Hot answers tagged efficiency
148
One reason why this might not be a good idea is that you would have to enforce unique passwords. This does not seem like a big issue to user experience at first, but from a security point of view, this is critical, here is why:
Enforcing unique passwords means that when a user picks a password there is a chance they accidentally (or with malicious intent) ...
40
If you choose to have a password only log in, you will run into many problems.
Security
If you only require a password, you have no way of knowing who it is that you are logging in unless you enforce unique passwords. In that case, if I were to sign up and tried to use a common password (say "Password") and your system told me that it was not allowed, ...
22
Which is more important depends on what you are designing. My general guidelines would be:
Intuitive matters mast when you're designing an app that people aren't going to invest time into learning. It's important that they get a win as soon as possible, and that means that they need to be able to use the product with little or no time learning it. Think of ...
22
A reason that just providing passwords could be problematic is in system administration. By providing only passwords you are making it difficult for the administrator to get a handle on the account. Thus while each account may have an account number, the admin won't be able to easily relate that to a user.
e.g.
User: "I have a problem with my account"
...
21
I respectfully disagree with Michael's answer. I can't speak to desktop GUIs, but in web forms you want to avoid having a default unless you believe a large portion of your user's (maybe 90%+) will select that value. Particularly if it's a required field.
Why? Because you're likely to introduce errors because people breeze through forms quickly online - ...
15
Hard Limits
In the 10ms-5ms range you're running into the refresh rates and response times of pixels on your monitor. Many monitors are limited to 60Hz (17ms refresh). You're also getting close to limits of visual perception. We take around 100ms to direct our eyes to something new that has appeared on screen.
Noise
The difference between a compile ...
13
Interesting idea, let's analyze its parts.
EDIT: I'll state outright that I'm not really a fan of the idea for the reasons kontour stated (enforcing unique passwords exposes existing passwords to new registrants).
n-factor authentication
As others have alluded to, the trend in security has been to increase the factors required for authentication. It's ...
10
They say that "too many cooks spoil the soup" and while there's some truth to that, I think the proper saying is actually "too many opinionated people that think they are cooks spoil the soup" is more appropriate. So, yes, having too many uninformed opinions can be a bad thing (design by committee) but having multiple informed opinions isn't necessarily bad, ...
8
While not talking about response times as low as the question, there are some very interesting results from tests carried out by Google and Bing here:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/06/bing-and-google-agree-slow-pag.html
The bottom line is that users interact more with responsive web pages and the companies made more profit. I would think it's not too ...
8
While it is generally agreed as a rule of thumb that fewer clicks are better, a more important metric is considering how much the user has to think to complete the action. Ten thoughtless clicks are a great leap better than having to perform one confusing click.
As long as the process is simple and requires very little thought, the number of clicks requires ...
8
You need to reduce or remove the confusion of the multiple inheritance and that is classically a very hard thing for users to understand when being displayed as a tree because a tree has a single direction of information - from the root node downwards (trunk to leaf)
So perhaps you could instead use something along the lines of a Miller Columns as in the ...
8
Icons can improve readability and findability in sense that users, that a familiar with interface, usually don’t read the labels in common way, but search for visual markers, that help identify item.
It happens due to visual form, that we percieve before “read” — for instance, in peripheral vision we don’t read, only percieve the form and colour of item, so ...
8
Any problem like this involves a matrix of priorities that you need to decide on before you can have a solution. For example, do you care more about people waiting on the ground floor than any of the other floors? Do you care about energy consumption? Is there a particular floor that is more important than others?
Once you've decided on these, you can ...
7
I'd like to first of all debunk the theories of lazy programmers and global shortcuts. Lazy programmers (but not the lazy smart programmers) would not single out keyboard shortcuts as a particular requirement they're too lazy to do. There's nothing hard about setting it up. Most programming languages and frameworks provide functions and convenience ...
7
If you are looking for the fastest way for experts to enter the data, you should focus on keyboard entry with keyboard navigation.
I would rename Alpha and Beta to "Alpha (1-5)" and "Beta (1-5)", and make them text entry areas restricted to the numbers 1-5. You should have some sort of client side validation to ensure that no other numbers are used. I ...
