Hot answers tagged web
21
Harry Brignull has an interesting post about adding artificial delays to increase perceived value which was inspired by a Hacker News post about locksmiths and their theatrics. In a nutshell:
Purposefully adding a delay to a service may increase perceived value.
In this case, the trivially longer time that it takes to "like" could possibly give the ...
18
Though I know you are not a fan of using the standard * as a way to highlight mandatory form fields ,I would strongly urge you reconsider your decision .The reason being that having the * (in front of the label or field) has become some what of a de-facto standard with regards to a form field being mandatory and coming up with a new design might just confuse ...
16
If this is an administrator function for a multiple-choice quiz, I would make it clear to the user that a correct answer is required, and allow the addition of one or more decoy answers. (Choose your own terminology for "decoy answer".)
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
The application itself would randomise the ...
14
No, don't close one when you open another.
The reason for this is that the whole screen will start jumping around all over the place when you start closing accordions programatically.
For instance - if the user selects item Four from your example they would expect the accordion to open from that point on the screen, but because Item 1 would close at the ...
14
HTTP error codes are primarily useful for support and debugging. In the early days of the internet, almost all users were technical, and so having them made a lot of sense.
Today, it still makes sense having them visible, but that should not be the only information that you provide. Explain it like a human for the rest of the world to understand what ...
13
If I get spammed because I was "foolish" enough to leave my e-mail address, then stupid me.
If I get spammed just for visiting a website, then - how can I put this politely? I'd be pretty darn peeved.
If I knew a site's owners were employing such practices, I'd avoid them like the plague.
If I found out I was contacted because I just happened to visit a ...
11
From your description, it doesn't matter whether they know what a clipboard is. All that matters is that you can explain to them that they can press a button to copy the content so that they can later paste it into something else.
I would bet that 95%+ of computer users know how to copy and paste, so just go with that.
11
Would it not be more appropriate to make the label describe that it is a contact field and ask the user to add one or more of the appropriate type? This makes the form also expandable to future forms of contact in the future (sms, or mailing address for example) or multiples of both phone and/or email.
In this screen we have pre-populated the first 2 sets ...
9
The issue is selection. On the desktop we usually select an item and then act on it. On the web, we act on the item without selecting it first - either that, or selection is implied by mouseover (which doesn't let us "select" multiple items). So, whenever we need to select an item explicitly before activating it, or when we need to perform multiple selection ...
8
I've come across the same question a while ago and my company relayed on my opinion to solve the same problem, but I wasn't able to find hard data to use as a starting point.
However, I found a paper by Raluca Budiu and Jakob Nielsen from the University of Cincinnati (http://uc.edu) about Usability of Mobile Websites.
The page 79 mentions very briefly a ...
8
I suggest using microformats instead of "tel:" in your markup, and let the browser handle it.
Power users can install a plugin or user script if their browser does not natively turn phone numbers to links to re-format the microdata or show new items in the context menu to handle that data (E.g.: "import into address book," "call directly" and so on).
8
Novice users comes to mind, but you can also use terms like non-tech savvy, computer illiterate, or just new computer user. But this doesn't specify the level they are at.
For situations like this I would create a persona that more fully represents the demographic that you want to refer to, and then refer to that persona instead of trying to name a ...
7
Here is my war story...
I had to re-skin some internal UI simply for a big name client we were having. They needed it the next day. So I put my nose to the grind stone and just re-styled the UI. The effect turned out to be better than we expected. The Pro's you listed were true. The brand stood out more but also the perceived value of the product went up.
...
7
I really liked Amazon's approach in how they cleaned up their old site to create a brand new layout while retaining the existing functionality. The key things you need to take care of are :
Establish the key functionality of the app i.e what does it do and what it should to continue to do after the redesign
Look at how the existing layout is designed and ...
7
Create a website for your portfolio. It is in essence the same as what you would need for a photography portfolio, so you have many templates to choose from in many content management systems (such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, etc).
Display it on dedicated portfolio sites. I have hired people directly off such sites based primarily on their portfolio, ...
