Back in the 1970’s, 3 friends clubbed together to buy themselves a TV for the house they shared. Each of them managed to save £10 for the TV so out they went. Eventually they came across a shop that had, in the window, an excellent model with 3 preset channel buttons plus 1 spare. It… Read More Cognitive Overload
Whenever the subject of information flow in forms was raised I discovered conflicting evidence for vertical or horizontal flows, ordering and grouping. In trying to establish the definitive answer I carried out three different user tests: a sort test where users were asked to arrange data into a two-column structure, a flow direction test where users were asked to… Read More Form sequencing
Humans have become extremely adept at recognising patterns. Long ago it would have been a survival trait: those who could spot the tiger before it attacked would survive. Pattern recognition isn’t often needed in that capacity any more but we still have the skill and it’s so hard-wired into our system that most of the time we… Read More What’s so great about Pattern Libraries?
Caroline Jarrett has written a great piece over on the UX Matters site: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/05/7-basic-best-practices-for-buttons.php For those of you with short attention spans here is Caroline’s own summary: Make buttons look like buttons. Put buttons where users can find them. Make the most important button look like it’s the most important one. Put buttons in a sensible order. Label… Read More Best Practice For Buttons
There is a, now infamous, story of a famous rock band who demanded several bowls of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed and refused to perform if they found even one brown M&M. The story is true. The rock band was Van Halen whose shows relied on extensive power requirements, intricate stage constructions and… Read More Brown M&Ms and The Importance Of Small Details
As I’ve been saying for quite a while now, ‘hover’ needs to be demoted to the status of ‘extra frill’ rather than forming an core part of our UIs. In terms of front-end development I’ve been adding a parallel ‘focus’ trigger alongside my ‘hover’ triggers in CSS for about 8 months. I did this to… Read More Not-hover
Forms are an integral part of the internet – they’re interesting things too. Forms can be used to help people engage more with your site/application ranging from requesting an email newsletter to signing up for your shiniest, most expensive membership deal. The problem is that so many people get it wrong when they design and… Read More Improving Form Engagement
We judge our past experiences almost entirely by their peaks (pleasant or unpleasant) and how they ended. A group of doctors were considering how to make colonoscopies less painful and uncomfortable but reached the conclusion that, while it was not actually possible to make it less uncomfortable because of the nature of the procedure and… Read More The ‘Peak-End Rule’
The other day I was reading something that happened to mention Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was a 17th-century English philosopher. He saw humans as ego-driven, power-hungry machines whose seeming good intentions all mask entirely self-serving motives. The impact of this idea was so strong that even today, more than 300 years later, we still find it… Read More ‘The “Free” issue’ or ‘How 17th-century philosophy affects UX’
Be careful what you ask from your users – if you’re not specific enough then you could easily end up with the wrong result. Try using two fields for ‘First name’ and ‘Surname’ instead of just one for ‘Name’ – the results you’d get from the second option would vary too wildly to be of… Read More Basic UX Principles: Garbage In = Garbage Out
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