Simon Willison’s Weblog

How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland? (via) Anna Andersen writes about a spectacular user interface design case-study from this year's Icelandic presidential election.

Running for President requires 1,500 endorsements. This year, those endorsements can be filed online through a government website.

The page for collecting endorsements originally had two sections - one for registering to collect endorsements, and another to submit your endorsement. The login link for the first came higher on the page, and at least 11 people ended up accidentally running for President! # 29th April 2024, 3:31 pm

The Articulation Barrier: Prompt-Driven AI UX Hurts Usability. Jakob Nielsen: “Generative AI systems like ChatGPT use prose prompts for intent-based outcomes, requiring users to be articulate in writing prose, which is a challenge for half of the population in rich countries.” # 27th January 2024, 3:49 pm

The Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design (via) By HCI researcher Ben Shneiderman. I particularly like number 4, “Design dialogs to yield closure”, which encourages feedback at the completion of a group of actions that “gives users the satisfaction of accomplishment, a sense of relief.” # 9th January 2024, 9:37 pm

The 6 Types of Conversations with Generative AI. I’ve hoping to see more user research on how users interact with LLMs for a while. Here’s a study from Nielsen Norman Group, who conducted a 2-week diary study involving 18 participants, then interviewed 14 of them.

They identified six categories of conversation, and made some resulting design recommendations.

A key observation is that “search style” queries (just a few keywords) often indicate users who are new to LLMs, and should be identified as a sign that the user needs more inline education on how to best harness the tool.

Suggested follow-up prompts are valuable for most of the types of conversation identified. # 23rd November 2023, 5:37 pm

My User Experience Porting Off setup.py (via) PyOxidizer maintainer Gregory Szorc provides a detailed account of his experience trying to figure out how to switch from setup.py to pyproject.toml for his zstandard Python package.

This kind of detailed usability feedback is incredibly valuable for project maintainers, especially when the user encountered this many different frustrations along the way. It’s like the written version of a detailed usability testing session. # 31st October 2023, 7:57 pm

The Magic Interview Question (via) Jeff Gothelf explains why “Tell me about the last time you [did something]” is the most valuable question you can ask when interviewing a user or potential user. # 28th June 2022, 2:26 pm

Command Line Interface Guidelines (via) Aanand Prasad, Ben Firshman, Carl Tashian and Eva Parish provide the missing manual for designing CLI tools in 2020. Deeply researched and clearly presented—I picked up a bunch of useful tips and ideas from reading this, and I’m looking forward to applying them to my own CLI projects. # 4th December 2020, 8:44 pm

The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (via) Research from 2016: “Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks” # 23rd September 2019, 2:49 pm

Instapaper requiring email and passwords for new accounts. Instapaper are changing from their novel “enter a username or email address, only enter a password if you really want one” registration scheme to a more traditional email and password required model. Messing with registration forms is a risky business—in this case, the non-obvious support issues that resulted were a net negative. # 15th December 2010, 8:35 pm

Dark Patterns: Forced Continuity example, Audible.com. Dark Patterns are user interfaces that are designed to trick people. I just submitted Audible.com for their habit of signing up users for a $7.49 “gold membership” without making it clear on the checkout screens that this is a recurring monthly charge, not a one-off payment. # 12th October 2010, 10:55 am

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

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

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

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