Every good magician knows how to lead an audience’s eyes with their gestures. This allows them to make the audience look in one direction, and whilst their gaze is averted, the magician is free to perform a sleight of hand or develop his illusion.
This same effect can be used in design. Here in the UK, [...]
There’s a fantastic article over at Daring Fireball about the friction of saving an ‘Untitled Document’ – It’s so true! Well worth a read.
I completely agree with his observations about the iLife suite. Both iTunes and iPhoto abstract away the location of their actual files from the user. Recent switchers to the Mac have a [...]
Your users will probably mess things up. Some are just down right stupid. Don’t trust anything they say, it is probably a mistake. The best way to deal with this sort problem is to ask them lots of questions, even when it’s obvious they meant to do what they just did. Are you sure you [...]
Conventions are important. They emerge as the ‘way things are done’. As such, when we see a control on a device, we apply our previous knowledge of similar systems and make assumptions about what will happen when the control is activated. The more experience you have in a particular field, the more conventions you know. [...]
Earlier this week Jake Burghardt at Flashbulb Interaction emailed to tell me about his new eBook entitled: ”Working through Screens: 100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work”.
I’ve not had chance to read it all yet, but what I have read so far is very good, so I saw [...]
Sometimes it is necessary for us to integrate our software with another system in order to offer its features to our customers, in fact a new class of applications has emerged where separate systems are created from integrating other products – the ‘mashup’. Allowing a user to take advantage of another system from within your [...]
You’ve spent months working on your project and delivered it to the client. Initial feedback was positive, but they’ve spent a few days with it now and have asked if there is anything you can do to ‘make it more user friendly’. Ouch. It’s a bit late in the day to start any major restructuring. [...]
It has been a long time coming, but this morning brought about the correct alignment of the planets and I’ve finally got around to writing my links page! It’s not an exhaustive list of all the usability sites out there – just the ones I subscribe to. But, if you think I’m missing out on [...]
I love watching people who obviously don’t know much about computers. They are wonderfully pragmatic, and will find the simplest path – even if it isn’t the optimal choice. The other day on the train I saw a guy using Notepad to write a report (his hunt & peck typing gave him away too!). Notepad [...]
Forgiveness is an important feature of good design. You should help your users by minimising the impact of mistakes or, ideally, prevent them from happening at all.
One way you can make your interfaces more forgiving is by employing a ‘forcing function’ (aka confirmation). This technique makes the user verify that what they requested is [...]
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