usability

usability

Usability vs. Learnability

In this 1996 Alertbox, Jakob Nielsen champions writing for the web in an inverted pyramid style: Journalists have long adhered to the inverse approach: start the article by telling the reader the conclusion ("After long debate, the Assembly voted to increase state taxes by 10 percent"), follow by

By Jeff Atwood ·
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ui/ux

UI Follies: Windows Media Player Edition

Windows Media Player may be the only windows application with a UI that gets progressively worse with each new version. It is my media player of choice due only to overwhelming indifference on my part; I curse every time I use it. That's why I was so encouraged

By Jeff Atwood ·
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usability

UI is Hard

Some users commenting [http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?comments=37492] on the poor pre-game user interface in EA's Battlefield 2 [http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/battlefield2/index.html]: > Poster #1: They need to stop hiring angry little men and romantically spurned women to design user

By Jeff Atwood ·
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usability

Conventions and Usability

Philipp Lenssen recently conducted an interesting experiment in usability minimalism where he visually deleted all the unused elements from the web pages he visits every day. Viewing some of Philipp's native German web pages, I was reminded how powerful conventions can be; the page layout and formatting are

By Jeff Atwood ·
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ui

Trees, TreeViews, and UI

I somehow doubt this is what Joyce Kilmer was thinking of when he wrote the poem, Trees: I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. It’s unfortunate that the TreeView is one of the standard widgets in a usability designer’s toolkit, because trees

By Jeff Atwood ·
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user experience

Tog and Google on UI

You may be familiar with Bruce Tognazzini, who is widely considered the father of the Macintosh UI. He’s no longer at Apple, but he is part of the Neilsen Norman dream team. He also maintains a website with the 10 most wanted UI design bugs: 1. Power failure crash

By Jeff Atwood ·
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usability

You’ll Never Have Enough Cheese

This Human Factors International presentation (ppt) references something called a Columbia Obstruction Device: I couldn’t find any actual references to the Columbia University science experiment they’re referring to, but it certainly seems plausible enough. The parallel with users and usability is natural. Either maximize the cheese (make your

By Jeff Atwood ·
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user experience

Teaching Users to Read

I’ve talked about irresponsible use of dialog boxes before, but a few pages I’ve read recently highlighted an interesting aspect of this topic that I hadn’t considered. First, Joel Spolsky: This may sound a little harsh, but you’ll see, when you do usability tests, that there

By Jeff Atwood ·
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unix

UNIX will never be usable

A few months ago, Eric Raymond, the open source guru best known for his seminal paper, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, posted a rant about the difficulty he encountered with a common user printing scenario in UNIX. The follow-up post is even more intriguing: I am informed that an RFE

By Jeff Atwood ·
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