Easy and Hard
Recently I was asked why I suggested a Cancel button be moved to the right of a Delete button in a dialogue box. The confusion was understandable: in this particular UX, the paradigm had been established that termination actions were on the left, whereas continuation actions were on the right. My response was that, since ...
System Messages Matter
Today I was the first person at work, and upon entering the office I heard the warning beep of our burglar alarm. I panicked for a moment, and then mentally scrambled to remember the code to disarm the system. When I entered what I believed to be the correct code, the system presented me with ...
Follow the User
Are you trying to dictate the path your users will take through your experiences? If so, you might be making the same mistake as the urban planner who designed the right-angle-only pathway in the photo above. As the image shows, people have decided — quite correctly — that they can get from A to B ...
A Better Restaurant Website
If you own a restaurant, chances are your website is frustrating the customers who visit it. Restaurant websites on the whole are so bad that it’s actually become a bit of a joke in the user experience community (you know, those of us who design and build websites for a living). In fact, Matthew Inman over ...
The Extra Step
Remove that extra step. Look for it…find the thing that isn’t necessary…and kill it. If you find more than one, kill ‘em all. Maybe it’s an extra click. Maybe it’s a bit of copy that needs to be read because a UI element isn’t self-explanatory. Maybe you’re loading a new page when you could have used ...
Dummy Data: Don’t Do It
I recently argued that, at times, it’s acceptable to use properly crafted dummy text (aka greek copy, or lorem ipsum) in your designs. However, it’s almost never a good idea to use dummy copy in your actual working site or app. Take the excellent iPhone weather app Shine for example: upon launch, it takes a ...
Fix The Product!
I’m working on yet another project where the hope is that UX and UI will make a suite of incredibly abstruse products comprehensible for the user. I have no doubt we’ll end up improving comprehension of the product lineup through a better, more intuitive user experience. And yet I’m also certain that the client, like ...
Free Wireframe Sketch Template
If you’re like me, you usually start your prototypes or wireframes on paper. However, it can be hassle to sketch out all the browser elements and grid anew for every page in a project. That’s why I created the 970 pixel wireframe sketch template that you can download (PDF) and use for your own work. ...
970 Grid PSD
I’ve been using the 970 pixel grid for a little while now, and I agree with those who argue it has many advantages over the traditional 960 pixel grid. For more information, read this article. To download a layered Photoshop file with grid and measurements that I developed, click here.
MTA: Free UX Advice
Following on yesterday’s rant about the MTA’s abysmal website, I thought it only fair to provide some thoughts about how they could improve their online experience. I only looked at their home page, and I only spent about 30 minutes, but even such a cursory audit reveals a lot of room for improvement. Remember: the ...
404 Greatness
A 404 Error page shouldn’t just let you know something’s gone wrong; it should let you know what your options are as well. This one, from Konigi.com, is quite good.
Fireframes
Over the years, I’ve used many apps for wireframing, from Mockflow to Mockingbird, Dreamweaver to Flairbuilder, Protoshare to Balsamiq, Omnigraffle to Indesign and Illustrator. And, of course, everything still begins (and sometimes ends) on paper. But I’ve yet to give Fireworks a whirl, despite the fact that some UX people rave about its strengths as a ...
Content Strategy
Here is a simple diagram that should help you get started with your content strategy.
A Better Cart
The e-commerce checkout process can be frustrating and confusing: it’s not always clear where you are in the process, how to go back and make a correction, or how much further you’ve go to go until you’re done. Fortunately, a relatively new type of checkout is starting to appear around the Web. It takes the ...
Say No to Itty-Bitty Type
I’m going to design and market eyeglasses that slightly diminish one’s vision. Why, you ask? So I can sell them to Web designers in the hopes that, seeing the world how people over 35 do, they won’t continue to use 10 pixel gray Arial on every site they design.
