New answers tagged interface
1
Because, more often than not, an engineer is made solely responsible for something that has a visual component. I'm sure no one considered bringing a visual or product designer into the mix when the basic structure of this interface was conceived.
For the record, I have no historical reference to back this. Just experience ;)
1
I think general page analytics information combined with a structured survey will provide you with similar results, but not intrude on the user activities of the website. It also takes less effort and is easier to maintain even if your website content and structure changes. However, if the website is small and it gives you the flexibility to ask more ...
2
What you call visual elements are really just the parts that are unique to one application vs. another. The logo, color scheme, and icons are most often unique elements that have to fit into, and often determine to an extent, the style of the website.
UI elements are just building blocks that can be used and which are expected to be well known to people ...
5
The entire point of the shadow is to achieve a separating effect from the rest of the page's content. This is somewhat subjective, but the sharper and more aggressive the shadow the more it distracts me from the actual content, making it "worse". To get a "good" shadow I do the following:
I prefer a glow effect (light source is coming behind the person) to ...
1
It's not very clear that "Review & Publish" is for this page or for all of the pages. When the link is clicked, a list of all of the changed pages is displayed and then the user can click the "Publish" button.
The hierarchy of pages and their state isn't communicated in your GUI. Simply reshuffling some elements should help here.
download ...
2
It sounds like unassigned option permutations are a high priority (perhaps they represent undefined or unexpected behavior in your system?). If, as you say, you expect the number of unassigned permutations to be low, I see no problem with showing the user a table of all the permutations as in your example. My suggestion is to allow sorting by the ...
1
How about looking at it from a completely different view? Don't allow the car to start unless it is in neutral/park and the brakes are on. That eliminates the problem altogether: the car won't move when it first starts, and the driver has to put it in the proper gear after starting.
(Isn't that the way it works anyway? Or is that just how I always use ...
1
I would argue that when driving a car, which gear you are in other than when you are in a standstill isn't important. What is important is whether you need to change up or down a gear.
Although and extreme example, there were extensive tests on this in auto racing, and it was determined that the only information that a driver needed was whether he needed ...
4
A few solutions could be:
Color coding on shifter - Forward moving gears could be colored green while reverse is left white. Red wouldn't be ideal since that's so closely related to 'stop'. There are problems with this approach because does white clearly mean reverse? Would a user be looking at the gear when choosing them? Could the graphic on the gear ...
2
This is not an answer. It is a lengthy comment on the phrasing of the question.
How could the mode of the car's transmission be made clearer to prevent this error?
suggests that the driver is unaware of the mode of the car's transmission and that clearer, more persistent, less ambiguous, more salient, etc., communication of the mode of the car's ...
4
A common affordance which informs users about cars reversing in india is the use of audio tunes to inform the user that the car is currently in reverse. Though its a very good affordance which immediately informs the user and the people around him that the car is in reverse, it does suffer from the issue of contributing the noise pollution and also the ...
1
I usually just annotate the wireframe with a note:
------------------------
| |
Search: / Search field uses |
[ enter search term ] \ autocomplete |
| |
------------------------
...
3
Assuming you're using a wireframing format where you can hide dropdown elements to see what's behind them, it's fairly common to show the autocomplete form with a few letters typed and a few rows appearing below it.
Some examples from pattern libraries are:
from the Yahoo Design Pattern Library
from CollectionSpace.org
from Welie.com's Patterns in ...
-2
Well, Have you considered using simple "X" in some bright color like red? A bright color attracts users attention immediately and will be easy for the developer too to understand it. Similarly you can use '✓' in green if the information entered by user is correct.
0
You should use the same terms for the same things.
Can My First Page be Flow Charts?
Publish and live are in the same semantic field: why not saying Go live and Live or Publish and Published?
If you choose second option Draft can be Unpublished.
Review and Edit have a close meaning: why not using Preview instead ?
Why don't you granularize the edit ...
5
You can categorize this under "menu bloat" ;)
Help is an expected menu entry and rather than adding another menu (or using the application's menu, as they should) a lot of apps have over-used this position. In their defense, it's a menu users turn to when they have questions. I assume IA's are simply trying to capture people browsing for app information.
...
2
Can blame the Information Architect if you want to ;)
Here is Chrome's help menu. Search bar for searching help topics, reporting issue and a button which takes you to the help page.
That being said, it is a general pattern to include update and installation information in the help menu (look at PS and Aptana menus). Google does background updates and ...
7
This answer is more or less a paraphrase of what I remember about what Jef Raskins says in The Humane Interface about KLM:
Say K is the time it take to hit a keystroke, P the time to put the cursor in some place of the screen, H the time to go from the keyboard to the mouse and vice versa, M the time for the user so she can prepare to the next action, R the ...
4
The amount of clicks required is something you can measure about an interface. It's a number and if managers like one thing it's numbers. It is however impossible to learn anything about the quality of an interface from a usability/ux point of view by counting clicks.
I have seen it happen: people trying to improve an interface by reducing clicks through ...
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