Tag Info

Plenty of good arguments and research here: Myth #25: Aesthetics are not important if you have good usability My favorite quote from this article: «A study on the role of aesthetics concludes that, though attractive things may not score higher in performance, people perceive attractive things as more usable»

There is research, but not much on specific aesthetic quibbles. Evidence does suggests that aesthetics are relevant - that users will perceive similar interfaces with differing visual designs differently. However, I've never read a paper that identifies which kinds of visual degradation are most harmful. On the importance of aesthetics, some papers to read ...

The UI should show what' important and what is optional. I would make the 3 optional fields as small links that open a dialog for each. Once the user pics his prefrences - the dialog closes and returns to be a link. Obviously - that all depends on the quality and quantity of search results in the discussed system. See this UI demo:

Relearning a process or how to do it has a cost to the person doing the relearning. So it comes down to a perceived cost benefit analysis. The perceived benefit in present value needs to exceed the perceived cost. As an example, I recently learnt a new keyboard layout (Colemak). It was a huge pain to give up my Qwerty typing speed to learn, but I did it ...

This University of Melbourne study found a correlation between "attractive" design and trust. They found that users are starting to interact with websites in much the same way that they interact with people, and that predictable biases start to emerge. What they also found was that while a user might trust a website more if it is attractive, this does not ...

To begin with, you can bring the left column of checkboxes closer to the one on the right, freeing up some room on the left to fit the labels in a single line each. You can also get rid of the parentheses, like this:

I'm thinking something along the lines of this: Having the query term in a text box and the category and location in selective drop boxes, with All Categories and All Locations being displayed initially. Displaying the distance interactive component I didn't really get any good idea, having it incremental would probably be best though with increment and ...

A few things. Labels should not be centered, it's awful for eye movement and legibility. I would favor the ease of the user experience over the conservation of html elements here, even if the form has to be longer. Also, the eye movements necessary to navigate this form are crazy. By having two columns with a label on top of each, the user has to ...

There are many factors that contribute to a design, and a finished design is as much a product of its constraints as the designer's aesthetic judgement. The first iPhone was thicker and larger than the current one because the technology demanded it. By rounding the edges they were able to reduce the feeling of size without necessarily reducing the size ...

While JohnGB's "The perceived benefit in present value needs to exceed the perceived cost" generally holds true, sometimes the rule needs to be broken because users won't immediately recognize the value of an innovation. For example, when Twitter started I didn't appreciate the 140 character limit (to me, at first, the cost in UX seemed to greatly outweigh ...

Aesthetics aside (as what is and is not aesthetic is out of the ambit of this site), what is most important is that you communicate to your users what the problem is. However don't communicate something that you aren't sure is true. So saying "There is a problem with XYZ servers, please try again later" is not good unless you can tell that it is definitely ...

Another thing to consider, in addition to the cost of some people having to adapt to a new system, is the ongoing cost of all new users having to learn and use the more ineffective process. You might damage the experience of current users, but make it massively more attractive to all the future users encountering the system. To be extreme about it: Even if ...

Convention beats innovation most often. Time of day is an example. Why don't we just go 11am 12 13 14 15? For that matter, why do we use 60 seconds, 60 minutes, and 24 hours? We could have 100 Danielseconds, 100 Danielminutes, and 10 Danielhours. Convention rules. Good design is using constraints. Make car doors so they can only be locked from the outside. ...

There are times when you just need to abandon the grid and just focus on the placement of the content so that the logos/images are clearly delineated and a person can quickly differentiate between them as shown in this image below: Alternatively if the logo sizes have huge variations,you can use those variations to create a descending or ascending order ...

Stretching or shrinking images can result in unpleasant visual effects. However, it wouldn't be hard to analyze the size of the image, resize it if necessary, and then place it on a black or white background that's always the same size. For example: A transparent logo .png could be centered easily. Users could choose black or white based on their logo ...

It might sound stupid but IMO it will be much clearer if you switch the columns and the rows. Just use a light gray for the text on the second line (no parentheses)* at a smaller font-size: if they need further details they will find it easily without hindering the first-timers' scannability. Adding small icons next to Dialog Box and Status Bar Message ...

Meinhald Thielsch, a german scientist did a research about the corralation between aestetics and usability. There is a tendency that nice looking websites perform better or can even compensate usability flaws. Good aesetics lead to a better user experience. http://www.thielsch.org/index.php?style=8&style=8&path=m_plus_data/publikationen/webaesthetik ...