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This is the historical reason:
(Concept drawing taken from document: VLSI-81-1_The_Optical_Mouse.pdf)
The mouse, and therefore the mouse cursor, was invented by Douglas Engelbart, and was initially an arrow pointing up.
When the XEROX PARC machine was built, the cursor changed into a tilted arrow. It was found that, given the low resolution of the ...
370
Take your right hand and point to your question.
There, you see.
183
In addition to Bart's answer, I'd like to add one more reason.
The reason the arrow was tilted to the left was so that the click position was easier to calculate, because the origin of the cursor's bitmap was in the upper left. This saved the mouse tracking subroutine a calculation on every click (its not much but it helped on older machines).
Source
175
Animation is used to draw focus to objects. It makes less sense to draw focus to an object the user is no longer pointing to (and thus, is no longer interested in focusing on), than to draw focus to the object the user does want to focus on.
It is not a matter of neglect, but a conscious decision to narrow the area of focus to coincide with the object the ...
140
Yes. There is a very simple, effective heuristic that adjusts to the preference of each user.
Place a check box in the warning message dialog that says:
Don't show this message again
Which can be improved further by stating where that dialog can be reenabled.
129
"Recovered" is a poor choice of words here. All that app is trying to do is warn people that the action is not reversible and they can't simply hit cancel or undo and all their files will be returned. A better solution would be:
Formatting SD card will delete all data. This action cannot be undone. Continue?
This is more direct to the point that you ...
127
Your objective is to draw your client's attention towards not doing business with PEP, therefore you could highlight just that and avoid the opposite sounding PEP: Yes/No combination. Leaving the non-PEP blank conveys the required message.
Alternate design for PEP:
Update:
You could explicitly show an indication for non-PEP as well:
Alternate designs for ...
124
Humanization is no different from any other design technique
Like many other design approaches, humanizing an interface has advantages and disadvantages and as such, is correspondingly prone to overuse and misuse.
I'm not a fan of humanizing as a goal. Websites are not humans, and trying to humanize a website is useful only if it actually improves user ...
116
Low level visual cognition
In addition to the various answers given, there is also sense in a tilted mouse pointer if one considers the visual processes in our brain.
Visual information arriving from our eyes is first processed in the primary visual cortex by the V1 area, then by the V2 area. These two areas recognise low-level visual features (hue, ...
116
What problem are you solving with this?
This seems like a developer's solution to a problem they think exists. Let's actually look at how users use pages.
They want to go to:
a specific page
the first page
the last page
a specific item held within one of the pages
going to the next or previous page (oops, forgot that, thanks 3nafish)
Jumping 10 pages ...
110
We ran a quick user test and found that more people were signing up with their emails
If you trust your test, then you should trust your users and design a solution that meets their desires.
We are trying to encourage users to connect with their Facebook/Twitter accounts instead
Why is that? Do you have sound reasoning behind this in that it will ...
108
You are totally right
As with many other devices (eg the QWERTY keyboard) the hot/cold tap persists not because it's the most usable design, but because of:
Cost since proper temperature control requires an electromechanical feedback loop design, or calibrated thermostatic valves which needs to be periodically adjusted or replaced. This drives up the cost ...
102
I think icons are the best possible way to convey the information about different flushing amounts. I see too much uncertainty by relying only on button relative sizes and ease of use.
It can be a simple pictogram showing the tank in the relative size of water what will be flushed upon pressing that button.
(source: sswm.info)
Or any other icons that ...
91
It's called abstraction.
Greatest achievement of mankind, I think.
If we abstract things in our mind, we can use them with lesser cognitive efforts and integrate them better in our lifes and thinking-models.
For example the Internet, it's not a real place: it's a bunch of tubes...I mean servers, to which we send requests, but it is easier to handle if we ...
80
It might not have many UX reasons...
... but it is benefical for the company.
I start with companies that have a large community, for example amazon. They have 244 million users and therefore many e-mails to send and to reply to. Most of the sent e-mails probably are automatically generated shipping confirmations telling you not to reply, because this ...
79
I would say it's too humanized if it hinders the users in finding the information they visited the site for in the first place.
I once visited the website of the local supermarket to find out their opening hours on a holiday. I entered every menu option i could see, but couldn't find the opening times. Instead, I found a lot of pictures of smiling employees,...
76
I've always thought that the arrow cursor is shaped similarly to your hand if you were point (naturally) at the screen with your (as typically dominant) right hand.
I have no support of this other than my own subjective experience but it strikes me as a natural shape when trying to relate real world interaction into a low resolution computer screen where ...
74
You can change the button to reflect the only available action, but separate the display of state.
You've replaced the button label with the only available action: reverting (unregistering).
Where it starts to get a little confusing is you have a checkmark alongside the button label.
One approach is to separate them. Separate the status 'You are attending'...
69
Based on Nielsen's 10 heuristics of interface design:
Visibility: Show system status, tell what's happening.
Following these guidelines you should show the status of interface and visualize that their face is being recognized. This will most likely avoid anxiety in the users.
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As per the official Google announcement, the reasoning behind this change is to try out methods which would complement new password authentication methods. To quote the post
Today, you sign in to Google on a page that includes both the ‘email’
and ‘password’ fields on the same page. We’ll be gradually splitting
those two fields into separate pages in ...
65
OK, how about this?
Should be understandable by everyone, irrespective of culture.
64
The problem with your buttons is that they are not raised above the background, so they don't seem clickable.
I highly recommend the Material Design for details on how to choose between flat buttons and raised buttons, with exhaustive do's and don'ts. http://www.google.com/design/spec/components/buttons.html#buttons-flat-raised-buttons
62
Why don't simply improve the standard numerical keyboard by adding the missing characters ?
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
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Selected – Create an inverted selection state which would make this feature more prominent. Many ways to accomplish but as an example; Make the button background black with a white or light grey pencil icon.
Enabled – Increasing the contrast. Our eyes become less sensitive to light and see a narrower section of the colour spectrum as we age. Increasing the ...
60
These are Confirmation messages - Windows have a fairly detailed page on their guidelines. The whole of that page is pretty useful but here's some excerpts (emphasis mine):
Confirmations are most useful when the action requires the user to make a relevant and distinct choice that can't be made later. That choice often involves some element of risk that ...
56
Because litres are a unit used everywhere across the world, a non-language dependent text solution is to label the amount of water used. Typically the symbol "L" is recognised as litres in almost any scenario.
Here is an example:
In addition, the two labels could be used as "wave to flush" sensors, if spaced far enough apart, preventing the spread of germs ...
54
Obviously, the first thing you have to ask is the language that the user speaks, because without that information, you can't ask them meaningful questions.
However, a user is coming to the site with the intent to learn a language. If you show them a list of languages, of course they're going to choose the one they want to learn. The fact that the site has ...
53
Speak like your customers
It's helpful to be more conversational — especially with older customers who tend to miss implied meaning in an interface. They aren't typically put off by a little extra text for the sake of clarity. This does not always hold true with younger markets.
Get into your customer's state of mind ...
"Reorder" means "place ...
52
There are a few reasons:
(and sites may implement for one, some or all of these)
Robot defense. Content sites (e.g. news sites) sometimes use these buttons to provide a rudimentary defense against content scrapers. By showing only part of the content they prevent scrapers from loading the page and parsing the article. This is obviously very crude, but ...
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