Tell Me How
I’ve noticed a little problem from time to time in various applications. Just recently I’ve had issues with my Internet connection and Firefox decided to automatically switch to offline browsing mode. I’ve never actually used the offline browsing mode before on Firefox so when I tried to visit an address on my local development machine I was greeted with the following error message:
An offline mode notice — looks clear enough. Now, I was just trying to access a local address so I knew the page should have worked — but that’s not the problem. The issue here is that while the message is clear and tells me that to proceed I need to put the browser into online mode, it doesn’t tell me how.
8 Characteristics Of Successful User Interfaces
There is a lot of information out there about various interface design techniques and patterns you can use when crafting your user interfaces and websites, solutions to common problems and general usability recommendations. Following guidelines from experts will likely lead you towards creating a good user interface — but what exactly is a good interface? What are the characteristics of an effective user interface?
Here are 8 things I consider a good user interface needs to be:
Lets take a closer look at each.
1. Clear
Clarity is the most important element of user interface design. Indeed, the whole purpose of user interface design is to enable people to interact with your system by communicating meaning and function. If people can’t figure out how your application works or where to go on your website they’ll get confused and frustrated.
What does that do? Hover over buttons in WordPress and a tooltip will pop up explaining their functions.
Safari 4 Beta Review
Safari 4 beta has been public for just over a month, and now that I’ve had the chance to try it out for some time I’m going to share few thoughts on the things I like/dislike about it, and whether I think it’s better than Firefox. Note: my choice of OS is OS X on the Mac, so the following is a review of Safari on that platform.
The tabs
There’s been a lot of talk about the new tabs in Safari 4. The new tabs have moved to the top of the browser, taking place where the title bar would have been (the title bar being no more). Here’s what they look like:
Good, Better, Best
I’ve noticed an interesting choice of words used in Apple’s Pages application when exporting a document as a PDF. Here’s what the dialog looks like:
When selecting the image quality you are presented with three choices: Good, Better and Best. I really like how there’s no “Draft” or “Quick” or “Basic” there — it starts with “Good” and goes up from there. This is a subtle way of telling the user that this software doesn’t produce bad or rough stuff, only good stuff.
Of course the first setting is going to produce the worst results, but by choosing the right words you can keep a feeling of high quality no matter what the user chooses.
Logospire v2
A couple of months ago I launched a logo gallery project called Logospire. It’s been fairly successful so far and today has around 650 logos hosted on it. The feature that sets Logospire apart from other logo galleries is that you can submit a logo and have it displayed instantly on the gallery — all the moderation is done through user voting. Naturally, this attracts all sorts of logos, with quality levels that vary from great to not so great. I think it has worked ok so far, with better logos rising to the top and making the “Popular” section of the gallery worthwhile to browse.
Userfly Review
Userfly, a startup that launched about 3 months ago, is a new way to study user behavior on your site. The service lets you record your site’s users’ actions and then play them back in your own browser. You are able to see exactly what people are doing, which includes mouse clicks, keystrokes (except for those in password fields for obvious security reasons), page scrolling and navigation across multiple pages. Everything happens as if you’re browsing the site yourself, except the actions you see follow another user’s recorded session.
Quince: A User Interface Patterns Explorer
Earlier this month I’ve received news of a new UI patterns library called Quince, which is a tool that I think you may find useful. The app is basically an organized collection of various interface patterns. Each pattern is part of a ‘problem’, and several examples are usually provided as viable solutions. Each of these problems is also accompanied by a bit of text describing the solutions and providing tips on things like accessibility.
IconDock — A Simpler Shopping Cart
Here’s what the shopping cart of IconDock looks like:
How does it work? Just pick up an item by clicking on it, drag it into the little shopping cart “dock” on the left, and release. That’s it — a drag and drop shopping cart. Of course you can still click the “Add to Cart” button if this doesn’t work for you, but I think this is a very clever way of re-implementing the the tired old shopping cart. Thanks to Dustin for sharing this.
Wrap Your Presents Well
Michael Lopp, a senior engineering manager at Apple, has told the audience at a recent SXSW presentation that Apple’s strategy is to deliver a series of presents to consumers: “really good ideas wrapped up in other really good ideas”. Nice software wrapped in beautiful hardware wrapped in great packaging.
I think this approach can be seen a lot more in the Mac world than the PC, and that’s probably because of Apple taking the lead. If you own a Mac you’ll know that all the applications come with a beautiful icon (in a huge 512×512 resolution now on OS X Leopard) — and not just Apple’s ones; most developers seem to strive to achieve the same level of quality for their offerings too, wanting to ensure their icon is worthy of a place in the user’s Dock (a bar of icons used for launching and managing apps).
Zoomable User Interfaces
Imagine for a moment how you would work on a real desk. Perhaps you want to proofread one document, make a couple of notes somewhere else, and fill out a form as well. Sure, most of us don’t touch a lot of paper these days, but think about those situations when we do. You can place documents on your desk wherever you want, provided your desk is sufficiently large. You have your tools, like the pen and pencil, nearby as well. The only limit to how much stuff you can put on your desk at the same time is the surface area of the desk.
If we then examine how a computer desktop behaves, we’ll see some differences. One big one is that the area provided by the computer monitor is much smaller than that of a desk. What this means is that we can’t spread out all our documents over it without overlapping — we have to put them one over the other because there just isn’t enough space. This is even more problematic considering the computer gives not only a greater access to all our documents, but also an easier way to access them, leading to a need for virtual desktop real estate.