Hot answers tagged design
97
Here's my 2 cents (just my own assumption).
I'm guessing they viewed the button on the right hand side as the primary action button as it's closer to the users thumb, with the button on the left for secondary/less-used action, as it's slightly further away from the thumb (more of a physical exertion on the user).
They then may have wanted to label them ...
51
I think the process of producing software is much more efficient if the designers (or those that contribute to the design) have a strong technical understanding of the medium. For instance, in designing a website it helps to understand what can be achieved via CSS because if you design things that can't be expressed with CSS and require images instead (or ...
32
To answer your questions very directly:
Is it acceptable to have a 4.0-like layout on older versions of Android (e.g. 2.1)?
Yes. It's fine, in general, to use Holo styling on earlier versions of the platform. There are certainly elements of the Android 4.0 interaction palette that may be a bit jarring to users at first (for example the contextual ...
29
For anyone mathematically inclined, the answer is to use a log scale.
For non-mathematical people, you may be better off showing a break in the chart and then the extreme value.
28
I was on the Excel team when this was designed.
If you remember the version of Excel right before you could have multiple worksheets, that version had a concept, IIRC called WORKSPACES, that let you link multiple worksheets into a workspace which could be opened and closed together.
The idea was that if you had 7 spreadsheets, one macro sheet, and four ...
27
Disable the submit button as soon as it's been pressed and show a message (or similar) to indicate the action is being processed. Disabling the button prevents repeat clicking and feedback lets the user know that something is happening.
Sometimes it can seem a bit like the feedback comes back too quickly, and users can feel more comfortable if they see a ...
21
From a historical viewpoint, I suspect the reason is simply "because someone thought it would be a good idea".
In fact, I did a little bit of digging. The padlock icon for HTTPS links was first introduced to MediaWiki in 2004 as part of the then-new MonoBook skin by Gabriel Wicke. Specifically, it first appears (along with a generic link icon and special ...
20
Because the simple system works. You set it when you go to bed, and if you don't want to be woken up the next day, just don't set it.
More complicated ones with more features are available if you like, but the common ones do the job in the simplest most intuitive way. Good UX design.
18
In some parts of Thailand the traffic lights have a large second timer which counts down to the next traffic light change. I found this amazingly useful and intuitive to use and wondered why other countries don't adopt it.
So the light with the timer tells you how much longer you have until the current light changes.
16
You could use logarithmic axes. This allows you to compactly visualize wide ranging variables.
To illustrate, here is a very simple logarithmic visualization:
6 942 535 341
23 598
419 203
8 201
3
The length of each datum represented as a number is (roughly) log_10 of that number. So just printing the numbers in a ...
15
This sounds like a case of HIPPO (HIghest Paid Persons Opinion). I would recommend throwing together a quick wireframe with your ideas on. Get together some of your team to discuss the new wireframe proposal. If you find some other staff like these ideas it may help change your bosses decision.
Break up how a user would achieve a certain task and work out ...
14
User Experience is not devoted to suppress revolutionary ideas nor innovation. In fact User Experience is the opposite: making sure new ideas and innovation works the way users expect. User Experience has nothing to do with the business plan of Foursquare, but rather how to make the check-in User Experience as simple, easy to understand and joyful as ...
14
Of course we have to!
Well, maybe not technically understanding or knowing the actual syntax of the implementation of a feature, but we should understand and be aware of how much effort goes into implementing certain features, ie. how expensive they are. Good UX doesn't come cheap all the time concerning the time it takes to realize the design.
UX people ...
14
1990's design is a symptom of a poor design aesthetic driven by the fact that computers were at the time constrained by what the end user could handle. This led to design with three main flaws:
loud color choices designed to be "web-safe"
poor font choices often involving Comic Sans, Papyrus, or Viner Hand ITC, as these were three of the "fanciest" fonts ...
12
Check out this rotary traffic signal used between 1938 and 1970:
Slightly less directly connected: ramp meters, and there are definitely lots of variations in operation around the world - and variations in the timings too. Good ol' wikipedia!
12
For a definitive answer, I guess you're going to have to track down the original developers of the product.
I would like to make a guess as why this layout was chosen though. I think it is deliberate. I think of the order of the A and B buttons as actions, A being the primary action and the secondary. When holding the controller, you'd want the primary ...
10
In addition to the HEART metrics (Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task Success) we also measure 1) new user adoption by whether or not training costs decreased and 2) existing user adoption by whether help calls decreased.
I'll try to answer your follow up question and to do so you must first understand the personality of the user's you're ...
10
A conversation happens in time.
Person 1 (P1) starts a conversation, the second person (P2) replies to what the first said (in the past) and then asks a third person (P3) what they think (in the future):
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
When Person 2 replies, they are replying to something that was said in ...
9
Goals and vision are the question. User experience is the answer.
User experience is not just about what users need. It's about meeting the product owner's goals or vision, while taking user needs into consideration. These goals or vision might be revolutionary or conservative. In addition, if you research both the owner requirements and the users' needs ...
9
An anecdotal perspective ...
On a couple of occasions, I've worked with supposed 'UX Experts' that know nothing of the implementation. In those cases my role was primarily as Creative Director but I found myself progressively taking on the UX role. The reason being, the expert didn't have the breadth of knowledge to push the experience beyond copy cat ...
8
The current combination of green and orange that you have here is very hard to see, especially for those with visual impairments. A great resource for checking the accessibility of color combinations is Snook's Colour Contrast Check. This tool checks against multiple color accessibility standards set forth by W3C. This question What are good resources for ...
8
Gradients are used to create a 2D or 3D lighting effect. They're often used in conjunction with drop shadows to create an impression of light. A typical iOS device home screen is covered with gradients and dropshadows which give a clear lighting effect.
Gradients are all about affordance and skeuomorphism; a previous answer of mine goes into some detail on ...
8
The Right Answer is Responsive Design as mentioned earlier. Take a look at some.
http://framelessgrid.com/
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
http://www.getskeleton.com/
Responsive design works because it scales with the available screen size. So, when designing a website or web app you can be sure it will display appropriately when using phones, ...
8
UX - User Experience is the field of design enlighting and useable software.
UCD - User Centered Design is a process of how to achieve this.
So, UX can't be about hygiene factors by definition, because it is no process like agile, waterfall or UCD is. It's not about how to reach your goal, it's an area where you work.
User Centered Design
You said there ...
8
User Experience and the design there of should consider all possible situations that the user may run into. This includes changes in the behavior of things, digital or not.
As an example I would like to mention the design of cars. A car changes behavior according to external factors, such as weather and of course aging. If the designer of the car didn’t ...
8
It's also worth considering that Japanese gamers read from right to left. So in Japan, the buttons would be in alphabetical order.
What would happen if Nintendo elected to switch the button order for the US market? It seems like that inconsistency would cause way more drama than dealing with buttons that look reversed!
CORRECTION: See Plutor's comment ...
7
Good idea. I often turn my phone on silent before opening something just so that I don't have this issue. Would be nice if more designers thought this through.
Getting to the first screen with an option to turn sound off without any sound playing is a good idea. It doesn't have to be an in-your-face question that users have to pay attention to, but ...
7
If you've never seen the documentary Objectified, I highly recommend that you do because the answer is there.
Jonathan Ive from Apple says something about how if a thing is not needed, it should not be seen. He was specifically talking about an indicator light on the MacBook Air that you wouldn't even know existed until it lit up, but the same can be said ...
7
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 ...
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