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Posts Tagged ‘user experience’

URL Literacy

In Commentary on 2 March 2010 tagged browsers, user experience with 7 comments

Jono from Mozilla makes a great point that most people (including me) have completely overlooked when it comes to the Web — most people don’t really understand URLs:

So what this mess teaches us is that there are lots of people out there who don’t know how to read a URL. The URL in the location bar, if they notice it at all, must appear to them as nothing but a bunch of computer gibberish.

Think about it from their point of view. They knew that Googling “facebook login” and then clicking the first link took them to their Facebook login. I wouldn’t call it the best way of getting to Facebook, but it was obviously working for these poor souls. Until one day, they saw something they didn’t expect. If you don’t know how URLs work, then all you know is that your expected Facebook login page has somehow been replaced with… something else.

The whole blog post is really thought provoking and worth reading for anyone who designs or develops software. For those of us who have completely internalized URLs, it’s hard to empathize with people who see getting to Web sites as a series of steps they follow. At this point it doesn’t matter whether people access all the Web sites they use through Google or some other search engine, other than to figure out how to make things better for people who use the Web that way.

I wonder whether browsers could display URLs in a way that makes things easier for users. The most important thing about a URL, especially in terms of preventing fraud, is the domain name — the real one, not the fake one that’s included to defraud people. Maybe it should be highlighted in some way with the owner of the domain displayed as well.

Via Simon Willison.

How to solve a problem

In Commentary on 23 September 2009 tagged user experience with no comments

Last week Firefox developer Alexander Limi posted about rough edges in the Firefox installation experience on the Mac. His article attracted a ton of thoughtful responses, and he posted a follow-up today discussing the options he looked at and describing the new installation experience that will be featured with Firefox 3.6.

The problem and solution are an interesting case study for user experience designers. Most Mac users are fine with the way the installation process, but clearly it is confusing to some users, and when you’re talking about an application with millions of users, it’s a big deal. What I liked about the way this worked out is that Limi clearly put a lot of thought into his original post, and the community responded with a ton of good ideas that led to an even better solution that the one he came up with. Now a lot of people are going to benefit.

This really is collaboration on the Web at its best — and I would hate to see it pass by unremarked upon.

On another note, the design of Alexander’s blog is just awesome.

Links from March 12th

In Commentary on 12 March 2009 tagged cars, community, content management, css, design, drupal, links, performance, science, security, user experience with 1 comment

• Kurt Cagle: Is Dreamweaver being beaten by Drupal? The real question being asked is whether the features associated with dynamic database-driven Web sites are more compelling than the pinpoint control and top notch user experience of Dreamweaver.
• Pathfinder Development: Keeping Up With The Joneses: Keeping Rails and its extensions up to date. Managing dependencies is generally one of the most unpleasant aspects of any software development project.
• Eric Burke: Ban Software Patents. Yet another example of ludicrous patents.
• Michael Ruhlman: Michael Symon’s Pickled Chillis. Really cool recipe.
• Serial Consign: Desktop Deja Vu. The history of the default desktop picture that shipped with Windows XP.
• useum: Measuring Social Participation in a Science Museum. Useful for more than just museums.
• Wired: The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist. Looks fascinating but I’m not reading it ’til my Wired comes in the mail.
• High Performance Web Sites: Performance Impact of CSS Selectors. Hard numbers on the varying performance of different CSS selectors. Also a reminder that there’s a lot more we could be measuring that we don’t.
• oobject: formula 1 user interfaces. Incredibly fascinating comparison of the current state of steering wheels in Formula 1 cars.
• PC Pro Blog: I’m sorry but Dreamweaver is dying. Another argument that high end page-based authoring tools are giving way to Drupal.

Links from January 25th

In Commentary on 26 January 2009 tagged links, management, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, software development, The Media, user experience with no comments

• Matthew Yglesias: The Thunder and the Laughter, the Last Thing They Remember. A list of the idiotic assertions about shutting down Guantanamo that people who want to keep it are putting out there.
• The Washington Monthly: There Are No Files. There are no formal case files for any of the detainees at Gitmo. The United States has held hundreds of prisoners for years without charging them with crimes, and never even bothered to put together evidence for eventual prosecutions. More here.
• LA Times: News organizations concerned about access issues at the Obama White House. Media outlets are trying to put a stop to anonymous background briefings from White House staffers and pushing for on the record comments.
• 12 Standard Screen Patterns. Handy resource.
• Integrity. A slick looking continuous integration server for Ruby on Rails applications.
• Hoptoad and Exceptional are both subscription-based services that log exceptions from Rails applications.
• Rands In Repose: The Larry Test. On being done.

iPhone 2.0 password masking

In Commentary on 13 July 2008 tagged iPhone, mobile technology, user experience with 5 comments

Apple made a clever user interface change with iPhone 2.0:

When you enter text into a password field, it briefly displays the character you just entered. After a few seconds, it changes the character into the mask, but it gives you some visible feedback that you’re entering the characters you think you’re entering. (I always had problems entering passwords correctly until this feature was added.)

It’s an acknowledgement that entering text using a virtual keyboard isn’t foolproof, and it provides a good compromise between masking passwords so people can’t see your password over your shoulder and enabling users to avoid typos when entering them.

By the way, this screen shot was taken using the new screen capture feature in iPhone 2.0.

Update: Commenters have noted that other phone makers have been doing it this way for years. I guess what this really means is that the iPhone is the first phone that I’ve ever used to enter a password.

What users do

In Commentary on 13 May 2008 tagged cars, user experience with 1 comment

As you know, I frequently mine the long term road test blog at Edmunds Inside Line for interesting tidbits that relate to design and user experience. Today I ran into a problem at work where people could no longer log into FogBugz because the computer running Windows XP on which it runs had decided that too many people were connected and I was violating the arbitrary rules Microsoft imposes to force you to purchase Windows Server 2003. Here’s the thing — nobody was actually using FogBugz at the time and the problem went away when I rebooted the server.

Then today I read about a complaint that the Edmunds staff have with Subaru’s navigation systems. Subaru disables the controls for navigation systems when the car is moving:

I find it extremely frustrating that some navigation systems, like the one found in our Subaru, will lock out 90% of the menu functions once the vehicle is in motion. Want to program in a new destination? Pull over and stop. Want to change the route from “quickest” to something more scenic? Pull over and stop. What if you’re mired in traffic, late, on a highway with no shoulder, or simply want to keep going? Tough.

And this remains the case whether you have a perfectly capable passenger riding shotgun next to you to press the buttons or not. A passenger can read regular maps while underway, and AAA gives them away to members for free. Tell me why I should pay one or two grand for one of these, again?

So what do users do when confronted with these arbitrary, user-hostile restrictions? They hack around them:

But our 2008 Subaru WRX STI has a hand-operated parking brake handle, a type that is much easier to control. While doing a hand-brake turn while horsing-around on the safe confines of a dry lake, I inadvertently found that pulling up on it doesn’t simply illuminate the brake lamp. Doing so also energizes all of the navigation system menus.

In the end, he winds up jamming his iPod under the parking brake handle so that he can use the navigation system whenever he likes. In the case of our FogBugz server, I’m going to uninstall Windows XP and replace it with some Linux variant as soon as I get a chance.