6
It would take more than hover states for UX designers to be able to treat mobile devices like desktop ones (and failing to celebrate their differences could be considered a mistake).
To understand why, we have to define the terms and then consider the differences.
Defining the terms
What do we mean by 'Web' interaction and what might we mean by 'mobile' ...
6
When I was using Google+ the first time, I noticed that they incorporate double clicks as an integral part of their Circles pages. The page shows a list of people - avatars and names. You can select them, multi-select them, rubberband a marquee to select them, all so that you can add them as a group to one of your circles.
But if you double click on one ...
6
welcome. The website has a clean design and is certainly focused right in there to registration. However, here's a few thoughts I had:
From the homepage alone, I don't know enough about it to just give my email address and be signed up. Registration is free for the Beta (which is only explained on another page), but are there any other fees?
What happens ...
6
Using large tables in devices with a compromised screen size is never a good idea if you can avoid it. The user will easily get confused and lost in a matrix that stretches far outside the viewport.
This will cause a lot of problems, like locating all alternatives and also looking back at what you have answered on previous questions.
Instead I would ...
6
It depends on who "the user" is.
HTTP error codes are definitely cryptic and unhelpful to users using a browser. Different web servers will each have their way of displaying these pages, with varying levels of user-friendliness out of the box. In most cases web developers can override these, but many times this will only be done for the most common ...
5
No, an average web user does not understand the concept of the clipboard. But I do believe an average user understands the copy/paste concept, which is all that you need.
Now you say that your audience is people with limited skills, thus not an average user. I think that copying would not be a big problem, because you can foresee a special button for this ...
5
why don't we move the other way and infuse our slick native desktop applications with offline capabilities and access to more hardware power
Your web browser is a desktop application, so has the same access to hardware power as any other software on your computer.
this would essentially recreate a refresh expect you only refresh once, at launch
A ...
5
Permalinks
I would recommend creating a "static" version of each entry (i.e., a separate page with an absolute URL that someone can type in an address bar, thereby also enabling that URL to be shared as needed). It could just be as simple as loading exactly the same content (in the same layout and style) as what you're already loading in the preview thing ...
5
Jakob Nilsen about "Return to Top" Links:
Yes, "return to top" can be avoided, because the exact same
functionality is provided by simply dragging the scrollbar to the top
of the page. It's almost always better to rely on a single, generic
interaction technique so that users don't have to ponder the choice
between two alternate interaction ...
5
Accessibility is part of usability. It's more commonly discussed because the US has official accessibility requirements that must be met to comply with ADA regulations.
Anecdote: I make UX hiring decisions. Having worked at Google, LinkedIn, Groupon, and two startups, we have never hired someone whose title was "accessibility" anything. We have hired lots ...
5
I agree that generally you would not close one section when you open another - why unnecessarily restrict the user?
However, there can be occasions where it might make sense to do so, and if implemented well it can present a very slick experience.
To make it work:
each section needs to be of identical size so that the larger frame does not shift around ...
5
You have had some great inputs but in my experience , they key thing which most UX recruiters and UX hiring managers look for is the process with which you have achieved with your end goal. While you can go with a number of different approaches with regards to how to showcase your content (slideshows, carousals, lightboxes) the end result is often not the ...
5
I am actually going to attempt, after this intro., to avoid the concept of the fold entirely as it's an interesting debate - especially with mobile screen sizes being so short, laptops being short, and, generally, not being able to guarantee/know where the fold is. (This happens a lot at my current job. The designers and I all use 27" iMacs - then the ...
4
My experience shows that you should expect all clicks on your website to be possible double clicks, and if so, you shouldn't rely on a double-click (as opposed to single click) as an interaction method.
Users randomly double-click on normal <a href> links, on submit buttons, and everything else that resembles a desktop icon.
They also perform ...
4
The reason many registration emails include a code as well as a link is that some email applications break hyperlinks. The alternative method is what a user can do if the hyperlink method fails. AOL's email client was one of the most popular to fail in this manner, but it is hardly the only offender.
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