Hot answers tagged usability
117
Option 2 is the best option, because you'll recognize your own language regardless of your knowledge of other languages (be sure to also provide charactersets if you support for example japanese)
Problems with options 1 and 3
Option 1. If you don't speak / understand the current language you may not recognize your own language. In the example germans would ...
80
Option 2 is the way to go as you should always show languages listed by the way they are written in that language. It is the way both Wikipedia and most companies that deal in many languages do it. Here is how Apple handle it:
Problems with the other options
Option 1 is a headache to maintain as you need to have the name of every language in every other ...
73
A better modification of such a statment which I see being used is:
'A company_name employee will never ask for your password'
This message alerts the user that if the person is asking for a password, there is something fishy and he should alert the concerned authorities immediately. With all the live chat functionalities that most industries are ...
57
Let them know what has happened. Here are some situations with longer, clear example notifications that use proper English grammar:
Only the name changed
The task "foobar" has been successfully renamed to "dummy".
Only the data changed
The task "foobar" has been successfully updated.
The name and the data changed
The task "foobar" has been ...
45
Some phone numbers are tailored to use a mnemonic "lettered" version to be more easily remembered.
Think of an insurance company running a commercial on TV and its goal is that you call their number.
If they use 1-800-INSUR-ME, it'll probably be more easily remembered than 1-800-4678763.
42
Etsy spent quite some time developing and testing infinite scroll in their search listings. They noticed fewer clicks on results and fewer items favourited from the infinite results page, and users stopped using the search interface to find products. They reverted back to traditional pagination. There's a good article about it here: ...
39
Most security breaches are from social engineering, and so telling someone that they should never under any circumstances give anyone their password is an attempt to increase security. I would suggest a statement more like:
If anyone asks you for your password, you should assume they are a criminal and report it immediately!
Idea provided by @Kaz
As ...
25
Alternatively, you can add semi-transparent black background behind the letters.
Example taken from: http://css-tricks.com/examples/TypeOverImage/
24
Some arguments against maps would be:
Many countries are too small to be selectable on a world map. It would require zooming and panning or some form of drill-down selection.
Selection would require a mouse. While it's possible to allow keyboard navigation, it would be a tremendous ordeal.
It assumes users will be geographically-aware. Many will not be.
...
24
You should allways follow the style guide of the platform you're targeting. That way it'll be much easier for your users to understand how the app works. If you do the opposite you'll end up with unnecessary cognitive load on your Android users trying to figure out how your iOS-like app works.
23
It currently accounts for about 20% of the activity on the site.
The fact that 20% of the activity on your site is private messaging indicates that your users consider private messaging to be of high value. So, you should be hesitant to remove it. Even if private messaging is not directly of benefit to your community, it still provides increased ...
23
Because kids still have a sense of exploring their world and will try things because they aren't sure how things work. So when something doesn't work, they will try a different way. Children tend to be more creative than adults as they are less constrained my experience.
Older adults have years of life confirming that things should be done in a particular ...
23
You have a lot of information in that form - it isn't organized very well. Consider subdividing the form fields into logical groups that will help orient and guide the user (the HTML fieldset and legend tags work well here). Also, present a uniform visual style - right now your inputs are all over the place. Line up your form fields so that the user's eye ...
22
I like JohnGB's answer. It's less fiddly and more visible than the slider.
For the sake of offering an alternative, if you do want to retain the slider, I would consider taking the 'never' option out. It doesn't really fit within the concept of a fixed range that the slider implies. In this version, you would only show the duration slider if "Delete ...
22
You should use an empty alt attribute for images that are purely decorative. I'd argue that in the example you gave it is worth supplying an alt attribute that describes the image e.g. alt="Portrait of Jane Doe". @KitGrose mentions that including this text will also make the image searchable to image search engines such as Google Image.
I reserve empty alt ...
20
The big three gestures are tap, swipe/flick and pinch/reverse pinch.
