usability

usability

Unnecessary Dialogs: Stopping the Proceedings with Idiocy

Although I like Notepad2, it has some pathological alert dialog behavior, particularly when it comes to searching. Here's an alert dialog I almost always get when searching a document: Thanks for the update, Notepad2. I really wanted a whole modal alert dialog to tell me this important fact.

By Jeff Atwood ·
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design

Design Matters -- but Content is King

In Never design what you can steal, I praised this amusing guerilla redesign of Jakob Neilsen's useit.com-- which is widely derided by the design community for its radically bare-bones layout. Well, the design guerillas are at it again. This time, they've set their design eye

By Jeff Atwood ·
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usability

If the User Can't Find It...

I was lucky enough to attend a week-long Human Factors International [http://www.humanfactors.com] session on usability a few years ago*. As a developer with a long term interest in getting to the human root cause of so many programming problems, I loved it. One of the freebies from

By Jeff Atwood ·
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usability

STOP! Having Trouble?

From Engadget's review of the iRiver H10 [http://www.engadget.com/2005/04/01/iriver-h10-hands-on-review/]: > So the first thing we noticed about this player when we opened it up was, unfortunately, a huge orange flyer [..] From Larry Osterman's review of the iRiver H10 [http://blogs.

By Jeff Atwood ·
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usability

Making Considerate Software

I'm currently re-reading the book About Face. I hadn't revisited this book since I bought the original version way back in 1995. The update, which was published in 2003, is a significant overhaul – and frankly much better than the original. Adding the second author, Robert Reimann,

By Jeff Atwood ·
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usability

But It's Just One More

The Windows Live Local mapping service is surprisingly difficult to use. It certainly looks simple enough: Like everyone else, the first thing I do when I encounter a new mapping solution is try my current address. In this case it's my work address. But when I press enter,

By Jeff Atwood ·
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usability

Selling Usability

It can be very difficult to sell usability, as Jared Spool notes in this 2004 interview [http://www.informationdesign.org/special/spool_interview.php]: > I learned quickly that business executives didn't care about usability testing or information design. Explaining the importance of these areas didn't

By Jeff Atwood ·
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design

In Praise of Good Design

Which pill bottle would you rather use? The rightmost bottle was designed by Target to address the shortcomings of traditional pill bottles. And you probably decided which pill bottle you liked best within a twentieth of a second. When I suggested redesigning address input in web forms, there was some

By Jeff Atwood ·
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user experience

Sometimes a Word is Worth a Thousand Icons

Pop quiz, hotshot. What do these toolbar icons do-- and what application are they from? Okay, maybe that's a bit too monochrome. Does color help? Okay, let's try something less abstract. Does a more traditional look help? So we can see there's some kind

By Jeff Atwood ·
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usability

Google is the Help Menu

Jensen Harris recently cited some Microsoft Office usability research which produced a rather counter-intuitive result [http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/11/29/497861.aspx]: > One of the most interesting epiphanies I've had over the last few years seems on the surface like a paradox: "

By Jeff Atwood ·
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font legibility

Comparing Font Legibility

If you're not reading the Wichita State Software Usability Research Laboratory newsletter regularly, you should be. It's an amazing source of usability experiments with actual data, hypotheses, citations, statistics, and all that other stuff that puts the science back into computer science. A 2001 SURL experiment

By Jeff Atwood ·
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usability

Don't Make Me Think, Second Edition

A reader recently pointed out that the second edition of Don't Make Me Think [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321344758/codihorr-20] is about to be released. I know I've pimped this book ad nauseam, but I can't help myself-- it's

By Jeff Atwood ·
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