Five Sketches™

My television lets me step through the channels. To do this, I use the remote control’s CH button. Similarly, my television lets me page through the list of programs, five channels at a time. To do this, I use the remote control’s PG button. In fact, it’s one button for the stepping and paging functions.

The programs in […]

During usability testing, I’m always fascinated to see how creatively users misinterpret the team’s design effort. I’ve seen users blame themselves when our design failed, and I’ve seen users yell at the screen because our GUI design was so frustrating.
Wednesday, the tables were turned.
I unintentionally “agreed” to let Facepoke—that social-networking site—invite everyone with whom I’d ever exchanged e-mail. Think about […]

Previously, I wrote about GUI—when to copy it and when to design it. When your competition has something better, I recommended you design, to leapfrog your competitor. Here’s an example of two competing web browsers:

At first glance, the new Internet Explorer 8 address bar looks like a copy of Firefox’s existing awesome bar, but click the image for […]

I’m a big believer in following the standards for GUI and interaction design. But when do you copy or reuse an existing design, and when do you design something new? Here’s my guideline for when to design and when to reuse or copy the GUI and interaction:

Reuse
When…
Design

…there is an external standard.
For example: the Vista UX Guide recommends […]

I have two stories about command buttons.
Quite a few years ago, a team member walked me through a new dialog box. He entered some data, and then unintentionally clicked the Cancel button. He made this error twice in a row, thus losing his changes twice in a row. I pointed out that the OK and Cancel buttons […]

I received an e-mail from someone at the 2008 IA Summit about Jared Spool’s declaration that UCD is dead:
 —  —  — Forwarded message —  —  — 
From: P
Date: Sun 13/04/2008, 2:54 PM
Hi Jerome,
I’m at the iA Summit in Miami right now, and hearing about all of the things that are going on makes me think of you. One of the interesting sessions was Jared Spool’s keynote […]

According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen, the worst mistakes in GUI design are domain-specific. Usually, he says, applications fail because they:

solve the wrong problem.
have the wrong features for the right problem.
make the right features too complicated to understand.

Nielsen’s last point reminds me of what a product manager once told me: many users of highly specialised software […]

This Eric Burke comic is funny because it reflects the way people in the software business feel, at times:

Here are two usability stories that are currently underway.
The first project
This weekend I got a Skype call from a usability consultant at a very large firm that is, in turn, working on a project for a very large insurance company. The usability consultant was just assigned, but the team is nearly finished building an online […]