The trend in Microsoft’s products for the past 15 years or more has been toward making things easy for the people who have never used the software before. Of course, as time goes on, there are fewer and fewer of those people. The Ribbon is introduced in the Help file thus: And if you’ve used previous versions [...]
Tag Archives: UX
How Many Identities Does a Single Person Have?
Sunday, July 17th, 2011 – 12:36 pm
(This was originally posted on Google+ itself. I’m also keeping it here, for easy reference.) A friend of mine notes that one of the problems of the current Google+ “real names policy” is that “Google is attempting to deal with (I’m assuming) manufacturing a community of 1-to-1 RL presence-to-online presence” — in particular, he says that [...]
The Difference One Site Can Make
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011 – 8:16 am
Only a year ago, I was against infinite scroll. In design meetings, I’d point out the way it breaks various aspects of the scroll bar. (You can’t tell how far through the full data-set you are; dragging the “thumb” down causes it to suddenly change place, etc.) But now, I almost expect it when I’m scrolling [...]
Are You Sure You Want to Read This Blog Post? (y/n)
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 – 7:22 pm
When should you ask a user “Are you sure you want to do that?” Bear in mind that asking this question when you don’t have to has more than one bad effect: Obviously, it wastes the user’s time and may even annoy them. It also contributes to the general problem of “too damned many dialog boxes [...]
Initial Impressions of the Samsung Epic and Android
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 – 8:38 pm
A few nights ago, my Palm Prē got dropped, causing a hairline fracture in the touch-screen. Since it would no longer take any screen input, it was suddenly an even less useful device than usual. I’d been thinking of switching to an Android phone anyway, so I am now the (proud?) owner of a shiny, [...]
Typesetting In Between the Letters
Saturday, July 10th, 2010 – 11:50 am
Long before I learned to program — and long before the World-Wide Web was even a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye — I was introduced to typography by Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas. In his chapter “Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity”, Hofstadter presents a full-page figure that shows 56 different versions of the [...]
How Many Ways Is Your Imitation Scrollbar Broken?
Sunday, December 13th, 2009 – 1:25 pm
If you’re going to reinvent the wheel, you should at least make sure your new version is somehow better than the previous kind. Reimplementing standard UI and OS widgets is one of the most common ways developers reinvent the wheel these days — it started with Flash developers building their own controls, and has now spread [...]
The Evolution of WordPress
Friday, November 6th, 2009 – 4:54 pm
For backward-compatibility testing, I’ve just installed a few versions of WordPress ranging back to version 2.0. It’s kind of fascinating to see a sort of fast-rewind retrospective of the software. Even just looking at the installation experience, it’s like watching HAL 9000 descend into childish incoherence as Dave Bowman yanks his memory chips. By the time you [...]
OpenOffice Writer UX Warts
Monday, October 19th, 2009 – 10:30 am
The more I play with OpenOffice.org’s Writer, the more confused I am by some of the odd UI/UX warts in it. Here are the ones that are on my mind this morning: When I press F11 to bring up the Style Picker list, why does typing letters not navigate me through that list? Why do [...]
A Chat With Palm Tech Support
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 – 3:25 pm
We’ll see if anything useful comes of this… I wasn’t too happy with the rep’s cluefulness at 2:55, I must admit. 2:50 PM Connecting to Rescue Gateway: control.app51.logmeinrescue.com… 2:50 PM Connected to Rescue Gateway. A support representative will be with you shortly. 2:51 PM Support session established with Kade. 2:51 PM Kade: Hello. 2:51 PM [...]