Steve Wortham

3,754 reputation

1021

bio	website	bucketsoft.com
	location	Colorado Springs, CO
	age	30
visits	member for	2 years, 10 months
	seen	yesterday
stats	profile views	108

My company sites...

BucketSoft.com
Web performance optimization.

SilverlightXAP.com
Royalty-free Silverlight controls and XAML illustrations submitted by developers and designers.

RegexHero.net
Powerful and easy to use .NET regex tester built in Silverlight.

My personal sites...

swortham.blogspot.com
My personal blog (mostly programming stuff).

GLdomain.com
My OpenGL site. Most of the programs and tutorials are outdated by today's standards, but I suppose it could still be useful to someone.

060calculator.com
Calculate how fast your car will reach 60 mph from a standstill.

	3,754 reputation	bio	website	bucketsoft.com	visits	member for	2 years, 10 months
1021 badges		location	Colorado Springs, CO		seen	yesterday

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67 Comments

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Aug 16	comment	why we need multi-column page layout? Why we do need sidebars? Often multi column layouts are used such that each column has a designated purpose. The left side bar might be for navigation, and everything to the right is content, for example. However there's a secondary reason to use multi-column layouts like this. And that's the simple fact that people can have a hard time following lines of text when they span the entire width of the page. They might accidentally skip a line as they're reading.
Jul 4	comment	Best practices for online help @jrullmann - I just used jQuery and some CSS. With the help of jQuery wiring up the events, it was just a matter of associating the hidden help divs embedded in the page to the appropriate textboxes. Then the div fades in whenever the textbox gains focus. The code at that point is so simple, that no additional tools were necessary.
Jun 11	comment	Why should we ask the password twice during registration? @ADOConnection - There's basically no chance of a user remembering a password that was randomly generated for them. This will become an annoyance for any returning user. In fact, since you say that you've already implemented this solution I'd be interested to know what percentage of users change their passwords after registering.
May 22	comment	So are there “standards” for UX? You know, every time you're asked that question you could say, "let me get back to you." Then you could write a blog post, sum up the problem and your solution, referencing your past work and the work or research of others. Then present them with your new article the following day. As a side benefit, you'd become a prolific blogger in no time.
May 21	comment	Should you use both the accelerometer and the touchscreen in a phone/tablet based game? @IanNi-Lewis - I clearly have not played enough games on my phone. The only one you listed that's available on my WP7 is Need For Speed. I just now tried it and it seemed easy enough to control.
May 18	comment	How to indicate AND and OR in a search form I agree. In the vast majority of cases I think the AND type of filtering offers all the functionality the user really needs. And it has the benefit of being the most common behavior among faceted search engines.
May 17	comment	Should you use both the accelerometer and the touchscreen in a phone/tablet based game? @Pratheepch - Part of the problem is that I think most of the games I've played on the phone either use the accelerometer by itself or the touchscreen by itself. I can't think of any examples that combine both. And I sort of envisioned a problem where you're tilting the phone to one side then lift one hand to tap the screen, and end up dropping the phone.
May 16	comment	How much color may a UI have? @VitalyMijiritsky - Jakob Nielsen wrote an article to this effect titled, "Don't Listen to Users". The title is slightly more extreme than the actual content, but it's still a good read... useit.com/alertbox/20010805.html I think one of the lessons here is that you shouldn't blindly follow your users' proposed solutions. When talking to your users it's more important to find out what works and what doesn't, and then you can figure out the best solutions.
May 13	comment	Why should we ask the password twice during registration? This is fine but at some point a returning user may like to change their password to something they'll remember. And then we face the same problem for the change password dialog. Do we force the user to type their new password twice, or just once?
May 13	comment	Why should we ask the password twice during registration? @BenBrocka - I agree, if you're typing fast it's hard to see every letter as you type it. But I do like how it solves certain problems without requiring the user to read and follow additional instructions, or toggle any options.
May 13	comment	Why should we ask the password twice during registration? @webvitaly - Yeah, I liked that approach as well. I can definitely see pros and cons of each.
May 9	comment	Yes/No radio buttons: Vertical or horizontal @JimmyBreck-McKye - The decision becomes harder at that point. I could see that becoming a good reason to make everything vertically aligned. But I've worked on multi-page forms where the Yes/No questions compose the overwhelming majority of the radio button based questions. So I'll still arrange them horizontally, and the few questions with 3 or more options might be vertically aligned. If spacing is used correctly, then this inconsistency won't necessarily be a problem. Everything can still be clear to the user.
May 8	comment	Yes/No radio buttons: Vertical or horizontal In general what I've found is that if you're dealing with enough options that you're going to have a problem with wrapping you should absolutely use a vertical layout as you say. But in the case of a simple Yes/No response, I prefer the options to be horizontal and aligned from question to question.
May 8	comment	Yes/No radio buttons: Vertical or horizontal I agree. I've created hundreds of Yes/No questions for insurance applications and this is the conclusion I came up with as well. The only difference is that in my case I position the radio buttons to the right of the question. But either way works well.
Mar 30	comment	Is the asterisk the common symbol to mark fields as required in all languages? I gave up asterisks after realizing that it's more effective to denote the exception rather than the rule as described here... ux.stackexchange.com/questions/840/…
Mar 16	comment	Should aspects such as page render time or time taken to retrieve results be considered part of UX? @DA01 - Read the whole article and you'll see that he has numbers from 50,000 websites. And sure, server side performance and scalability should not be overlooked. But you should measure to determine how much of a problem it is before spending too much time there.
Mar 16	comment	Should aspects such as page render time or time taken to retrieve results be considered part of UX? Granted, some of these front-end optimizations require server configuration. For example, setting far-future expiration dates, using gzip, etc. But these are still things related to the static files (images, js, css) that make up the majority of requests on your site. Ideally these things should be on a CDN... but you get the idea. These are the things the user spends the most time waiting for (in most cases).
Mar 16	comment	Should aspects such as page render time or time taken to retrieve results be considered part of UX? @DA01 - I made up that 90% figure, but in reality it's probably higher when looking through Steve Souders' research. The actual quote from Steve Souders is, "80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend. Start there." stevesouders.com/blog/2012/02/10/the-performance-golden-rule
Mar 16	comment	Should aspects such as page render time or time taken to retrieve results be considered part of UX? +1. It certainly helps to have performance in mind even in the early design stages of your site. In over 90% of cases, the vast majority of a page's load time can be attributed to front-end elements and has nothing to do with how powerful your server is. For anyone interested in this topic I'd suggest two resources: www.webpagetest.org and stevesouders.com And then you should absolutely use YSlow as well... developer.yahoo.com/yslow
Mar 16	comment	What are the benefits to software that has no installation wizard? @Barfieldmv - Sometimes this will surely be possible. Other times there may practical reasons why you wouldn't want to do this. For example, a .NET application requires the .NET Framework to be installed. The installers I've built with NSIS will automatically download & install the latest version of .NET if necessary. I think to pull that off without an installer would require two executables (one would be an unmanaged "launcher" application.)