These are the rudimentary motions that are inherent to the end-user for mobile devices. This is due to the early adopters of mobile technology incorporating these gestures in their proprietary software, conditioning consumers to use these motions throughout their devices. Thus, many ...
20
Stephen P. Anderson does a good job of explaining why uptime is needed in his book Seductive Interaction Design. He presents a pyramid based upon Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs where you have to fulfill the requirements at the base before greater requirements can be fulfilled. Aarron Walter presents a similar pyramid in his book Designing for Emotion:
At ...
20
To "star" something is a very abstract concept hardly familiar outside Gmail. While people save things for later all the time, they hardly ever "star" something. While the star as an icon is fine, it doesn't translate well to a verb or action.
Marking things for later reference is commonly offered through either "bookmarks" or "favorites". Here, favorite is ...
19
Driving is complicated for any first timer. That is why you have driving schools teaching you how to do it. The most challenging thing there is not the gear shifting, but dealing with traffic.
The gear shifts you propose do exist. They originate from the racing world, and Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson refers to them as "flappy paddle gearbox". They allow ...
19
The way that you have it now breaks the way that we expect numbers to work. 90 days is greater than 10 days, so the 90 days option is on the right. Never is the equivalent of infinity days, and so it should be the last option on the right.
The far left option on the slider would correspond to never keeping them in the first place - assuming you want that ...
18
I'd be tempted to tweak the layout slightly to avoid having lots of columns:
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
18
I vote "yes"! True, hover events shouldn't be depended upon because touch devices are so popular. However, Jon seems to be asking about visual hover states on buttons, which is slightly different.
Visual hover states afford "clickablity". You shouldn't have to click something to find out if it's a button. Users on laptops and desktops expect "clickable" ...
18
Neither approach is ideal. You almost need a combination of the two.
If I select that I want something to happen every single month, just because it's on the 31st doesn't mean that I don't want it to reoccur.
I would stop trusting my calendar forever if even once it failed to notify me. Better to assume people want it reoccurring than to just be OCD. Those ...
18
Option 2 is the best, since user can always recognize its own language.
There's is a small pitfall though. If you present language selector as dropdown, user won't see any values except current auto-detected language, unless he clicks it. And if user doesn't understand currently selected language - say, already mentioned Chinese, he might won't even notice ...
18
I cannot comment on your user test results since I do not know your parameters and scenario.
But, talking about gmail's new email input method. The advantage which desktop email applications had over the web based ones was, while composing the email (in a separate window) you could freely browse older emails and look into content you might want to refer. ...
17
With the google calendar on android, you can scroll down from one month to the next and view a whole month - but here's the key: - it's seamlessly attached top and bottom to the previous and next month without having to think about overlapping parts of the week, or having gaps, or having repeated parts of the week, or greying out days that do not belong to ...
17
In general, yes, keyboard shortcuts have been shown to be effective. Some research suggests (1) that having keyboard shortcuts in a web app improves revisitation. In general, keyboard shortcuts enable power user activity. Keyboard shortcuts also improve accessibility. (2)
You also have the evidence of what the major players in the field are doing (i.e., ...
17
I think you're trying to solve a readability problem the wrong way.
Line length (measure) is your real problem. The number generally advised for a readable measure is about 60-70 characters. Cut the measure to about 60% of it's current length and you'll find you have far less trouble. The other way to solve it is a bigger font size ... that would be really ...
16
Once you get past the usability choice of using pips vs. Arabic numerals (because you can read pips in any orientation), it's more about taste than readability.
Comparing Asian dice to European dice (courtesy of wikipedia) makes this clear:
The color of the 1 and 4 in the Asian patterns is a cultural adaptation (these designs would be considered ...
16
If you use the slider, stick with it as the sole means of control. Extra controls add too much "tool time" in making the decision and may be confusing.
The solution I propose is to simply reverse the fine concept you have.
Make "Never" at the END of the slider and 1 as the lowest value on the slider.
Set the slider to the default setting or a ...
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