Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category
Make Mundane Tasks Fun Online for Conversions
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Quite a while ago 37signals/Basecamp did a survey on their products. Now I normally fill out surveys of products I use because I’d like them to improve in ways I think are good but this survey from 37signals was actually fun to fill out. The Questions While many of the question were totally normal and [...]
Seriously: Just Build Applications and Interfaces that Work
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
The problem So here I sit with a wonderful copy of CS4 running on my machine. I would love to scan something into my lovely version of Photoshop but unfortunately I can’t. Why is it, you ask, that I can’t scan something directly into Photoshop CS4? Well it seems that there is no official TWAIN [...]
Captcha Sucks But I’m Lazy So it’s Your Problem
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
Hidden under the guise of making your life less troublesome by limiting spam on your site lurks a hurdle. It’s a hurdle that brings no end of frustration to users. A stabbing pain in the eye of users and what does it gain us but a few precious seconds of our days. The Issue We’ve [...]
The Long Proposed Death of IE 6
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
The proposed demise of IE 6 rings with the shouts of joy from web developers the world over, but is it truly on the horizon? While sites trying to kill IE 6 extoll all the valid reasons web designers and developers have to want the death; clients sit and look at philosophical arguments and compare [...]
Don’t Get Your Design’s Stuck on Language
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
I’ve been designing lots of e-commerce projects lately and a theme I’ve been finding in the designs is the buttons. Specifically the implication of buttons. We’ve all seen buttons on store that say “Add to Cart” or “Purchase” or whatever but does the simple word convey enough meaning? The Thoughts I am more and more [...]
What Type of Experience Do You Provide
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
The Issue Working in the web industry means there is lots of news to follow. Tons of new developments all over that you are expected to keep track of. If you don’t keep track of the latest developments you can quite quickly find yourself using outdated techniques. I use Google Reader to organize all my [...]
Designing for Small Screens
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Netbooks are becoming very popular today because of the price and the true needs of 90% of the computing population. Most people are just checking their email, getting on Facebook, tweeting a bit and maybe wordprocessing. Most people don’t need anywhere near the horse power provided by fullsize laptops and desktops. Even for myself the [...]
Can We Get by with Web Apps?
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
Web apps have been heralded as the solution to our online and offline lives. We do not have to install software on our machines. Things are backed up online and, in theory, we can edit offline with Google Gears (or other solution). So looking at this promised land I decided to move my blog writing [...]
Bad Forms Provide Bad Feedback
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
Lately I’ve been looking at my site and coming up with a few pain points that I’d like to address with some small redesigns of the site. My footer contact form (and it’s ‘contact page’ counter part) are two items I would like to address. While they aren’t bad they could definitely use some refinement. [...]
Yahoo’s New Homepage and Some Problems
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
The big story today seems to be the roll out of Yahoo’s new homepage. While this is very cool for Yahoo to do I still think that there are some problems with the idea. Is This What People Really Want? I’ve recently read Getting Real and while I do not agree with all of the [...]
