Topic Archive: user experience design

Web 2.0 context menus vs. Web 1.0 link lists: Style over usability?

Brian Dillard, Monday, October 20, 2008 @ 1:59 pm

As Ajax spreads new UI conventions to the masses, it's important to apply a critical eye to the usability of those conventions. Several big-name sites have launched extensive redesigns in the last few months, from Twitter and FriendFeed to Flickr and Facebook. Certain trends are solidifying, especially the use of context menus that are hidden until a user mouses over an item, then displayed as a series of icons, text or both.

First up we have Flickr, whose homepage redesign emphasizes the social networking aspects of the service. A Recent Activity feed, modeled on Facebook's iconic News Feed, showcases favorites and comments from your contacts. The default view for each item displays its age. When the user hovers, though, the same real estate becomes home to two icons. One allows you to add your own comment; the other "mutes" activity related to that photo and removes it from your feed. Neither option is represented by an industry-standard icon, and no tooltip is provided. Even the status bar shows only an inscrutable URL: a hash sign.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (1)

agile ajax

Four blatant iPhone usability blunders (and one constant annoyance)

Brian Dillard, Thursday, September 4, 2008 @ 12:14 pm

I've been an iPhone 3G owner for about six weeks now - six weeks of love, loathing, cool apps and connectivity problems. Rather than complain about poor network coverage, though, I'd like to delve into some of the vexing usability problems that hamper the phone's user experience.

No ability to disable autocorrect completely

Like pretty much every autocorrect feature ever built, the iPhone's does more harm than good. It always thinks it knows best. If you don't watch it like a hawk, it will render everything you type completely nonsensical. Proper nouns, abbreviations, profanity - all get turned into gibberish by this well-meaning but deeply flawed function. And god forbid you try to use the classic email e.e. cummings mode in which uppercase letters don't exist. The iPhone literally will not let you output the word "iPhone" without throwing in that capital "P." It's maddening.

If the purpose of autocorrect is to allow you to type quickly without having to monitor your output, it fails miserably. On the iPhone, if you want what you type to show up verbatim on the screen, you have to pause at the end of each word to ensure that the OS is not about to substitute its own wisdom for your actual intent. I would honestly rather type on a 1999-era StarTAC numeric keypad.

None of this would be as galling if there were a setting to turn this feature off. But there isn't. Elaborate, unwieldy workarounds have been suggested - all because Apple users know that the folks in Cupertino often paternalistically ignore their users. Microsoft's OS and apps may suck, but you can usually customize the hell out of them. Not so Apple's.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (7)

agile ajax

“Ajax overhaul, Part 4: Retrofit existing sites with jQuery and Ajax forms” now live at IBM developerWorks

Brian Dillard, Monday, August 4, 2008 @ 1:16 pm

Last week, IBM developerWorks published the fourth installment in my jQuery/UxD tutorial series. Ajax overhaul, Part 4: Retrofit existing sites with jQuery and Ajax forms shows how to turn a multi-page checkout process into a single-screen interface using two jQuery plugins: jQuery Form and jQuery UI Tabs. As with previous installments, I tried to show not only how to use open-source JavaScript libraries, but why. Ajax integrates into existing webapps best when it's used to improve their user experience design rather than just thrown in for its own sake. In the example application I constructed for this series, Ajax was used to simplify the shopping process rather than complicate it needlessly. As always, I focused on progressive enhancement so that the overhauled interface didn't leave any users behind. This is the final installment of this series, at least for now. I hope to publish on additional topics at developerWorks soon.

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

agile ajax

Google Calendar: Finally, a search box that makes sense

Brian Dillard, Monday, July 28, 2008 @ 4:31 pm

I've been complaining for months about a usability problem with Google Calendar's default search behavior, so I figure I should document that it's finally been fixed. Ever since gCal introduced the concept of public calendars, hitting "enter" in the global search box has kicked off a trawl through the public-calendar database. Instead of searching MY OWN calendar for, say, my Aunt Donna's birthday, gCal instead searches public calendars of, like, sports schedules and Kazakhstanian bank holidays. Smart.

Now, though, that behavior seems to have been flipped. "Search My Calendars" is now the default action, while "Search Public Calendars" has become the secondary action. Bravo!

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (2)

agile ajax

Fresh paint or new drywall? The cost of changing IA or design mid-project

Brian Dillard, Monday, June 16, 2008 @ 4:53 pm

We software engineers - and our clients - tend to think of visual design as a coat of paint. The arrangement of elements on a screen seems like a purely decorative concern, something that can be applied to the bare walls of an otherwise functional application at the very end of the development process. Anybody who's ever spent much time coding at the view layer knows differently. If effective visual design planning doesn't occur early in a project, there's often a hidden cost. Reskinning an application is more like installing new drywall than applying fresh paint.

The PR wizards who launched the web standards movement have propagated the idea that if you just mark up your content and code semantically, then it's a trivial concern to alter its appearance. This is true up to a point, but most sites have a large number of person-hours invested in their stylesheets, images and other purely "decorative" assets. Because browser vendors haven't consistently implemented existing web standards, even the most well-meaning programmers must litter their code with hacks, filters and nested containers to achieve visual fidelity. The hooks for achieving a given look-and-feel often penetrate deep into the view-layer code. Altering that look-and-feel often requires changes to those hooks, which adds risk to a project and almost always breaks lots of tests.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

agile ajax