meta user
network profile
| bio | website | |
|---|---|---|
| location | Ireland | |
| age | 41 | |
| visits | member for | 2 years, 8 months |
| seen | May 10 at 0:20 | |
| stats | profile views | 17 |
Interaction Designer since 1993, working in a wide range of fields such as air traffic control, financial markets, virtual reality mockups, and latterly, open source desktop applications.
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May 3 |
comment |
red checkmark vs. a red “X” @AthomSfere I guess you don't remember older versions of MS Windows, then :) guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/win31-2-1.png |
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Apr 28 |
comment |
UI Lag: What's considered “smooth”? To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if modern technology does eventually have some sort of measurable effect on these numbers, despite Nielsen's assertion. But even if it does, for something that innate the timescale will more likely be measured in generations than years. |
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Apr 26 |
comment |
UI Lag: What's considered “smooth”? Nielsen kind of addresses this in his 2010 update to the above: "No matter the implementation...we are discussing user experience, not coding. Therefore, the response time guidelines for web-based applications are the same as for all other applications. These guidelines have been the same for 37 years now, so they are also not likely to change with whatever implementation technology comes next." |
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Apr 26 |
answered | Is shaking a device to refresh an accepted behavior? |
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Apr 12 |
comment |
Help menu - “?” or “Help”? Probably just another example of "you should do what we say, not what we do" :) |
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Apr 11 |
answered | Help menu - “?” or “Help”? |
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Mar 22 |
comment |
How to make a progress-speed bar more understandable? The OS X stripes don't speed up as far as I can tell, but yes, they will naturally slow down if other processes grab their processor time. However, the fact that we're still somewhat 'fooled' by this stripy optical illusion to some degree reinforces what a smart design choice it was back in the day. |
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Mar 11 |
awarded | Nice Answer |
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Feb 6 |
comment |
How do you show a locked slider? @JohnGB Fair enough, the "premium users only" part was what I was missing. I'd agree it's generally better not to disable controls that can't be enabled by nearby actions. I'd expect a significant number of users to be more antagonised than enticed by a slider that's screaming "you can't use this" at them, though, so I'd go along with the "don't show the slider at all" answers. I get why you'd want to show your non-premium users what they're missing, but not sure this is the place to do it. |
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Feb 6 |
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How do you show a locked slider? I suppose one obvious question is: why is disabling it not an option? What's the difference between a disabled slider and your idea of a "locked" one? Sounds like you're describing exactly what disabled controls are normally used for. |
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Feb 4 |
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why are circular buttons in software/websites so rarely used? Was also tempted to give a -1 for the all-too-common supposition that the the web is the be-all and end-all of GUI design, but I'll let it slide this time :) |
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Feb 4 |
comment |
why are circular buttons in software/websites so rarely used? Indeed... and one reason they weren't used on many of those desktops is that the display technology was too lo-res and with too few bitplanes to render visually pleasing circles. Another is that a circle was relatively slow and mathematically complicated to draw at an arbitrary size, whereas rectangles could either be drawn with straight lines, or composed from pre-rendered bitmaps (one for each corner, and one each for top, bottom, left and right segment). |
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Jan 22 |
comment |
What is the most user-friendly way to show position of a user on a long leaderboard? This is pretty much what anybody who's ever played an Xbox game will expect (I'd imagine PlayStation is pretty similar)… it's the standard online leaderboard presentation in almost every game. (Though annoyingly, the means of scrolling/paging to other parts of the table does still vary between Xbox games.) |
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Nov 26 |
comment |
Unintuitive order of vi directional keys Related fact: Ctrl+H sends the ASCII code for backspace, so having left arrow on H kinda makes sense. Likewise, Ctrl+J sends newline, so down arrow makes sense. Ctrl+K sends vertical tab and Ctrl+L sends form feed, which don't map quite so nicely to 'up' and 'right', but are still in the ballpark. |
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Nov 26 |
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Unintuitive order of vi directional keys The vi cursor key order also influenced that of later home computer keyboards. The Sinclair ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum in the 1980s all mapped left, down, up and right to the 5, 6, 7 and 8 keys, for example. |
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Aug 31 |
awarded | Yearling |
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Mar 22 |
revised |
Is 'crazy' good? added 82 characters in body |
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Mar 22 |
answered | Is 'crazy' good? |
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Feb 9 |
comment |
How to best label age group boundaries? As an aside, unless it's particularly required for your purpose, I'd consider putting the age boundaries on fives rather than zeroes (e.g. 0-15, 16-25, 26-35, 36-45 etc.) In western cultures, at least, turning 30, 40 etc. can be a bit of a psychological barrier, and I've certainly seen 40-year-olds who'll continue to classify themselves as "30-39" simply because they don't like to admit (to themselves, as much as anything) that they've turned 40. Turning 36 or 46, on the other hand, isn't so much of a big deal, so people are more likely to answer truthfully. |
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Jan 3 |
answered | Do android users press the menu button? |
