OpenID50 items tagged “usability”
Comet (long polling) for all browsers using ScriptCommunicator. More Comet from the Plurk team: 80 lines of dependency free JavaScript implementing long polling using script tags (hence working cross-domain) across IE6+, Firefox, WebKit and Opera. The clever bit is the code to detect loading errors. It doesn’t try to fix the infinite loading indicator problem—is that still a cromulent usability concern? 
3rd February 2010, 12:37 am
The making of the NYT’s Netflix graphic. A database dump from Netflix, some clever hackery in ArcView GIS, hpricot to scrape Metacritic and a lot of careful thought about the UI for navigating the data. 25th January 2010, 1:11 pm
Fixing the Google Account problem. 3,000+ words explaining how to open a Google Doc invitation sent to an e-mail address that isn’t associated with your Google account. Worth reading just to get an idea for the enormous complexity involved in running a large scale identity system and designing an interface for managing aliases and multiple profiles. Google haven’t got it right yet—has anyone else? 
25th January 2010, 11:21 am
A piece with a lot of screenshots about the close tab behaviour in Google Chrome. If you click “close” with your mouse, Chrome doesn’t resize the remaining tabs until you mouse away from the area. This means you can click “close” multiple times without having to chase the close button. I hadn’t noticed this, partly because Chrome doesn’t do it if you hit Command-W. They even switch the position of the close button in RTL languages such as Arabic. 
11th December 2009, 9:19 am
Correct way to handle mobile browsers. If your site has an equivalent “mobile” version running on a different subdomain, how and when should you redirect mobile users to it and how should you let them opt in or opt out? 10th November 2009, 8:57 am
breaking links. Mike complains about sites such as Twitter and WordPress.com which mess around with Ajax and links and hence breaks the ability to command-click to open a new tab in Safari (and Chrome). I just realised that I’ve subconsciously retrained myself to right click and select “open in new tab” to avoid that exact issue. 
8th October 2009, 8:26 am
Collection: Search Patterns. Peter Morville’s enormous collection of screenshots of search engine interfaces. 30th July 2009, 12:35 pm
Solved: where the civil servant really wrote that message to Hazel Blears. There’s an interesting usability / understanding-of-technology story here. 7th July 2009, 5:41 pm
Google asked people in Times Square:“What is a browser?”. Stuff like this makes me despair for creating a secure web—what chance do people have of surfing safely if they don’t understand browsers, web sites, operating systems, DNS, URLs, SSL, certificates... 20th June 2009, 1:25 am
... Facebook will be hosting the second User Experience Summit for OpenID on February 10th. The goal is to convene some of the best designers that leading internet companies can muster, and bring them together to develop a series of guidelines, best practices, iterations, and interfaces for making OpenID not just suck less, but become a great experience
— Chris Messina 6th February 2009, 12:19 am
Adobe: Akamai Download Manager FAQ. Tip for Adobe: if the bizarre, buggy custom Java applet you force people to use to download your software requires an FAQ this long, maybe you should provide a “just do it the way everyone else does” option. 16th December 2008, 10:13 am
Showers and UI design. UI issues aside, why is it so hard to build a shower where the settings for freezing cold and scaldingly hot are more than a couple of millimeters apart? 14th December 2008, 8:21 am
Facebook’s new signup process. It looks like they’ve dropped the “enter your password twice” pattern. Is this really a good idea? I suppose if people mis-type it they can always use forgotten password to set a new one. 
12th December 2008, 11:43 am
I’ll put forth one central, overriding guideline for iPhone UI design: Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.
— John Gruber 4th November 2008, 12:02 am
Yahoo! Releases OpenID Research. Extremely valuable research, conducted with a group of typical Yahoo! users. OpenIDs usability remains bad, and if we don’t get it right soon something centralised like Facebook Connect will take over and the Web will stop being open. 
14th October 2008, 4:59 pm
Google’s Usability Research on Federated Login. Fascinating—suggests an approach to federated auth based on the Amazon.com “Yes, I have a password” login flow. Feels convoluted to me but apparently it tests really well against a mainstream audience. The more research shared around this stuff the better. 
