96
I would say that "New" is best in most situations, as it is short and distinct.
A good rule of thumb is to look at the other options you will have in your menu. You want to make scanning fast, so you want to make each option as distinct as possible. Here is a crude example of what I mean:
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq ...
95
Call it the email address. It's unambiguous.
A user returning to your service will always remember their email. They may not remember if they configured a special username, however.
80
Show the numbers.
If the user selected three fruits to be shown, Apples, Oranges, and Melons, and only sees Apples and Melons in the pie and in the legend, they will wonder where the Oranges went. If the Oranges are shown in the legend but not in the pie, again they will look for the tiny slice of Orange with a magnifying glass.
Therefore, show the numbers,...
79
In addition to the related posts that JonW, called attention to, I think the biggest question to answer is using 'My' vs. 'Your'. We've had a previous question on the subject ("'Your' vs 'My' in user interfaces"), which is a great resource, but my favorite resource on the matter is the Yahoo Design Pattern Library.
Yahoo advises to use 'Your' as the ...
78
"Sort by date" is probably the most common option, but it's not the way that most people speak. Where possible, I prefer speaking like a human (as opposed to an engineer), and so I would prefer using something like:
Newest first or Oldest first
74
It may very well be universally understood but I would be concerned (or at least keep in mind) the user's reaction to this symbol. Would a Russian (a patriotic Russian) be happy to see money be symbolized by the US dollar?
Is there any chance that he may think poorly of your site / app for using the dollar sign?
I don't know your customer base but at first ...
72
Ok I might be on to something:
"New" is good for buttons that take the user to a clean "canvas", where the user can add his content.
"Create" is good for buttons that "submit" the user's content or input (either into a database or to some public platform).
In other words, "New" doesn't suggest that you're actually creating anything. It just sets the stage ...
69
...but name buttons after what they actually do.
This might seem pedantic, but looking at the screenshot the "Select" button doesn't select the video, it confirms a previous selection, presumably by the user clicking one of the videos, etc.
You might want to use the verb that your application will perform, such as Edit, Delete, Play, etc. Or stick with OK /...
66
Context matters a lot here.
Like others mentioned, localization and your primary userbase should inform you whether to use $, €, £ or ¥ as 'standard' symbol. It might also be possible to do a location-check (via GPS, or IP) and display whichever icon is most appropriate.
If you don't know your userbase's location or currency, you could choose to go with ¤, ...
62
A number of issues factor into the perception of what a kilobyte is and how to word it.
The IEC standard names are useless: As Jeff Atwood notes there is simply no industry acceptance of KiB/MiB/GiB. Hard drive manufacturers and Macs are the only major players using the 1000 bytes definition and hard drive manufacturers have absolutely no incentive to ...
53
Another option would be for the text field to ignore all non-numeric characters, and display appropriate formatting automatically.
For example:
User enters '3' -> Text field displays '0.03'
User enters '4' -> Text field displays '0.34'
User enters ',' -> Text field displays '0.34' (no change)
User enters '5' -> Text field displays '3.45'
User ...
50
How about his. show the percentage in the legend:
Apples (20%)
Melons (80%)
Oranges (0%)
49
Remember the user's context. Sometimes when we are creating an interface, we tend to forget that our user is navigating through a specific set of information to reach an action button. At that point, "Send/Receive all data from sources" could also be reduced to "Sync Data" and it would carry the same meaning for the user.
Everything should be made as ...
47
Clutter is problematic. Emphasizing the valid characters might be enough. E.g.:
Valid characters are A-Z a-z 0-9 . _ -.
Displaying them with different color might also help.
43
If it's clear, say it in the least number of words possible. If there is no confusion, then there is no problem.
"Import image" - clear.
"Create app" - clear.
"Add description" - clear.
For further reading, I suggest the Android Writing Style.
41
Surely the best symbol for currency that will be universally understood would be a note and coin as every currency uses both paper notes and coins most currencies use banknotes and coins.
