user experience
Despite Apple’s historical insistence that the computer mouse should only have one button – which led to the highly unfortunate convention of double-clicking – most mice have more than one button today. In his classic book The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin revisits the earliest days of his involvement with the Mac
software development concepts
I have tremendous respect for Paul Graham. His essays – repackaged in the book Hackers and Painters – are among the best writing I’ve found on software engineering. Not all of them are so great, of course, but the majority are well worth your time. That’s more than I can
programming languages
The Choose Your Own Adventure book series was one of my favorites as a young reader. The Choose Your Own adventure books are still around; modern versions can be found at your local bookstore. I bought one today at a local Barnes & Noble to refresh my memory, and although
user experience
I miss Kathy Sierra. Kathy was the primary author of the Creating Passionate Users blog, which she started in December 2004. Her writing was of sufficient quality to propel her blog into the Technorati top 100 within a year and a half. That’s almost unheard of, particularly for a
software development
Ted Dennison left this astute comment in response to Do Not Listen to Your Users: Generally when I go talk to users, it is to educate myself enough to become a user like them. Then I can see what needs doing, what needs streamlining, reorganizing, rearranging, etc. This brought to
user experience
The original Tivo was one of the finest out of box experiences I’ve ever had as a consumer. I remember how exciting it was to tell friends about our newfound ability to pause live television, and how liberating it felt to be freed from the tyranny of television schedules.
user experience
We programmers are obsessive by nature. But I often get frustrated with the depth of our obsession over things like code coverage. Unit testing and code coverage are good things. But perfectly executed code coverage doesn’t mean users will use your program. Or that it’s even worth using
accessibility
In Where the Heck is My Focus, I wondered why web developers don’t pay attention to basic keyboard accessibility issues. I don’t want to navigate the entire web with my keyboard. That’s unrealistic. I was specifically referring to login pages, which tend to be quite spartan and
security
As far back as I can remember – which admittedly isn’t very far – GUI toolkits have included a special type of text entry field for passwords. As you type, the password field displays a generic character, usually a dot or asterisk, instead of the character you actually typed. I’ve
keyboard accessibility
The web is quite mouse-centric. Ever tried navigating a typical website without your mouse? I’m not saying it can’t be done – if you’re sufficiently motivated, you can indeed navigate the web using nothing but your keyboard – but it’s painful. There’s nothing wrong with the point-and-click
user experience
Heidi Adkisson notes that features sell products, but the people buying those products often don’t use the very features they bought the product for in the first place. A few years ago I did an extensive in-home study observing use of a particular computer hardware peripheral. Most people had
operating systems
Over time, I’ve become something of a desktop minimalist. Sure, I’ll change a few settings to my liking, but I no longer spend a lot of time customizing my desktop configuration. I’ve learned that if the defaults aren’t reasonably close to correct out of the box,