22nd September 2008, 8:56 pm
Google Chrome, the comic book (via) Google have finally announced a browser project, though it’s currently vapourware (or rather comicware), existing only as a Scott McCloud comic. Still, it looks fascinating—entirely open source, WebKit with a brand new JavaScript VM, every tab running in a separate process for smarter memory usage and some new UI concepts and anti-pishing measures thrown in as well. 
1st September 2008, 7:45 pm
Reviews of the Pownce app on the iPhone app store on Flickr. I had to stitch together a screenshot because you can’t actually link to content in the App Store (unless you don’t care that people without iTunes won’t be able to follow your link). Three out of the four reviews complain about the OAuth browser authentication step, which is frustrating because Pownce have implemented it so well. 12th August 2008, 11:05 am
Download size has been an issue in the past. [...] In the early days Macromedia did studies adding null kilobytes to Player downloads and measuring the dropoff rate in completed installations. The more time people have to hit that “Cancel Download” button, the more will do so.
— John Dowdell 8th August 2008, 3:51 pm
Silverback has launched! Clearleft’s “guerilla usability” software for OS X Tiger and Leopard—specialist screencasting software optimised for conducting usability tests. 24th July 2008, 6:14 pm
The Truth about Web Navigation. Jeremy Zawodny on regular users understanding the browser address bar: “They don’t. And they never will.” Then they’re going to get phished, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do to help them. 19th July 2008, 11:42 pm
He/She/They: Grammar and Facebook. Facebook are going to start requiring gender information because foreign language translations wind up being too confusing when that information is not available. Aside: I wish they’d implement proper title elements on their blog posts. 27th June 2008, 9:06 am
Clickpass. Peter Nixey’s new OpenID startup has finally launched—does a great job of making OpenID more approachable with a clean, well designed UI and a neat orange button. 
11th March 2008, 4:47 pm
On the design of the first-run assistant. NetNewsWire’s Brent Simmons explains the in-depth thinking behind the new first-run assistant. 29th January 2008, 12:16 pm
Usability Disaster Story. A strange combination of usability oddities culminated in 95% of visitors to the Mono website downloading a two year old version by mistake. 25th January 2008, 6:36 am
8 More Design Mistakes with Account Sign-in (via) Second of a two part series by Jared Spool. I agree with all of them with the possible exception of #15 which advocates providing a non-email password recovery solution. Security “questions” are usually dreadfully insecure, and introduce the need to lock users out of their accounts after just a few tries. 17th January 2008, 4:35 pm
Poorly Macbook, ineffective error message design. Nat’s MacBook died the other day, throwing out some impressively meaningless error symbols. How exactly are you meant to Google for a circle with a line through it? 13th January 2008, 11:31 pm
OpenID and Google’s Blogger. Blogger gets it wrong by displaying a nickname derived from the OpenID URL (in Malcolm’s case, “blog”) instead of the user entered nickname. 30th December 2007, 10:35 am
But here’s the thing: Regular people on the web *love* Snap previews. I know you don’t believe it—I didn’t want to believe it. But it’s completely true. In the testing and feedback I’ve seen, it’s some emotional pull about the fact that links “do something” now, instead of just being on the page.
— Anil Dash 2nd November 2007, 6:49 am
If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software. Interesting discussion about why enterprise software tends to completely suck from an end-user point of view. 22nd October 2007, 1:51 pm
Radiohead Album Available for Free, But Fileshared Anyway. “Why are some people getting In Rainbows from P2P rather than the band’s site? Probably because they find P2P easier to use.” 18th October 2007, 5:39 pm
The arc of TF2 is something that’s probably familiar to a lot of amateur developers or designers. When we got here the first thing we built was overly complex, very hard core, almost impenetrable to anyone who wasn’t familiar with FPSs in general. And as we found as we played it, wasn’t more fun because of it.
