The Five Hat Racks was first developed by Richard Saul Wurman in his book Information Anxiety. It’s a bizarre name, but makes sense: the hats are information…. hat racks organise hats…. and there are 5 ways to do it. Fine, call it what you like – at least it’s memorable! In a nutshell, there are [...]
Category Archives: Tutorials
The Importance of Conventions
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. [...]
Usability Issues When Integrating Systems
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 [...]
10 Ways to Improve Usability When You Thought it Was Too Late
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. [...]
Posted in Tutorials Tagged 5 Hat Racks, 80/20 Rule, Aesthetic Usability Effect, Cognitive Load, CRAP, Empty State, Fold, Forgiveness Leave a comment
Learning more about CRAP
I posted yesterday’s tutorial to hacker news and I must say I’ve been overwhelmed with the response I got; so a big hello and thank you to everyone who clicked through! A few people were interested where the term CRAP came from and if I invented it. No, I didn’t invent it; all I did [...]
How to make your user interface CRAP
Graphic design has 4 basic principles that appear to varying degrees in all well designed works; Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity. They are there to help guide you in making attractive designs, but I think they can (and should!) be applied when designing user interfaces. This post will show you how. Anyway, I like the [...]
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