Tooltips are an incredibly useful interface paradigm to know an application. They are the mapping between the visual control and the application specific action associated to that control. the user can explore the action without invoking it just by hovering the mouse pointer. The touch devices make this paradigm basically impossible. th...
How to write good alt text for images to help screen reader and blind user to understand what is picture about ? and if we are using Alt text then what should be in a Title="text" if we are using both in special cases like menu images etc ...
Do the WCAG or W3C provide any guidelines regarding when hyperlinks should open in new windows? ...
I'm a recent graduate who is looking to get a job doing user experience. Next week, I have a technical interview in which I will be given a website and will have to talk about its usability issues as well as come up with ways of improving the user experience. I feel I have the natural skills to do this and have been doing a fair amount o...
Hi, I'm going to be running some large scale usability tests of my software for a science project. We have a lab of about 30 computers running Windows XP. Our application is written in Python and PyGTK. We want to be able to collect the following without staff intervention (automatically on our application start): A recording of the...
I've built a Single-Sign-On system for our web network. It works like this: User clicks a login link on the site he wants to log in to (the "Unsafe Site"). The unsafe site's ID is passed in the URL. He ends up on the system's (called "RAS") login page. This is on it's own domain, and may in the future get HTTPS, so the user can see his...
Hi, i have to implement a Info Terminal. I choose dot.net and the terminal is only a touchpad. So this System running 7 days 24 hours. So i call a Webservice, display Data, show Website stuff. Many things can going wrong. Have you some recommendations for this scenario? Every function in an try catch? AppDomain.CurrentDomain.Unhandled...
Top k problem - searching BEST k (3 or 1000) elements in DB There is fundamental problem with relational DB, that to find top k elems, there is a need to process ALL rows in table. Which make it useless on big data. I'm making application (for university research, not really my invention, I'm implementing and trying to improve origina...
While I've been working hard to keep the WinForms application I'm working on simple and easy to learn, the functional domain I'm working in (finance) is pretty rich, and I feel I should help the user figure out what to do next once the program is launched. I must add that in the software I'm working on, there's often "something to do ne...
I'm looking to find any articles/books on usability. I'd like to get a handle on best practices when designing a UI, this can be anything from which user controls are more intuitive to a new user, to how to phrase text that is displayed to the user to avoid confusing dialogs. I mainly do Windows desktop applications, but most usability s...
My Google analytics shows the second most used keyword to access my site is the url of the site. This doesn't particularly surprise me, but I wondered if any of you have tried educating your users out of this (i.e. detecting search term from referrer and showing a popin encouraging them to create bookmarks etc.) or is it just a waste of ...
Hi Does anyone have any suggestions on how to generate accessible PDFs (including images) from HTML? The PDFs need to look like the original HTML, including positions of images etc. Any special HTML structure required to help make the final PDF accessible? I've seen questions about creating PDFS none of them specifically address the ...
When doing hallway usability tests do most of you make your apps fully or near fully functional? Or do you just make sure the links or flow chain correctly? Or do you just draw on paper and go with that? I'm would like to test early on a prototype and am trying to find a good balance. But at the same time am worried that some non functi...
Hi, I am about to start developing a desktop application, and I am interested in making the application both usable and accessible for end users. Can anyone suggest online resources that offer guidance for developing usable desktop applications? In particular, I would be interested in learning about how to test desktop applications f...
As Jeff Atwood reminds us, the ultimate metric of developer success is the number of users our products. Building software that people actually want to use involves creating an enjoyable experience from the first minute they encounter your brand to the minute they power down. It got me wondering, what are a couple of low cost (both in m...
I'm working on a project where on certain pages (e.g. settings pages) we combine AJAX and regular fill-out-the-form-then-submit POST based operations. I'm curious if anyone has advice on improving the usability of such a page. One of my ideas is that when the user enters/modifies a value in a non-ajax part of the page, some sort of div...
Hi all, I'm designing an iPhone app that features a rather large set of onscreen rounded rect buttons. Given finger-based touchscreen UI, what do you think would be the smallest sensible button size? I need to fit as many of them as I can in the viewport without compromising the usability too much. Maybe there's an Apple-recommended min...
I do have a credit card number form. The number is divided into four parts just as on a real credit card. I want to add a JavaScript taste to the form where when a user types four letters in a field, the focus automatically goes to the next tag. But not in the last tag. By doing this, a user doesn't have to type "tab" key to move a focu...
Several parts of our existing business application use a tab control to logically separate groups of data. In other applications I often see the expander control also used for this purpose. Does anyone know of any usability guidelines that provide guidance on when to use the tab control versus the expander control? If it matters I'm...
I found an anchor plugin for jQuery, and its demo site is at http://www.position-relative.net/creation/anchor/. I am developing a FAQ page on a website where a list of questions are followed by a list of answers. I could use the scroll effect to move down to the corresponding answer when a user click a question. But I also want the answ...