user experience
One thing I dislike about classic WIMP GUI applications is the way they typically present you with a blank page at startup. Here’s what Word 2003 looks like just after I launch it: This leads to Blank Page Syndrome: when presented with infinite choice, it’s sometimes hard to
user experience
This OS X versus Windows XP site contains an exhaustive, extensively illustrated 100-topic comparison of these two operating systems. The author tries to be objective, which is admirable, but the extremely detailed comparison is worth reading mostly because it highlights a lot of subtle design differences. For example, this little
customization
In The Problem with Configurability, I noted the tenuous balance between the opposing goals of customization and convention. Kam VedBrat, one of the Microsoft Windows UI designers for Vista, riffs on a similar theme. Why isn’t Windows Vista completely skinnable out of the box? There is also the issue
windows
We’re in the middle of an after-hours MAME arcade project at work.* As one of the final fit and finish steps, I did a bit of research on how to replace the default Windows XP boot screen with something a little more arcade-y. I came up with StarDock’s
naming conventions
Jason Kemp notes that Microsoft's choice of product names can have some unintended consequences: I don't know yet how I feel about the name Windows Vista, but it at least has some character to it. But Windows Presentation Foundation? Windows Communication Framework? Who wants to use
user experience
One of the biggest highlights of PDC 2005 was the first day keynote, when the Office 12 UI was unveiled. I don’t know if people realized the significance of what we saw at the time – but we had just witnessed the death of the main menu. There’s no
software development concepts
During the fantastic Monad session at PDC 2005,* Jeffrey Snover and Jim Truher illustrated the tradeoff between verbosity and conciseness: cp c:apples c:oranges -fo -r copy-item c:apples c:oranges -force -recurse Monad has a ton of aliases for common commands (e.g., echo is the same as
windows
1. If you’re lazy: 2. If you’re a contortionist: Shift + Ctrl + Esc 3. If you love modal dialogs: Ctrl + Alt + Del, then click or press the T key. 4. If you’re a ninja keyboard user: + R, taskman, Enter
configurability
I’ve recently been experimenting with a few hand-picked desktop utilities, but I am rapidly reaching the point of diminishing returns: the effort required to run and maintain all these utilities is greater than the productivity benefit. Furthermore, if I learn to rely on a highly custom desktop, I’ve
usability
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 the most
user experience
Shawn Burke’s post Shippin’ Ain’t Easy (but somebody gotta do it) explains why you have to resist change at the end of a project, no matter how justifiable and rational the reasons may be. Even the smallest change has a real risk of introducing additional bugs. The first
security
In an era of instant online worldwide connectivity, protecting users from themselves is a lot harder than it used to be. For one thing, full trust can’t be trusted. And then there are all those dancing bunnies to contend with: What’s the dancing bunnies problem? It’s a