I was browsing the Worst UI You’ve Ever Used question, when I realized that many of them involved the options dialog of some application. This is obviously an area where a developer could get "lost" easily, since there are often a large number of options available which can be hard to organize. (Especially to the stereotypical programmer...
There are firms which critique sites from the stand point of user experience and usability. They cost thousands. I am cheap and have little money for that! :) I would like to get critiques from volunteer web designers who know a thing or two about good online experience and good web design. Any online resources like forums where people...
When designing my homepage, I feel like the common knowledge is that it is bad to just have one big picture in the center that gives all of the content. The "right" way to do it would be to chop up the large layed out image into several small backgrounds and make the text use standard html with css background images for layout. Is the ...
Clients need to know who can do what in an application. When someone leaves a company or joins it or roles change, application permissions get lost in the shuffle. They aren't visible, so they aren't noticed. How can we best represent this to our users so they can see and take action on bad permissions or ACLs? Is it better to show ...
I'm quite anal about form validation. So while creating a validator for a "data of birth" (DOB) field in one of my current projects for a job application form (platform/language is neutral in this context), I wanted something to prevent 'punky' inputs. I used a date picker and restricted the max date to be XX years from the current day....
I finally plucked up the courage to go and formally complain to the heads about my boss. What's really scary is that the claims I have made are serious enough to be taken to the CEO in a couple of weeks. I've been asked today to procure some documents referring to some points I have outlined and wanted some real-world developer input o...
i am looking for new features and ideas to improve the overall usability of our internal webapp (straight LOB-App with some CRM features) i bet there is ton of those waiting the get found. as an example: recently i tried out rememberthemilk.com a task tracking application which has the feature to enter dates in natural language, so ins...
I am struggling with what the better practices or recommended ui design patterns are for making selections from a list of data, more specifically, key/value data. My questions are: When should I use a drop down? When should you employ a list of radio buttons verses a drop down? When should I use a list box? If you do allow for m...
In my particular situation, I have a comment form than cannot be used until the user has logged in and joined a specific topic. Then, they can comment on that topic. In your opinion, should I hide the comment form completely, or disable it and prompt the user to complete the necessary requirements. ...
What would be a good user experience to present this? I have: A folder/directory structure containing mostly media files that need to be presented in a Silverlight app. Future versions may be expanded to allow some non-media files to be presented as well. The typical use case (that I'm tailoring the solution for) is video. The videos (...
currently I have a requirement to display related items in a multi level grid. that is great grandparent -> grandparent-> parent-> child For example: Country-> state->City->Street is the order of display. The proposed solution is to display all these in a multi level grid (4 levels maximum). Country -> state ->City ...
For an university project on usability I'm looking for an open source project that is useful but hardly usable. My group would do a complete usability review and give recommendations over a period of approximately 3 months. Of course this is no purely altruistic idea and the best-case-scenario would be: Our recommendations get implemen...
Does anyone else think that the add view dialog in VS is useless or is it just me? Why is there no search/filtering in there? I can not even paste the type name (without namespace) there to speed up the view creation. Plus, there are a lot of irrelevant classes there, including classes from all referenced libraries. Am I missing somet...
Hi, I have this version of jQuery-autocomplete: jQuery Autocomplete Mod, It's cool with me till the moment But I'd like to get slight customization of it: I want onclick a list appears holding all of the possible suggestions! even if there is nothing in the input box Somethings you should know: I have a problem with the 'Traditional...
I've been working on a long-term project for over a year now and love every minute of it. However, I find myself getting increasingly out-of-touch with my users as my perspective of the same project is drastically different. In my case, I know how to get from A-B very quickly in 5 different ways. But, if a typical user and I were place...
Is there a plugin that can help create javascript app/site walkthroughs? If not, (I can't find any via google, though I could've sworn I knew of at least one), is it a good idea (for a moderately complex app)? How does it compare to screencasts? What are some best practice if you were to do one? And in general terms, what are some ideas...
Suppose I'm trying to displaying all US states in two columns, ordered alphabetically. Which approach is better from the usability standpoint? Is it sorting horizontally, like: Alabama | Alaska Arizona | Arkansas Colorado | Connecticut Delaware | Georgia or is it vertically, like: Alabama | Montana Alaska | Nebraska Arizona ...
I am trying to use periodic refresh(ajax)/polling on my site by XMLHttp(XHR) to check if a user has a new message on the database every 10 seconds, then if there is inform him/her by creating a div dynamically like this: function shownotice() { var divnotice = document.createElement("div"); var closelink = document.createElemen...
I am after a service like userfly, that is not userfly. Userfly is renders the site badly and means the information is unreliable. ...
Beginner in python, but been programming for about 5 years now. I suspect I have a lot to learn about doing things the object oriented way, but I know the basics. I planned on programming a calculator that shows it's work for the challenge and knowledge i'll gain from it. I just started and this is what i've got, and it just looks really...