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05.16.08

Inside Out: How Not to do Error Messages Writing | (1)
I just tried to buy some tickets to a film as part of Toronto's Inside Out Lesbian & Gay film festival only to be greeted with this message at the top of the page. That's right, there's a message there. Can't see it? No, there's nothing wrong with your eyes, that's actually hot pink text against a red background. What kills me about this message is that the intent to design something decent was there - it has a couple of the winning elements of a good error message: displayed prominently at the top of the page (after I've clicked the ...

Tagged: undefined, Usability
05.01.08

Did You Mean Auspicious? Writing | (0)
I heard the use of the word tacit today. I hadn't heard it in a while, and wanted to check what it meant by checking up on the definition at Dictionary.com. There it was, "understood without being openly expressed; implied". Then in the sidebar, this Ask.com graphic caught my eye: One of the links there is "How do you use Tacit in a sentence?". I was curious, so I clicked through, landing on an Ask.com page with the same question used as the search term. Here's what I was immediately faced with: Narrow? What does that mean? Narrow down the search result? ...

Tagged: Usability, Web
04.22.08

Void Your Firefox Warranty Writing | (0)
Advanced users of Firefox sometimes tinker with the about:config command to change behaviour and functionality of the application. I got a little chuckle when I tried it in the most recent Firefox 3 beta only to encounter this cute warning: So it's one thing to be cute, but the main purpose of this warning is to make sure people who don't know what they're doing are aware that they might screw something up in the process. This is a good way of steering potentially novice users away from unintentionally tinkering by using the very familiar real-world analogy of a warranty.

Tagged: about:config, Firefox, UI, Usability, User Experience, warranty
04.21.08

Amazon.ca and the Broken Search Box Uncategorized | (2)
What you see above is the main search box on the landing page at Amazon.ca. What you don't see is that I've actually typed into that box in Firefox, "this is broken" since it is impossible to see what I've typed because of a browser incompatibility. Here's the same search box, this time with Internet Explorer: While I can see why it would make sense to someone upstairs at Amazon why they would design for the majority of the market, it's really inexcusable at this point to have such a prominent feature of your site looking so embarrassingly bad in Firefox. Now let's ...

Tagged: Usability, User Experience, Web
04.17.08

Posted by someone Uncategorized | (0)
Oh no you didn't. It's bad enough when dialog messages are completely unhelpful, offering no insight as to what you did wrong and what you can now do rectify the problem. Employing the word someone is taking it a little too far. Essentially this message isn't giving you any helpful information, and it's also creating doubt and apprehension about using the application - who modified MY view? Has my PC been hacked? I'm not quite sure how to respond to this, but OK seems reasonable enough.

Tagged: UI, Usability, User Experience
04.14.08

Podshow: How do I subscribe? Uncategorized | (2)
I was listening to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code today (which, as an aside, was the first podcast I heard way back in 2004. How's that for nostalgia?). Adam talked about a new show he had started with John C. Dvorak called No Agenda, and I checked out the site as soon as he blurted our the URL. Imagine my surprise when I visited the show page for No Agenda, which is part of the Podshow network, started by Curry himself (the co-creator of Podcasting) and I can't even find out how to subscribe to show. Go ahead, take a look ...

Tagged: Podshow, Usability, Web
04.09.08

Pick a Time Zone, any Time Zone Uncategorized | (0)
You know I don't want to seem like I'm constantly being negative about the usability and Web issues I discover on my journeys around the Internets, but often the best way to learn what to, is to see what not to do. Take this Web app that shall remain nameless above. In the registration form you're asked to select your time zone, from which there about 100 to choose from (with duplicates no doubt), and as you can see above, shown in at least three different formats. Any idea where I'd find Eastern Americas? (Oh wait, there's three of them ...

Tagged: Usability, Web
04.04.08

UI Design in Development World Uncategorized | (1)
Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror yesterday wrote an interesting article about designing user interfaces, prototyping, and getting locked into design patterns based on code rather than user expectations. He quoted a fellow named Rick Schaut about the ideal way of going about software development: When you're working on end-user software, and it doesn't matter if you're working on a web app, adding a feature to an existing application, or working on a plug-in for some other application, you need to design the UI first. This is hard for a couple of reasons. The first is that most programmers, particularly those who've ...

Tagged: Development, UI, Usability
03.14.08

The Fruits of Usability Testing - Firefox Beta 3 Writing | (3)
I just upgraded to the most recent release of Firefox Beta 3 on the Mac (which is a phenomenal improvement over version 2), and in version 4 there was quite the startling difference in the navigation buttons in the toolbar. As you can see above, the back button is now gigantic in comparison to forward, and infinitely more clickable. This is something anyone upgrading is bound to notice, both for its asymmetric design, as well as how much more usable this control now is. If you think about how much you actually go back while navigating the Web in comparison to ...

Tagged: Usability, Web
03.06.08

Top 10 Design Mistakes in Web Applications Uncategorized | (1)
Worth a read for developers and anyone involved in Web development, Jakob Nielsen's Top-10 design mistakes in web-applications. The ones I tend to run across the most that make me want to pull my hair out are: 6. Asking for the same information twice and 10. Offering system-centric features that reflect the system's internal view rather than the users I believe both of these problems tend to occur when the same person who's programming the database is given free reign over the user interface. (Not that this is always a bad thing - given the right expertise) Typically though, you'd end up with a transaction-based ...

Tagged: Usability, Web

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