Simon Willison’s Weblog

A bad survey won’t tell you it’s bad. It’s actually really hard to find out that a bad survey is bad — or to tell whether you have written a good or bad set of questions. Bad code will have bugs. A bad interface design will fail a usability test. It’s possible to tell whether you are having a bad user interview right away. Feedback from a bad survey can only come in the form of a second source of information contradicting your analysis of the survey results.

Most seductively, surveys yield responses that are easy to count and counting things feels so certain and objective and truthful.

Even if you are counting lies.

— Erika Hall # 24th April 2024, 12:31 am

The language issues are indicative of the bigger problem facing the AI Pin, ChatGPT, and frankly, every other AI product out there: you can’t see how it works, so it’s impossible to figure out how to use it. [...] our phones are constant feedback machines — colored buttons telling us what to tap, instant activity every time we touch or pinch or scroll. You can see your options and what happens when you pick one. With AI, you don’t get any of that. Using the AI Pin feels like wishing on a star: you just close your eyes and hope for the best. Most of the time, nothing happens.

— David Pierce # 12th April 2024, 12:39 pm

If you have had any prior experience with personal computers, what you might expect to see is some sort of opaque code, called a “prompt,” consisting of phosphorescent green or white letters on a murky background. What you see with Macintosh is the Finder. On a pleasant, light background (you can later change the background to any of a number of patterns, if you like), little pictures called “icons” appear, representing choices available to you.

— Steven Levy (in 1984) # 27th January 2024, 1:33 am

Discoverable CLIs have comprehensive help texts, provide lots of examples, suggest what command to run next, suggest what to do when there is an error. There are lots of ideas that can be stolen from GUIs to make CLIs easier to learn and use, even for power users.

— Command Line Interface Guidelines # 4th December 2020, 8:48 pm

... 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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