Theoretically, the end user should never see internal errors. But in practice, theory and practice differ. So the question is what to show the end user. Now, for the totally non-technical user, you want to show as little as possible ("click here to submit a bug report" kind of things), but for more advanced users, they will want to know ...
There are many usability evaluation techniques that have been developed over the history of software development. But it seems to me that they are rarely used in practice. Why aren't usability evaluation tools and methods actually used much? Or are they used more than I've been led to believe? ...
I've read somewhere (I forget the source, sorry - I think the MS Office developer's blog?), that when you do a survey of users asking them about what features they would like to see in your software/website, they will more often than not say that they want every little thing, whereas collected metrics show that in the end, most people do...
This question was asked by Ed Burns in his book 'Riding the Crest'. I remember that almost all of the rock star programmers found helpful if one had new and kool gadget. Programmer stays in touch with the latest design, hardware and software implementation which may affect also his work. What is your opinion on this question? ...
I've got a typical impedance mismatch where the data is stored in a normalized fashion: Client | Year | Value -------------------------- Foo 2007 9000000 Foo 2008 10000000 Bar 2008 20000000 Foo 2009 12000000 Bar 2009 15000000 But the users consume, visualize and comprehend it in a denormalized fash...
Adobe AIR has enabled us push the boundary for creating Rich Internet Applications(RIA) outside the browser fence. Some companies have differentiated such applications as Rich Desktop Application (RDA). We have usability guidelines for Web, Desktop and RIA applications separately. But since, Adobe AIR has enabled us to create desktop ap...
Does anyone have experience with implementing OpenID on a non technical website? If you do, how were your non tech users reacting to the concept of OpenID and creation of the account on a different website? I really like the idea of a single sign-on, but I am afraid that non-tech people who are used to create an account on every websit...
In the example below, can anyone tell me how to make "slow response when clicked" respond more quickly without modifying appendContent()? I'm wondering if there's a way to place cheap operations before more expensive ones, and make sure the cheap ones actually get carried out quickly. <div id="draw">slow response when clicked</div> <di...
Like probably a lot of software developers, I almost never see real users using my software. It is, of course, quite difficult to get good user feedback in this situation. Even if some users agree to give me some piece of information about the way they use the software, there's a huge difference between how they really use it and how th...
As a C# programmer I want to increase the java knowledge and the only barrier is getting grip with the java IDEs like Eclipse. What can I do or use to get Visual-Studio-like experience from these IDEs. EDIT: I don't want visual studio drag and drop support specifically but I need the Resharper plugin functionalities and responsive inte...
I have a requirement to be able to accept different forms of payment within the same order - ie not just the usual credit card or paypal for the whole thing, but perhaps paypal for one item, cheque for another. I know this sounds quite crazy, but there is a good business reason for the requirement so I can't just push back. The best wa...
Whenever I write mouse handling code, the onmousedown/onmouseup/onmousemove model always seemed to force me to produce unnecessarily complex code that would still end up causing all sorts of UI bugs. The main problem which I see even in major pieces of software these days is the "ghost mouse" event where you drag to outside the window ...
Can anyone recommend some good online resources that show samples of what would be considered good Winforms "design" in terms of both User Experience and overall aesthetics. I'm looking for something that includes screenshots so as to inspire me..... not just a bullet list of best practices. Thanks! ...
I was watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiqgmAYrd3c and was thinking it might be kind of fun to create some NSView/UIView-system compatible widgets that had some of the interactions found in the video. Some of them involve some fluid 3-D animation. Has anyone tried using OpenGL or maybe Quartz Composer to create widgets similar to ...
We have a long for which has 3 sections: requester, shipping and billing each section screen or more long so the form is 3+ screens long. From usability perspective what is the best way to display messages on the form. Grouped list of error messages at the top of the form. Grouped messages for each section at the top of the section ...
How can I make that a site automagically show a nice "Currently Offline" page when the server is down (I mean, the full server is down and the request can't reach IIS) Changing the DNS manually is not an option. Edit: I'm looking to some kind of DNS trick to redirect to other server in case the main server is down. I can make permanent...
Facebook applications have access to a service they call Proxied Mail. It's basically an email address unique to the user/app pair and forwards to the users registered email address as long as they continue to grant the app permission. So I can use this and prompt for permission, or I can just ask the user for their real email address s...
From a User Experience point-of-view, what is the best way for an application to address a user, e.g. a link to perform a task: Edit Your Profile Edit My Profile Edit Profile I usually avoid the third since it is often not clear e.g. which profile am I going to edit, MY profile or the default profile, etc. Usually I find my applicat...
Designing a web application, how do you design the main page? By this I mean the page that is displayed to a user after entering the base url, like http://www.foo.com. It would probably depend on a website, but... stackoverflow welcomes us with list of questions, no silly what is stackoverflow landing page, last.fm prestens a kind of ...
A long time ago I ran into a website (I unfortunately lost the address, it was some kind of newspaper site) that allowed you to make use of everything as if you were a registered user. You could rate, favorite and comment articles, and when you did it would display a discreet, embedded message saying you had to register to the website fo...