I've long thought (but never practiced for some reason) that a dropdown menu that is dynamically generated and only contains one item, should automatically select that item. This would opposed to the typical approach that I've observed where a blank entry is made at the top and you still have to interact with the menu to make the single ...
What is the best pattern for having a select all or deselect all checkboxes. Can someone come up with a better way to have it in this form: ...
I have a macro taking several parameters. Some of these are optional and if a parameter is left empty it will replaced with default. Now the question is how to make this as easy as possible for ordinary web designer. Is there any other possibity apart from my examples to handle this case? Example 1: The obvious problem here is the op...
I was just reading the "Open Letter to Joel and Jeff" and I noticed the dates on the comments are relative to when the blog entry was posted. So that means the first entry will always stay as "12 minutes later" and the next will always be "14 minutes later". From a usability standpoint, does it make more sense to list out times relative...
The question is simple really, when is it time to finally pull the plug on a browser version and just not care about supporting it any more? As can probably be expected this is in regards to IE6 specifically right now. A site I'm working on right now has a mostly-finished design that needs to be integrated but most of the back-end functi...
Almost every application out there performs i/o operations, either with disk or over network. As my applications work fine under the development-time environment, I want to be sure they will still do when the Internet connection is slow or unstable, or when the user attempts to read data from badly-written CD. What tools would you reco...
For instance, customers that we're creating web sites for, request things like: all links should open in a new window put custom 'Back' button on every page while there is a working browser's equivalent make some part of the text blinking etc. Of course I tell them it's wrong, but is there some nice list of bad things to have from ...
Can anyone tell me some of the most important usability, accessibility and SEO guidelines, which must be taken into considerations while developing a good Web2.0 website ??? ...
On most sites on the register user part they want you to enter password 2 times. Why is that? Why not just one input where you enter password? Why do you have to "confirm" it. You know Username Password Confirm password Submit This has been on my mind for a while... Hope somebody can answer this. Thanks ...
I was wondering if it was ever ok not to have a submit button (Ok, Go or Search for example) near a search box in Web pages. I know that hitting enter is much faster and that it will perform the search. However, is it an accepted convention for the average non tech savvy user or only for the tech community? For example, the search box...
We occasionally need to notify users about warnings or problems. But often times, especially if it's a common problem, users will just dismiss the warning and continue. Often times users won't even remember seeing the warning, but we check their logs and see that several were displayed. So, how do you get users to pay attention when you'...
The several uses to which the <title> tag is put complicates the question… As browser window or search result titles, it would seem to make little difference — there's enough room for everything and the display order is unrelated to the title. For tab and taskbar / dock titles, space is at more of a premium. Placing the page name firs...
What is currently regarded as best practice in UI design for displaying actions that are not available in the current context. For example, A page displays customers who can have many associated contracts. I do not wish to allow the user to delete a customer if there are active contracts. From a usability and UI perspective what is cons...
I develop a web application used internally at a mortgage company. We've been having problems with people filling out a form while talking with a customer and then clicking away from the screen before hitting Save, thus losing their data (they could just click Back, of course, but they never think of this). Our users' first "solution" w...
Starting to look at my last year project now, and so I'm doing the specification-requirements document. Now, it just so happens that this project requires a high degree of "usability" - I dunno if this is the right word in english, but what I mean is that it should be really easy to use from a user PoV. Now - in all the projects I've wor...
I want to provide my users with an 'advanced' search engine. I basically have a lot of search criteria to chose from : some are very simple/common and will be largely use (ie time period, item id) some are a bit less mainstream and some won't be used a lot, but I still want to provide them Overall, I have around 30+ criteria to chose...
It happens sometimes that one feature seems to belong to more than one place. Trivial example, let's say I've got the following menus : File Pending orders Accepted orders Tools Help I've got a search feature, and the same search window work for both pending and accepted orders (it's just an 'order status' combo you can change) Whe...
While novice software designers expect their users to behave rationally, it's far from being the case ; I've seen many times the user perception being totally disconnected from reality, or it's feedback obviously irrational. I think we are the one who should adapt, not the other way around. There's only one way that I know of to achiev...
Hello, I was wondering if there's an easy way with javascript (including JQuery, which we're using on the site) to put descriptive text in a text input until the user clicks it to type in their own text. For instance I'd like to put the word 'Search' in a text input (preferrably in a lighter color than real input) until the user click...
Background: I've inherited a web application that is intended to create on-the-fly connections between local and remote equipment. There are a tremendous number of moving parts recently: the app itself has changed significantly; the development toolchain was just updated; and both the local and remote equipment have been "modified" to ...