96 posts tagged “usability”
2007
Jottit. Aaron Swartz’s latest venture: a complete rethink of the Infogami concept. Well worth checking out for the extremely thoughtful way it introduces features, and the way account creation with a password remains optional until you want to add access control.
I've actually been using the latest version of JAWS recently, as part of my work on HTML5. From a usability point of view it is possibly the worst software I have ever used. I'm still horrified at how bad the accessibility situation is. All this time I've been hearing people worried about whether or not Web pages have longdesc attributes specified or whatnot, when in fact the biggest problems facing blind users are so much more fundamental as to make image-related issues seem almost trivial in comparison.
Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms. Fascinating results from an eye tracking study on the placement of “Submit” and “Cancel” buttons—one layout was a whole six seconds slower than the others. Luke Wroblewski’s “Web Form Design Best Practices” book looks like it will be excellent.
In 1997, I chose to suppress a similar finding: users tend to click on banner ads that look like dialog boxes, complete with fake OK and Cancel buttons.
OpenID: Great idea, bewildering consumer experience. Realistic, detailed look at the many usability problems that currently surround OpenID—and a good list of suggested fixes at the end. This is why I’ve been advocating OpenID as a tool for early adopters: they can help smooth out the experience for everyone else.
Dynamic Help in Web Forms. Luke Wroblewski catalogues patterns for providing contextual help.
E-Trade financial tried using a RSA fob as a second factor of authentication, but as of their 11/07/06 financial report their fraud losses continue to increase. That said, they considered this program a success because users indicated they feel safer and are more likely to provide assets.
Never use a warning when you mean undo. The abundance of “undo” is one of my favourite things about Gmail. I wonder if there’s anything Django could do to make implementing undo functionality easier...
On any given Web page, users will either click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal, or click the Back button on their Web browser.
You need to lay out the user interface components visually, by hand, with total control over where they go. Automated LayoutManagers don't cut it. A corollary of this is that you can't move a UI layout from one platform to another and have the computer make everything fit. Computers don't lay out interfaces by themselves any better than they can translate French to English by themselves.
In Which I Think About Java Again, But Only For A Moment. Convincing argument as to why desktop applications written in Java rarely have decent user interfaces.
The way you make users understand your program model is with metaphors. When you make things look, feel, and most importantly, behave like things in the real world, users are more likely to figure out how to use the program, and the app will be easier to use. When you try to combine two very dramatically different real-world items (email and appointments) into the same kind of thing in the user interface, usability suffers because there’s no longer a real-world metaphor that applies.
2006
Fast and Simple Usability Testing. Nat’s 24ways article on practical usability testing (and hedgehogs).
EasyEclipse
Back in November of 2004 I posted a rant about how difficult it was to download and install the Eclipse IDE from the official site. I’m delighted to hear that my rant was partially responsible for the creation of the EasyEclipse project, which not only provides easily installable packages for setting up a Java development environment but also covers LAMP development as well.
[... 140 words]2005
World Usability Day. Coming up November 3rd. Lots of events around the world.
Usable Security: Look Beyond the “Fundamental Conflict”. Security and usability are not conflicting goals.
2004
Usability blunders
I stumbled across this today and thought it was just too good not to share.
[... 62 words]User Education Is Not the Answer to Security Problems. Smart thinking on security from Jakob Nielsen.
Joel on Software—It’s Not Just Usability. More social software design thinking from Joel.
Café testing (via) A brilliantly easy of conducting quick usability tests.
Design Eye for the Usability Guy. Jakob Nielsen gets the makeover of a life time.
This site uses “Fly-out” menus to increase usability. (via) The irony of this statement appearing on the “how to use our navigation” page is delicious.
Fixing CMS usability issues with JavaScript (via) Make Vignette suck less.
Simple tricks for more usable forms
My second article for SitePoint has been published: Simple tricks for more usable forms. It examines a whole bunch of CSS and Javascript tricks for improving the usability of web based forms without impairing their accessibility to clients that don’t support those technologies. The article has already had some useful feedback on the forums, including the valuable observation that auto-selecting the contents of a form field when it receives the focus can have a negative effect on the usability of Unix browsers, where mouse buttons are frequently used for coping and pasting.
2003
Usability guidelines available online after all
In an earlier entry about Usability.gov’s Research based Web Design & Usability Guidelines I criticised them heavily for not providing an HTML alternative to the huge PDF file containing the guidelines. It has since been pointed out that the guidelines are in fact also available as HTML. I’d like to apologise to the authors of the site, although I would also like to suggest that they add a link to the HTML version from the PDF page. Thanks go to Adam Bramwell for alerting me to my mistake.
Web design and usability guidelines
Usability.gov’s Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines lose instant credibility for being available only as a 39.2 MB PDF file [ Update: this statement is incorrect—see my correction ], with all of the usability and accessibility problems that brings with it. I’m on a fast connection here so I downloaded them anyway to have a look. There’s actually a lot of good things I can say about them—the document is attractively laid out, the guidelines clear and easy to follow and each is backed up by references to academic research (hence the title). There are however some guidelines with which I completely disagree, in particular the ones in chapter 4, entitled “Hardware and Software”:
[... 431 words]Balancing Act
Balancing visual and structural complexity in interaction design (via Column Two) is an interesting article that shows how over-simplifying a design can harm usability rather than helping it.
[... 151 words]Usability myths
UIE debunk three usability “myths” (the three click rule, the idea that users give up on slow loading web sites, and the “5 to 8 test subjects should post most usability problems” idea). 37Signals do a pretty good job of debunking the debunkers.
Quasar usability
I had my first ever Quasar (otherwise known as laser tag) experience last night with the Bath University Computer Science Society (BCSS). Due to various misunderstandings our booking failed to materialise, but Quasar were very nice and said we could play against another group at 7.30pm. They failed to mention that the other group had an average age of about 9. Suffice to say it was an entertaining match, which we won by a very small margin (little kids spend all day running about; lazy students don’t).
[... 424 words]Mail models
Matthew Thomas offers a fascinating example of usability gone horribly wrong (the explanation is provided here). Incidentally, while showing the above to my girlfriend she uncovered an interesting usability issue on Matthew’s site itself— “is this a collaborative weblog then?” she asked, having spotted the Posted by mpt on 2/24/03; 3:51:24 AM
text below the entry. Clicking on the name link provided no extra information, bringing up a screen with no useful content at all. I imagine this is an issue with the CMS powering the blog, but it does neatly demonstrate how some CMS features can detract from the unserstandibility of a site.