How to collect customer feedback?
What's the best way to close the loop and have a desktop app "call home" with customer feedback? Right now our code will login to our SMTP server and send me some email. ...
user-experience
What free software can I use to create UI mockups?
What are good Open Source / Free software packages that let you design GUIs quickly, like "on a napkin" style, but also give a bit of polish that you could throw into a slide deck? Preference would be to use some clipart/objects ala Visio, but not required. NOT: Visio PowerPoint KeyNote OmniGraffe Balsamiq (althought it's worth the m...
Password generation, best practice
I need to generate some passwords, I want to avoid characters that can be confused for each other. Is there a definitive list of characters I should avoid? my current list is il10o8B3Evu![]{} Are there any other pairs of characters that are easy to confuse? for special characters I was going to limit myself to those under the number ke...
Native Tongue as Default Language For an Application
When downloading both Firefox and Chrome, I've noticed that the default version I got was in my native tongue of Hebrew. I personally don't like my applications in Hebrew, since I'm used to the English UI conventions embedded in me since long ago by: The lack of choice: Most programs don't offer interfaces in multiple languages and whe...
Good books on "designing for improving the User Experience"
I'm trying to learn some programming designing guidelines on User Experience in both web and desktop applications. I've read some online resources like ux_matters. I'd like to get some books on the subject but I can't find the one that fits me best. Any suggestion is highly appreciated! ...
Experience with SQLExpress for a multi-user commercial application?
I have inherited a VB6/Access application that we have developed and sold for many years. We're going to SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and .Net. The application can be multi-user. Currently the setup is simple for the customer -- Navigate to the folder to create the database on first launch; second user browses to the same file. ...
Forced Alpha-Numeric User IDs
I am a programmer at a financial institute. I have recently been told to enforce that all new user id's to have at least one alpha and one numeric. I immediately thought that this was a horrible idea and I would rather not implement it, as I believe this is an anti-feature and of poor user experience. The problem is that I don't have ...
Quick and Dirty Usability testing tips?
What are your best usability testing tips? I need quick & cheap. ...
Resources to create applications with a great user experience?
I am making the distinction between User Experience and pure User Interface (UI) design here, even though there is usually a tie-in. You can have great user interaction even with a ‘boring’ grey interface, (note that it is not a requirement!). My bookshelf contains the following: The Inmates are running the Asylum Don’t Make Me Think ...
Where do you get your application sounds from?
Specifically for prompts, message boxes etc. Thanks ...
UI Design / Workflow: Changing same property on multiple objects
I am looking for a general UI design / work-flow for changing the same property across multiple objects. Suppose I have an object class called Person. The Person class has a property called City. I want to select 5 Person objects and change the City property on all 5 to "New York" in one action in the UI. This is not difficult to ...
window.resizeTo affects subsequent Firefox windows
I have a webapp which resizes its window to exactly fit its contents: window.resizeTo(200,300) People do like having the page fit its window in this way. However with Firefox the next browser window the user opens comes up at the same size, which is ridiculously small. Is there a way to tell Firefox to resize the current window, but ...
How to encourage a user to fill in long application forms?
What I can think of is pre-populating certain form input elements based on the user's geographical information. What are other ways can you think of to speed up user input on long application forms? Or at least keep them focus on completing the application form? ...
Most Astonishing Violation of the Principle of Least Astonishment
The Principle of Least Astonishment suggests that a system should operate as a user would expect it to, as much as possible. In other words, it should never "astonish" the user with unexpected behavior. In your experience as the "astonishee," what types of systems are the worst offenders, and if you were the project manager, how would ...
What are great _specific_ usability guidelines?
Usability is extremely important, and yet there are so many products that violate a lot of rules. There are several questions on StackOverflow that are about usability (see: link1, link2, link3), however what I feel is missing still is a comprehensive list of usability "tactics": concrete examples of what (not) to do for a web applicatio...
An alternative to alert/confirm/error dialogs?
We all know that alerts are bad. If you didn't know it read this Alerts are used to communicate with the user. So if we don't use them what is a good alternative? I'd like to get a nice list of good alternatives to choose from when implementing something that requires user communications. I'll give one myself as an example and for ev...
General tips and techniques for minimizing the size of Flex applications.
I really like the Flex framework, however I routinely deal with SWF files that are ~ 500KB. I don't know at what point a file considered to be "too big" to be served on the internet, but I would assume that a 500KB download just to use a web application would certainly annoy some users. Are there any tips or techniques on reducing the...
J2EE Error Handling - Application and User
Hi All, I have a question regarding handling errors in a J2EE application. Our current application is in use by many many users and as a result we get a lot of support tickets. Most of these tickets are user-related but 5-10% are system related exceptions, unhandled errors, etc. We have the basic exception handling checks in the code (...
Web page runtime errors
As I use the web, I regularly get runtime errors (usually javascript) being reported via popups. This can make for a really unsatisfying user experience on many otherwise excellent websites and also makes me wonder what functionality I am not getting access to. Why is this such a common issue? Is this down to a lack of testing or is it ...
Rich interaction in Java/JSP web app
I'm writing a website in JSP using Struts and Hibernate. I'm looking for a way to implement a rich UI where you can have more than just buttons. For examples, drag and drops, drop down lists that updates itself in real time as you type more letters out etc. Is there a way to use something like Swing with Struts and Hibernate? Or are ther...