usability
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, I
password management
I have fifty online logins, and I can’t remember any of them. What’s my password? I can’t use the same password for every website. That’s not secure. So every password is unique and specific to that website. And what’s my login name? Hopefully it’s
usability
It can be very difficult to sell usability, as Jared Spool notes in a 2004 interview: I learned quickly that business executives didn’t care about usability testing or information design. Explaining the importance of these areas didn’t get us any more work. Instead, when we’re in front
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
user experience
Seth Godin showed this slide during a recent presentation at Google: Users don’t care about YOU. What’s the biggest web design mistake of 2004? 1. Believing people care about you and your web site. Why isn’t anyone reading our blog? 1. You’re not a good-looking female
forms
Why do HTML forms have to be death by a thousand tiny textboxes? The classic example of this is phone number, which typically forces you to tab through three annoying little textboxes to enter a single number. Why can’t we let the user enter the number however they like,
minimalism
John Maeda created quite a stir with his montage of the Yahoo and Google homepages from 1996 to 2006 in simple is about staying simple: Although Philipp Lenssen has posted on this topic before (he calls it the portal plague), it’s still striking. Altavista made the same mistake, and
ides
I just installed CodeRush, and now my IDE looks like this: From Mike Gunderloy’s review of Refactor! Pro: Refactor! uses the same drawing technology as CodeRush, making a video game out of your code. When you introduce an overload, for example, you actually see strikethroughs appear on parameters being
programming languages
I have nothing against World of Warcraft, but the Gamasutra editorial World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things highlights one problem I have with the entire MMORPG* genre: [WOW teaches players that] investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill. If you invest more time
user experience
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 of VCR-like functionality,
user experience
Darwinia is the third game I’ve played with mouse gesture support: 1. Bungie’s classic 1998 game Myth used gestures in a limited way to indicate squad facing post-movement. 2. Lionhead’s 2001 game Black and White used gestures to invoke various spells. 3. Introversion Software’s 2005 game
markup languages
Black and white works fine when I’m reading newspapers. But when I’m reading computer languages of any kind – from Perl to SQL, from C# to Regular Expressions, from HTML to XML – I can’t bear to read them in black and white any more. Consider this Infocard XML