103
Sudden rearrangement of content is disturbing
Dynamically updating data while user is looking at it may (depending on type of data) be disturbing to the user workflow - for example, if you're reading a sentence and it changes while you're doing it, it's unwanted.
The same applies for any content changes that will re-flow or reorder other content. Appending ...
82
I've seen this occasionally in usability tests. When I ask it's usually because they have filled in many paper forms where there is a request to 'fill out in block capitals' or similar — so they think that is the default for all forms.
With solicitors I imagine there may be similar issues where court forms have to be filled out in specific formats.
Have ...
73
You could use a single bar, partitioned into four sections, labelled (or possibly coloured, as I've used in my example image) accordingly. The area where each partition meets would be resize handles, and resizing would accordingly expand and shrink the adjacent partitions, while the entire bar is capped at 100%.
With a legend showing the exact percentages ...
65
Users enter information in upper case either intentionally, or unintentionally (e.g. they happen to have CAPSLOCK activated). Several other answers mention a variety of reasons for why the user may be doing so intentionally. If it is unintentional, then the user probably wants to know about it, and correct it.
As others have mentioned, designing an ...
55
This is an absolute 'No no' in creating charts. This is a very bad way of representing data, to make it look like Donut chart but non-functional. It doesn't matter if the thickness is proportional to the value, that is a secondary dimension. The primary dimension must be proportional to the primary value. Having a regular Donut chart is adequate for this ...
51
Well, you can write the predicted year of death based on user research, or you can say "TBD" :).
And more seriously - it would be a good idea to develop two templates for this item, one for dead presidents and another one for those who are still alive. The "alive" one shouldn't contain the "Died" field at all.
The downside to this is that it may not be self-...
50
tl;dr:
Some of the invoices are not eligible for payment. They were excluded from payment processing. [details]
Error messages should separate two things:
Information for the end user (What they can do to "fix things")
Diagnostics for support and for the developers
Of course the developer is happy because they see what they want. But it's not helpful ...
35
The trick is to not look at it as data or key-value pairs, but how the user would review it.
For each data point evaluate what it means for the user.. e.g.
Acreage .046 - does that mean anything to the user ? How much is .046 acres.. they care about the size of the lot. For smaller lots you might want to user different units.
Then you have square footage ...
34
Is it necessary to use sliders? Note that a slider is a good choice when you know that users think of the value as a relative quantity, not a numeric value. For example, volume or brightness control.
If the user has to determine value, you can also give a simple value entry interface along with a "Remaining Value" indicator. Somewhat like this:
download ...
34
I wouldn’t call this a “chart”, but rather numbers with decorations. The numbers don’t add up to the total, and the pie sizes are decorative rather than informational. Sizes don’t make sense either. Using this will create more confusion than answers.
The most approximate chart to the provided images is a Donut Chart. Refer to this link about how to use ...
32
what data does the user actually need to see?
If only we could get a straight answer to that. Instead of "it depends".
I keep on running into this problem, and every time I Google I end up back here at Jason's excellent question.
And there are many excellent answers, but I smell a meta-topic that we all seem to skirt around yet I think is worth unpacking.
...
22
There is also possibility using four sliders to normalize the results, that is, if they sum up to x%, multiply each value with 100/x. Then you wouldn't have to worry the user with constraints while retaining the proportions desired by the user.
21
Topologically, it looks the same as a Spider chart with 4 variables, but each variable is displayed as a quarter-circle instead of a point.
19
This is because early Teletype and computer systems had no provision for lower case. Mixed case Teletypes came on the market in the 1930's, but the standard US military Teletype of World War II only printed in upper case. The idea that official communications and reports should be in all caps worked its way deep into the culture.
Up through the 1970's ...
19
Make the user's job easy
Ask yourself if it's the system or the user that's concerned with 1% accuracy. Does the user really want to think about the distributed percentages, or just the priority of each point?
Ask for simple relative values
If a high level of precision is purely the domain of the system, consider asking your users how much they care about ...