6
Looks like JohnGB beat me to it.
As he says, efficiency wins out when:
the user will be spending a lot of time with the application
the application will become important to the user, and they have an investment in understanding its nuances
the application exists in a time-critical domain
A good example might be a stock tracking application for a city ...
6
This was suggested in 2000 by Jef Raskin, and it was implemented by Amazon for at least a couple of years. It's a good idea, and no less secure.
The reason it's not less secure than a username and password is because your username is probably guessable. It's your email address, or your first name, or your first initial plus your last name, or it's the ...
5
A blank value really isn't a good idea - it doesn't really provide a visual clue, and may even imply to some users that the field is not required. Saying something like "Select an Animal" along with the same type of visual cue that you use for other required fields (the most common being the red asterisk) should help convey the point.
5
Similar to your experience, I’ve found that learnability and expert efficiency are as often positively correlated as negatively correlated. As an example of positive correlation, having too many simple windows tends to hurt both: experts spend too much time navigating rather than “doing,” and novices get lost in the maze of interconnections.
Often ...
5
Apart from coding challenges, One big reason is that keyboard shortcuts become useful in software that you regularly use and return to. You can learn and use the shortcuts over time. Therefore saving effort.
One thing I find when testing websites and software is that experts use shortcuts, the average person finds their way by navigating menus, buttons and ...
5
The human brain and a computer algorithm work quite differently.
Your assumption that it should be easier to start in the middle of a list is wrong.
In those cases you would first need to figure out what the middle point of your list was. Then you would need to figure out whether the item you are searching for would be above or below this middle point. ...
5
People use the elevator to move between ground (0) floor and one of the higher floors. There are two directions, upward and downward. In situation when all the people have to use elevator, upward and downward category stats would distribute normally, so about 50% of calls should be from the floor level.
People are more up to use stairs in the following ...
5
I would split 'UX Designer' into two distinct roles - namely 'UX' and 'Design'.
UX
For the UX part, a good team works better than someone alone. This is especially important for ideation and brainstorming where you want many opinions. A solo person will often find this very difficult.
Some teams work well with 10 people, while others find that 2 is too ...
4
Related questions have mentioned http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html which says users have to reorient themselves to the task if the waiting time is over 10 seconds. As I understand it the theoretical basis for the 10-second figure is that short-term memory decays in the 2 to 10 second range (or the user's attention wanders and pushes other things ...
4
See Neilsen's take here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/interaction-elasticity.html
Note he warns against focusing on the number of clicks - he takes the approach (as Peter of the Corn noted in his post) that it's the ease of clicks that really matters. He also adds that context plays a role in what is acceptable, and that you need a good understanding of ...
4
This is a question I've never found the 'right' answer to. Leaving it blank seems as valid as making it a command 'select one'. In the end, it may not be a major issue.
I do think it does make sense to not default it to a valid selection, though.
If I had to come up with arguments for both options:
blank = easy to scan the form to see what you haven't ...
4
Good answers here for your typical consumer app. However, if you want to get beyond rules of thumb (such as “more use means favor efficiency over intuitiveness”), then you need to apply a formal human systems integration (HSI) approach.
With HSI, you look to minimize total lifecycle cost (or maximize revenue) by designing a system with optimal levels of ...
4
Redundancy isn't always bad! There's a concept called Redundancy Gain:
If a signal is presented more than once, it is more likely that it will be understood correctly. This can be done by presenting the signal in alternative physical forms (e.g. color and shape, voice and print, etc.), as redundancy does not imply repetition. A traffic light is a good ...
4
There are two different parts to your question.
The first is whether it's more efficient to disable controls in inactive windows. I'd suggest that it isn't, because disabling a control means that it has no content worth the users attention - disable != readonly. In most cases a background window does have content the user may want to reference, concealing ...
4
A few reasons:
it's generally easier for a user to grok how items are being ordered if they start at one end of the list;
it's typically simpler to get users to scroll down an interface than up, especially on the web where content is usually laid out as a long, static page. Yes, there are some visual tricks that imply some content is hidden up above the ...
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