Users trying to scroll horizontally in our app accidentally scroll back and forward, and it’s very hard to get what you’re expecting.
Horizontal scroll was always causing trouble on the web, but with OS X Lion it's even more vexed. (Of course Nielsen has been saying that for ages, but who would listen to that old weirdo.)
Incredible effort has been put into interaction design recently. Unfortunately, all that effort has been targeted towards inexperienced users, pretty much ignoring those of us who use computers for hard work, who run the show behind the scenes.
Command line is incredible powerful interface that has been neglected in the last 20 years of rapid progress in UI design. The article explores this interface and ideas how it could be improved. They seem rather vague, but the subject indeed is interesting.
This screenshot of Windows Explorer from Windows 8 has been already ridiculed by everybody and his dog. It's looking like Apple and Microsoft, both having 30 years of experience in interface design, reached radically different conclusions.
Reading the article clearly shows that Microsoft's design is driven by data. Apple, on the other hand, seems to employ designers.
Traditionally Web applications are untrusted, treated as potentially malicious, and hence "sandboxed" to deny them the ability to affect the user's system or access user data. As we add capabilities to the Web platform, we sometimes encounter situations where legitimate applications want functionality that must be denied to malicious applications. A natural solution is to ask the user whether such requests should be permitted.
Robert O'Callahan of Mozilla compares usability of permission model of Android and web browsers.
I thought I'd driven a stake through splash screens many years ago and eradicated them from the Web, but apparently splash screens are super-vampires that can haunt users from beyond the grave.
Reading sentences like this I wonder if Mr Nielsen realizes how much the attitude he demonstrates makes it harder to convey his (valid more often than not) findings.
Most websites are crammed with small text that’s a pain to read. Why? There is no reason for squeezing so much information onto the screen. It’s just a stupid collective mistake that dates back to a time when screens were really, really small. So…
A manifesto from 2006 that's still valid. For me, it took Instapaper to finally understand what's so wrong with most of the content websites on the internet. Including my own.
The site or app speaks in the first person plural “we”. (In general, “I” takes you to that creepy HAL 9000 place. It’s the uncanny pronoun. Avoid.) The interface addresses the reader as “you”, or by name.
Things belonging to the people who run the site, such as a privacy policy, are “ours”. Things belonging to the user, such as a profile, are “yours”. Anything that is just a part of the overall experience, doesn’t necessarily need a possessive pronoun at all.
On using “My” in names of elements.
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.
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.
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.
Good analysis of hover behavior on touch devices.
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.
Nielsen researches readability on Kindle and iPad. I expected that Kindle will score higher with its e-paper technology.