18
That looks like a form of polar area diagram.
Also known as a ‘rose diagram’, this is almost 200 years old, and was popularised by Florence Nightingale to highlight death rates in different months:
It uses equal angles, with the radius indicating the magnitude. (Though that means the area isn't proportional. Alternatively, you could use area to indicate ...
17
Additionally, it's less data intensive, and if you're designing with a mobile first philosophy, that's got to be a consideration.
You're going to need to consider that the screen size is constrained
to smaller dimensions than a desktop machine, which means that even
smaller changes are more likely to move what the user is looking at
off screen.
Many (...
14
The problem with tabs within tabs is mostly visual, not logical. The situation you describe has three navigation levels - that's not that uncommon. If you make the different navigation levels look different from one another, you'll find that the perceived complexity is reduced.
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
14
I guess one can always find special cases, but in the general case, I would go with rounding the correct sum, not summing the rounded numbers.
The point of rounding is to make a number easier to digest at a glance. And while we are aware that there is a tradeoff due to lost accuracy, we want to keep the accuracy loss as small as possible. If you were to ...
14
From Wikipedia:
In statistics, a histogram is a graphical representation of the distribution of data. It is an estimate of the probability distribution of a continuous variable.
The emphasis is on continuous variable, as opposed to discrete variable.
The histogram
In the top histogram you've presented, the X axis is time, which is continuous in this ...
14
[Flippant] End users are strange creatures, period. There's no accounting for what makes sense to them and what they'll do (even with explicit instructions). [/flippant]
A good rule of thumb is to never trust that the data entered by end users is reliable and accurate, even if you give them explicit instructions and train them on how to correctly use the ...
14
I used to work for a company which paid for a behemoth third party software.
So on a typical work day, Peggy would enter a client name and save it to the database, hunky-dory.
On the following work day, Donna would need to search for this client and do further processing. Cool, so Donna would use the search box and not find the client. Hmm, better call ...
13
You pretty much want to go for one or the other extreme, where the extremes are:
Explicit Save for Everything. Everything needs saving through an explicit command.
Autosave Everything. Everything is saved automatically and instantly.
You want the user to have as simple a mental model of the system’s behavior as possible. You don’t want to burden the ...
13
You are trying to deal with concurrent editing, and unfortunately there isn't any easy solution for this. The common ways of dealing with it are:
Lock the record when someone starts editing it. This will prevent a second user from editing a record that is being edited and should inform them that someone else (possibly a name) is editing that record. This ...
12
I'm a bit surprised, that none has suggested the Master-Detail pattern yet.
We have exactly the same problem in several of our own products: Too many columns to fit on a screen, however, every piece of information will be relevant in some use-case.
Actually, we decided to do, what you(r boss) ruled out: Cutting the default number of visible columns to ...
11
Exporting data can be more time consuming
Ultimately it depends on how your users feel about it but exporting data requires users to think more and can add friction to their work flow. If I could only choose one option or the other I would go with option 1, however, export to Excel sounds like a very useful function so consider the following example.
Show ...
11
When one slider is adjusted, auto-adjust the remaining unlocked sliders to keep their total at 100%
10
From a UX perspective, there is no reason that the sum has to be 100. You may be thinking in terms of percentages, but it is trivial to scale them up or down to make the net effect 100.
What usually matters in weighting is the weight of a single item relative to the total weight. You can easily calculate this, so there is no need to burden a user with ...
10
For names, all capital letters is sanitization normalization.
Take the name "Macdonald" for example. It can also be spelled "MacDonald". If you aren't typing your own name into a form, this kind of error is very common and can cause problems. The client (client of your client) could be insulted or it could cause legal issues (possibly).
"MACDONALD", ...
10
I think a problem with a generic waveform is that it will be "moving" and indicating sound when there is none (the audio is playing a silent section) and this disconnect would be bothersome (to me, at least). Something like a spinning record would be better. I actually faced this problem a few years ago, I wanted a clear and moving indicator that audio was ...
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