I am trying to pick out the optimal set of colors for a new website project. I want to do a traditional black on white look and feel for the main content. However my partner on the project wants to do a color combination that more looks like the traditional Windows Forms look and feel. Is there any research available on the best c...
I'm often conflicted about how to approach this problem in my applications. I've used any number of options including: A generic multiselect - This is my least favorite and most rarely used option. I find the usability to be atrocious, a simple mis-click can screw up all your hard work. An "autocomplete" solution - Downside: user must...
I just wrote a list of country from the Wikipedia ISO 3166-1 My goal is to use it in select inside my xhtml, but it's a huge list. How many are you from Aruba? But how many are you from United Kingdom, France, or even United States of America? Sometimes, I can see that the most common countries are listed at the top of the list. Is it...
Hi there, I've a particularly long operation that is going to get run when a user presses a button on an interface and I'm wondering what would be the best way to indicate this back to the client. The operation is populating a fact table for a number of years worth of data which will take roughly 20 minutes so I'm not intending the int...
I have an NSSegmentedControl on my UI with 4 buttons. The control is connected to a method that will call different methods depending on which segment is clicked: - (IBAction)performActionFromClick:(id)sender { NSInteger selectedSegment = [sender selectedSegment]; NSInteger clickedSegmentTag = [[sender cell] tagForSegment:selec...
Sometimes, game-like features in an application can make work fun. For example, Stack Overflow uses badges and points to coerce its users into doing work. What game-like features are transferable to applications? What kinds of applications are appropriate for game-like features? Why are game-like features uncommon in applications? ...
Hi, What is the "best practice" (accessibility/usability-wise) for resizing text with Javascript? My current solution is that for when the user clicks the resize link it adds an extra class to the body tag. It also sets a cookie and then when the page is loaded - onLoad() - it reads the cookie and reapplys the body class tag again if...
What is the best approach for defining page width of a web app? Most of our users have 19" monitors, but many run the apps from 14" laptops, and some have 24" monitors (assume it's a max resolution). From what I know, the two most common methods are: using fixed width pages or dynamic (max) width (100%). There are problems with either a...
When developing a desktop application that has several groups of equally important data and operations, how do you tackle the user interface design? Most of the web-based apps I've developed have a simple home page with links to each service the app offers. Most of those pages contain lists of items in a database which you can drill dow...
I'd like to customize the "unsubscribe" links in our email newsletters so that they remove the recipient with a single click. Right now they just point to a generic page where the user has to enter their email address and select the newsletter from which they'd like to unsubscribe. It seems like this should be pretty straightforward, i...
How usable is a document which uses <ins> and <del>, compared to seeing the deltas in a two-pane split-screen diff viewer? Although a command-line diff tool will show its output as one diff after another (in a single vertical column / console window), all the GUI diff tools that I know of tend to show diffs in a two-pane, split-screen U...
I'm in the works of developing a media player kind of application. I have noticed that Apples iTunes have the playback controls on the top of the application window. But, more of less every other application or web based media player has the controls on the bottom hand side. (Windows Media Player, Winamp, VLC, YouTube and every other Fl...
Hi all, I want to improve my site usability by providing users some kind of "related search" funcionality if they are coming from a search engine. It is possible, from a servlet, to obtain if a visitor of my site is coming from search engine results page? If yes, is possible to obtain the query string? Thanks in advance EDIT: Thanks...
During my master thesis I need to study how my users interact with my webapp. There are alternatives to userfly.com? I want just to know how I can do some usability testing without much hassle. Requests: must work under https cheap unobtrusive, if possible ...
The ASP.NET MVC pattern of submitting forms via post, then redirecting to the same or different URL is very easy to code. Imagine this scenario: User goes to /products/42/edit to view and edit product 42. They see something crazy on that page, edit it, and hit save. This causes a POST to /products/42/edit The action updates the data ...
I would like to focus on programming for mobile devices such as iPhone, Palm Pre and last Nokia series. I'm interested in usability, user interface design, memory management, application design... every single part of it. What books do you recommend for this topic? What are the must have books for mobile device programming? ...
Why would I spend so much time on sketching my user interface on paper before designing it in Interface Builder/Visual Studio/Dreamweaver/wxWidgets/etc... ? Can anyone explain me why we should do this? Do you do this? Thanks in advance. ...
I can think of one way to do this, however I don't know if its the only way. On a page on my website, I have a two select boxes, a 'parent' select box and a 'child' select box. The values that are inside the 'child' select box depend on what is selected in the 'parent' select box. This would be easy to solve in JavaScript, via AJAX call...
While reading a revision history here at stackoverflow I noticed a great usability pattern: a list of revision entries. I like this approach since it is both easy to use and easy to implement. Now I'm wondering about a catalog of usability patterns for web applications. ...
On a JTable in Java, how do I set the accessible text on a column, row and/or cell? Normally you would do component.getAccessibleContext().setAccessibleName(text); and that is what JAWS would read upon focusing, but a table "cell" doesn't seem to exist, and columns (from the ColumnModel) do not implement Accessible. I've tried doing so...