Giving Users Some Credit [Design Informer]
Aug 18, 2010 Interaction Design, User Experience, User Interface Design, Web Design
Really liked this article, which is a little reality check for web usability. Especially neat was the UX version of “The Golden Rule” at the end of the post.
enjoy.
Giving Users Some Credit | Design Informer:
Creating designs that are intuitive and easy to use is something we should continually strive for if we want our sites and applications to be visited and used by as many people as possible. Ultimately, making those sites easy, as well as enjoyable, to use is a critical part of helping them be successful and it starts by abandoning outdated opinions on what users can, and cannot, understand. It starts by giving our users some credit and realizing that they are not ‘idiots.’
Overcoming Design Creative Block
Aug 12, 2010 Interaction Design, User Interface Design, Web Design
While specifically written for Logo Design, I thought the suggestions contained in this article were applicable to most other design disciplines like web or user interface design…
Tips for Overcoming Logo Design Creative Block:
This phase can be very frustrating for any creative person. If you don’t recover within a few days, a creative block can destroy your self-confidence. The fear that you will never again be able to produce good work drives you to desperation. You try harder and harder and end up exhausting your mental faculties. This makes the situation worse. Therefore, it is very important to deal with this delicate phase of creative block with a lot of patience and care. Only you can get yourself out of it. Designers all over the world face this problem and don’t know what to do. There is actually no reason to panic. Let’s look at a few ways by which you can get rid of your creative block.
Designing with Paper Prototyping [UX Booth]
Aug 5, 2010 Interaction Design
Designing with Paper Prototyping | UX Booth:
Prototyping is key to any successful design. Paper prototyping is usually the first step, but does it fit into a world where mobile devices are king? Yes, but not using the conventional method. Combine the physicality of the device and the power of paper prototyping and you have a solution that’s fit for the new era of computing.
Free iPhone Design Templates for Keynote and PowerPoint
May 26, 2010 Apple, Interaction Design, User Experience, User Interface Design, iphone
Free iPhone Keynote and PowerPoint templates help get you from thought to finish:
Mockapp.com has created both Keynote and PowerPoint templates of iPhone UI elements, and has made them available as free downloads. Say you had a dream in the middle of the night about the most awesome iPhone app that, to your surprise, no one has thought of yet. Instead of waking up in a deep sweat and scribbling said ideas on paper, you could dream them up on Keynote.After mapping out your concept on Keynote, you could then pitch it to others in a Keynote presentation. The Keynote and PowerPoint templates include alerts, the iPhone keyboard, arrow icons, buttons, as well as a host of other UI elements.
Tags: Apple, interaction design, iphone, ixd, user experience, ux
Please don’t add debug messages to your customer-facing application
Sep 22, 2009 Interaction Design, User Experience, Web Design, Web Development
Debugging messages are for developers/engineers, not for humans (I can say that since I’m a developer). But I can’t believe that it’s 2009 and I still encounter things like the following example…
Every time I log into one of my online banking systems, I get a message like the following:
This is just intrusive and rude behavior (as Alan Cooper might say). First of all, the message first off tells me when the last unsuccessful attempt was made to access the account… HUH??? Then it tries to be helpful and tell me when the last successful attempt was made.
It just makes no sense at all to me why this message exists at all. Why would I ever care about these particular statistics, and even if I did care about them, is it really necessary to pop up a message box every time I log in???
I vote no.
Fine. If you want to have that information accessible, provide a log of all accesses tucked away in my account settings or somewhere I can get to if I think I have a security concern. Don’t show this message to me, please. What this message boils down to is a debug-ish message in the clothing of security (I could be wrong, but that’s what it smells like to me).
Interestingly, as a side note, I happen to know that this system is from a company that is now owned by Intuit (my former stomping ground), and in the two or more years since that acquisition, this message box has surprisingly still not disappeared.
Tags: annoyances, design, engineering, interaction design, intuit, ixd, messageboxes, online banking, rudeness, software, usability, user experience, ux, web
HP printer driver gets subtle usability upgrade
Sep 18, 2009 Interaction Design, User Experience, User Interface Design
I just noticed when printing up a document today that my [Windows] HP printer drivers must have been upgraded recently. As a result, the Printing Preferences dialog that used to have an entry entitled “Default Printing” (or something to that effect) now reads “General Everyday Printing,” which, while a little confusing in itself, is a lot less TechnoSpeakish than using “Default…”, since non-software-development professionals don’t generally know that word.
Tags: hp, labeling, taxonomy, technospeak, usability, ux, wording
iPhone Wireframe Templates for Sketching
Sep 17, 2009 Interaction Design, User Experience, User Interface Design, iphone
In the spirit of Open Source, I have posted some iPhone Paper Prototyping and Design templates, and you can Download The .Zip File Here.
There are two layouts, and both layouts are in PDF and Viso (VSD) formats.
Feel free to download and tweak them as needed.
Have fun with them!
UPDATE: With all the recent activity following the Smashing Magazine article on Wireframing, I’ve added the PDF files on their own, so if you’re viewing this page on an iPhone or other device that doesn’t like .zip files, then you can at least view them.
Enjoy!
Tags: interaction design, iphone, ipodtouch, ixd, paper prototyping, ux, wireframes
ASP.NET Forum Tags: Semicolons as Separators?
May 25, 2009 Interaction Design, User Experience, User Interface Design, Web Design, Web Development
Ummm… OK I know Microsoft is trying to give the illusion of being user friendly and all, but when the delimiter for tags that categorize a post on the ASP.NET developer forums, they chose semicolons.
Is it just me or is that a ludicrous choice? Why not a space (my preference – a la delicious) or a comma?
In addition, there is no example visible to show you what the legal delimiter is! You have to miraculously divine what it wants, or let it show you what it wants, as I chose to do.
To find out what the delimiter is, I had to do the following:
- Open the “Select Tags…” dialog.
- Select two (short) tags. (I notice lots of other folks thought that a space would be a logical delimiter too…!)
- Close the dialog.
- Oops. Closing the dialog didn’t populate the text box with my selections. Awesome.
- Trying again… Open the “Select Tags…” dialog.
- Select two (short) tags, this time at the end of the list where I notice OK and Cancel buttons (yes – you heard that right. The buttons are embedded in the list itself… and at the bottom of the list, no less! They’re not on the dialog “window.”)
- Click OK.
- Observe that text box has the new selections delimited by semicolons.
The auto-populating text box is another usability nightmare deserving of its own article, but I’ll let someone else write that one up. ;)
Tags: annoyances, interaction design, ixd, usability, user experience, ux