— Robin Walker 6th October 2007, 12:04 am
Amazon makes you lie to log off (via) Amazingly, the only way to sign out of Amazon these days is to use the “If you’re not XXX, click here” link—the traditional “sign out” link has quietly vanished. 2nd October 2007, 1:19 pm
Halo 3 Site Demonstrates Flaws in SilverLight. The Halo 3 “interactive manual” is like a throwback to Flash in the late 90s—“skip intro”, pointless transitions, text you can’t select or enlarge, links that aren’t links—all wrapped up in an ugly blob (only this time it’s XML instead of binary data). 27th September 2007, 2:38 pm
Jottit. Aaron Swartz’s latest venture: a complete rethink of the Infogami concept. Well worth checking out for the extremely thoughtful way it introduces features, and the way account creation with a password remains optional until you want to add access control. 16th September 2007, 9:43 pm
I’ve actually been using the latest version of JAWS recently, as part of my work on HTML5. From a usability point of view it is possibly the worst software I have ever used. I’m still horrified at how bad the accessibility situation is. All this time I’ve been hearing people worried about whether or not Web pages have longdesc attributes specified or whatnot, when in fact the biggest problems facing blind users are so much more fundamental as to make image-related issues seem almost trivial in comparison.
— Ian Hickson 4th September 2007, 12:27 pm
Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms. Fascinating results from an eye tracking study on the placement of “Submit” and “Cancel” buttons—one layout was a whole six seconds slower than the others. Luke Wroblewski’s “Web Form Design Best Practices” book looks like it will be excellent. 4th September 2007, 2:52 am
In 1997, I chose to suppress a similar finding: users tend to click on banner ads that look like dialog boxes, complete with fake OK and Cancel buttons.
— Jakob Nielsen 21st August 2007, 6:34 pm
OpenID: Great idea, bewildering consumer experience. Realistic, detailed look at the many usability problems that currently surround OpenID—and a good list of suggested fixes at the end. This is why I’ve been advocating OpenID as a tool for early adopters: they can help smooth out the experience for everyone else. 17th August 2007, 10:07 am
Dynamic Help in Web Forms. Luke Wroblewski catalogues patterns for providing contextual help. 7th August 2007, 4:01 pm
E-Trade financial tried using a RSA fob as a second factor of authentication, but as of their 11/07/06 financial report their fraud losses continue to increase. That said, they considered this program a success because users indicated they feel safer and are more likely to provide assets.
— Usable Security 20th July 2007, 10:31 am
Never use a warning when you mean undo. The abundance of “undo” is one of my favourite things about Gmail. I wonder if there’s anything Django could do to make implementing undo functionality easier... 
17th July 2007, 11 am
On any given Web page, users will either click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal, or click the Back button on their Web browser.
— Mark Hurst 7th March 2007, 1:58 pm
You need to lay out the user interface components visually, by hand, with total control over where they go. Automated LayoutManagers don’t cut it. A corollary of this is that you can’t move a UI layout from one platform to another and have the computer make everything fit. Computers don’t lay out interfaces by themselves any better than they can translate French to English by themselves.
— Jens Alfke 22nd January 2007, 9:41 pm
In Which I Think About Java Again, But Only For A Moment. Convincing argument as to why desktop applications written in Java rarely have decent user interfaces. 22nd January 2007, 9:39 pm
The way you make users understand your program model is with metaphors. When you make things look, feel, and most importantly, behave like things in the real world, users are more likely to figure out how to use the program, and the app will be easier to use. When you try to combine two very dramatically different real-world items (email and appointments) into the same kind of thing in the user interface, usability suffers because there’s no longer a real-world metaphor that applies.
— Joel Spolsky 22nd January 2007, 9:26 pm
Fast and Simple Usability Testing. Nat’s 24ways article on practical usability testing (and hedgehogs). 16th December 2006, 12:20 am
EasyEclipse
Back in November of 2004 I posted a rant about how difficult it was to download and install the Eclipse IDE from the official site. I’m delighted to hear that my rant was partially responsible for the creation of the EasyEclipse project, which not only provides easily installable packages for setting up a Java development environment but also covers LAMP development as well. [... 140 words]
Usable Security: Look Beyond the “Fundamental Conflict”. Security and usability are not conflicting goals. 18th March 2005, 2:27 am
User Education Is Not the Answer to Security Problems. Smart thinking on security from Jakob Nielsen. 1st November 2004, 1:22 pm
