“You mean you can't take less; it's very easy to take more than nothing.”
There have been a lot of UI innovations since HTML forms, some of them big and some of them small. One of the smaller innovations is the addition of hints to text fields. These are basically placeholder text in the fields that describe the sort of input that should go in them that disappear when [...]
An article on A List Apart recently talked about an experiment into the effectiveness of Zebra Striping. It's an interesting study with interesting comments, finding no real evidence that zebra striping has any effect on accuracy and speed. One of the interesting things to come out of it was the number of people who used [...]
It’s been a while since I’ve been frustrated by peoples ignorance of the UI changes in Office 2007, but a recent post by Mary Jo Foley about what people would like to see change in the next version of Windows seemed quickly to degrade into what was good or bad about Office 2007. The arguments [...]
It's always interesting to look at the way in which people overcome the problem of navigating the web. The problem being that nowadays content is full of sidelines and links. As you're reading your favourite blog (mine, surely ) they might link to another post, such as this one about The Problem With Tabbed Interfaces. [...]
Humanized have come out with another pretty good product, Songza. I won't use this post to review it in full, but as a summary it is a web-app to find and listen to music. It seems to have a minimalistic design philosophy – that is to say it aims to do only a small number [...]
I was discussing UI with a friend recently (as we often do) and he mentioned his dislike of greyed out disabled buttons. Upon further query it was revealed that he once discovered that the save button was disabled and he didn't know why. This is obviously a very distressing thing – save is core to [...]
We’re going to start this post with a little quiz. Who can tell me what clicking the following button does? I’ll make it easier for you. It’s either a) It turns alerts on, or b) It turns alerts off. But which you can’t quite be sure. The problem is that sometimes people use the button [...]
The guys over at Humanized have been writing a series of posts at the moment about their reasoning behind writing Enso. Their latest post details how command lines have a lot of advantages over gui's. But one thing they didn't mention that I find a great advantage of command line interfaces over gui's is the [...]
Amir over at amix has released a new task management site called Todoist. It’s not without it’s quirks, but it is quite usable. Very usable in fact. The emphasis is on a clean, easy to use but feature full interface. It uses a lot of AJAX to make it all shiny and Web 2.0, much [...]
Regular readers will know of my love for my Firefox profile – the plugins and the streamline interface. I find it very productive. Yet for a long while I've struggled with it from a philosophical perspective. Ever since I read The Humane Interface I've subscribed to the theory that an interface should be done properly, [...]