’m sure most regular Stack Overflow users have got used to it and don’t mind.

more on danzambonini.com

Outsider's attempt to pinpoint and fix design mistakes on Stack Overflow. Being an avid listener of Stack Overflow podcast and knowing how much though, testing and data-driven adjustments were put into design of this website, I was rather amused to read the analysis. While there might be some valid points, a lot of the advice doesn't take into account the target audience and well-thought community focus of the site.

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Filed under // usability webdesign

Jul 8 / 10:48pm

Non Hover

Try to Avoid

Hyperlinks that aren’t 100% obvious

Javascript tooltips that show important information or metadata

Displaying action items on hover. Examples I’ve seen typically involve edit / delete items.

Displaying graphics in a less-than-ideal state until hovered: all those semi-opaque or black & white screenshots and photos that only display full color when covered by a cursor

Drop-down menus. While some of these can be revealed on click or tap, be sure the user has cues that show those options.

Focusing too much on hover dependent CSS3. I know it’s a bit of a heartbreaker, but while these have always been seen as enhancements, we’re going to have to settle with the fact that multi-touch users won’t be seeing our fancy transitions.

more on trentwalton.com

Good analysis of hover behavior on touch devices.

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Filed under // usability webdesign webdevelopment

Jul 3 / 2:09pm

iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print. However, the difference between the two devices was not statistically significant because of the data's fairly high variability.
Thus, the only fair conclusion is that we can't say for sure which device offers the fastest reading speed. In any case, the difference would be so small that it wouldn't be a reason to buy one over the other.

more on useit.com

Nielsen researches readability on Kindle and iPad. I expected that Kindle will score higher with its e-paper technology.

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Filed under // ipad kindle usability

May 29 / 10:14pm

10 words I'd ban from all websites

5. 'Check' this box
If you're a British brand (or selling to Brits) stick with British English, especially around forms and transactions. I've seen significant evidence that this reassures e-commerce customers in the U.K. We 'tick' boxes or put crosses in them. And we don’t do 'shipping', we do 'delivery'.

more on imediaconnection.com

Useful advice by a professional copywriter, with some British flavor added. I mean flavour.

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Filed under // usability writing

May 29 / 9:20pm

iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

For the last 15 years of Web usability research, the main problems have been that users don't know where to go or which option to choose — not that they don't even know which options exist. With iPad UIs, we're back to this square one.

more on useit.com

Nielsen on iPad's usability. In short: the interface beautiful, but suffers from lack of standardized controls and metaphors.

Of course it didn't take the members of “Nielsen is a boring guy who just don't get” camp too much time to come up with a rebuttal:

He almost gets it.

more on johnnyholland.org

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Filed under // ipad usability user interface

Apr 30 / 7:53pm

I hate computers: confessions of a sysadmin

Speaking of filesystems, why is it that a SQL database can find a specific record in a database of millions of records in a fraction of a second, but finding a specific file on your hard drive takes minutes? I’m sure there’s some very real reason why filesystems are so unfriendly to users, but I’ll be darned if I can explain it to any of my users.

more on crunchgear.com

A sysadmin asks some fundamental, but still very valid questions about computers' usability. On the other hand: man, what these machines do IS complex. Current level of computer adoption is still amazing, if we take into account what was the world like just 200 years ago. But sure, we could do better.

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Filed under // usability

Mar 25 / 1:16am

Coding Horror: The Opposite of Fitts' Law

more on codinghorror.com

I.e. words: make your often used functions easy to reach, make your dangerous functions protected from accidental use.

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Filed under // usability user interface

Mar 6 / 1:22am

Fire the “web designer”

Don’t mix up the two roles, user experience designer and graphic designer. Neither should do the others’ job. They should never be blurred into “web designer.

more on briancray.com

Sounds like an advice from Captain Obvious, but maybe it's still not for some.

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Filed under // usability webdesign

Jan 24 / 9:45pm

ignore the code: Realism in UI Design

The goal is not to make your user interface as realistic as possible. The goal is to add those details which help users identify what an element is, and how to interact with it, and to add no more than those details. UI elements are abstractions which convey concepts and ideas; they should retain only those details that are relevant to their purpose. UI elements are almost never representations of real things. Adding too much realism can cause confusion.

more on ignorethecode.net

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Filed under // usability

Jan 17 / 9:55pm

Did you mean: Google Maps

more on erickerr.com

A wonderfully simple idea for improving 404 pages. At least at google.com.

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Filed under // usability

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