Given this is a simple symbol for "currency", agnostic to culture, the great majority wouldn't have heard of cryptocurrencies, and may have once heard of Bitcoin so they ...
37
It seems like Windows OK/ Cancel convention has done a lot of brain conditioning for users. So usability tests would certainly come out with lots of people looking for an OK button on the left, Cancel on the right.
But that doesn't change the most basic instinct of someone who is interacting with the system without any pre-conditioning. My basic instinct ...
36
I think your own analysis matches Microsoft's own from the link I provided in my comment.
To quote from Why do you have to click the Start button to shut down?:
People booted up the computer and just sat there, unsure what to do next.
That's when we decided to label the System button "Start".
It says, "You dummy. Click here." And it sent our ...
36
Let's talk for a minute about user expectations and magic.
A user comes to your tool with certain expectations, and not every user's expectations are the same. You're seeing this first-hand. Culture, up-bringing and life experience all shape how a user will interact with a tool, opening a vast array of expectations to potentially meet.
One expectation ...
34
Designers' over-sensitivity
It is easy for designers to overthink things (and equally under-think things). I highly recommend reading this research paper:
Petrie, H. & Power, C. (2012). What Do Users Really Care About? A Comparison of Usability Problems Found by Users and Experts on Highly Interactive Websites. Proceedings of Human Factors in Computing ...
32
Here is some advice :
forbid characters only if it is absolutely necessary (I hate when I
cannot use _ in my nickname)
display a message only to the user who tries to use one of these. Other users won't be bothered
if the user enter a forbidden caracter, just don't consider it and explain him why.
download bmml source – Wireframes created with ...
30
You have several visualization problems to solve in one graph. How are the users interacting with this?
Your question is focused mostly on labels, however, you also mentioned showing when an element is being split among several entities for payment, in addition to showing sequence of payments.
So you have a stacked bar - like graph doing some heavy lifting....
29
I'd be inclined to "Recommended Sorting", but since it breaks the "Sort by..." pattern, I'd choose either "Sort Automatically" which breaks the pattern only slightly, or one of my favourite terms for this kind of "magic": Relevance.
So I'd go with Sort by Relevance.
After all, what heuristic does is being more relevant to the user's interest.
29
Typically I find using the placeholder text as an example of the intended content is best. So, the label describes the field, and the placeholder exemplifies the type of content.
Here's a good example, from this article: http://www.pardot.com/faqs/forms/placeholders-and-labels/
29
Can you just annotate the button with a label? The label explains the action, and the buttons indicate a clear and specific action that will be taken.
In some cases, we do something like this:
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
27
So the user is interested in the price history of a product? And this part of your website lets them see how much the price of that product has changed between the first date and the second date?
What criteria do they use to pick the two dates? See if you can find a way to tie it to their workflow.
As an alternative, and this doesn't directly answer your ...
27
Show the user what's expected visually and show how the machine interprets the user's input.
My contribution to the brainstorm would be:
Use a reference to the cheque-form of the old days :)
Let the computer ignore all comma's and periods that the user enters (for that matter: non-numerical characters)
Show (if you're able to) an image in the background ...
27
Yes, show it. The data IS important.
Others gave given good reasons (the inclusion of Oranges clarifies they HAD been taken into account) and suggestions (show percentages or numbers, show a thin line if >0 but v. low).
Here is a clearer example of why it would be a bad idea to not include zero-sized elements in the legend:
Assume we have 0 apples, as ...
26
You should use an empty alt attribute for images that are purely decorative. I'd argue that in the example you gave it is worth supplying an alt attribute that describes the image e.g. alt="Portrait of Jane Doe". @KitGrose mentions that including this text will also make the image searchable to image search engines such as Google Image.
I reserve empty alt ...
26
Historically, this question has been debated for quite a long time.
There is a "Generic Currency Symbol," which looks like "¤" which has been used since at least 1985, where it was included in ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1). In theory, that is the symbol you want. However, I have never seen it used outside of reading about the code pages themselves, so that just ...
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