Why is that button gray?
10-Aug-09
As the author admits “We’re doing nothing mind-boggling here”, but the recommendation to provide a tooltip explaining why an inactive button or menu option is not available is certainly a good one.
Color Scheme Designer
29-Jan-09
From time to time I find myself forced to design a web site without being able to hand the task to a proper graphic designer. I find that I can just about produce workable layouts, but colour baffles me.
I’m always on the lookout for useful tools to help the design-challenged, and this one looks particularly cool, as it includes a way of checking how your chosen colours might look to users with different types of colour-blindness.
How to Kick Ass at anything
16-Jan-09
Kathy Sierra is always worth paying attention to. This 30-minute audio is Kathy doing her inspiring, thought-provoking, energising thing at an O’Reilly conference.
Clearing my backlog, a mix of links
24-Nov-08
My browser is full of tabs, each representing something I intend to blog about. I need to clear some space, so here’s a few interesting links without comments.
The London underground map has long been held as a classic of information design, eschewing unnecessary details of distance and geography in favour of a symbolic connection between stations.
Max Roberts delves in to the way that the modern incarnation of this classic is becoming progressively overwhelmed by “information pollution”, arguably reducing its effectiveness.
Information Pollution on the Underground Map
I have seen many software products fall into the same trap. With each new version or upgrade a few (individually small and potentially valuable) new features are added, and the original clear, expressive and usable design is compromised. After relatively few such iterations the software has the appearance of being complex and bloated, with no clear indication why.
An object lesson for all HCI and usability designers in evolving systems.
Remote Usability
29-Sep-08
An example of poor usability on what should be a transparently simple device.
Meeting the Usability Challenge
14-Jul-08
A stunning presentation, even when viewed on-line. A deep, enjoyable, yet very practical coverage of key issues in usability which shines a light on a whole selection of problems and offers a way of looking at usability which can help solve them.
It’s nearly an hour long, but if you do any work at all with user interfaces, you really should watch this, and you should probably take notes, too.
This should be recommended viewing for any course on usability, such as the Open University module I took recently.
I guess everyone finds time to think now and then. Greg “Gigu” was obviously in a contemplative mood when he observed a some problems in a toilet cubicle, and correlated them with common issues in user-interface design.
Gigu’s blog » Blog Archive » Bad interFACE design based on a TOILET example
Usability and User-centred design
30-Apr-08
I find that one of the saddest things about taking an Open University course is that all the work and thought that people put into discussions in the course forums are just thrown away at the end of the course. This seems particularly poor from a learning perspective, as some of the best sources of aid and information for new students would be students who have successfully progressed through the course.
Why think of this now? I happened on an interesting little web article related to a course (M873), but have no obvious way of sharing that information with tutors and future students on this course. This just seems a shame.
Oh well, maybe someone might make the connection if I post the link here