I am looking for actual studies/analytics type data (real numbers) concerning the use of a standardized or consistent (read: accessible and beautiful) user experience / user interface. Specifically this information will be cited to support standardizing and reworking an existing (hideous) web application, but I'm pretty certain that cu...
There must be many online resources for good user interface design principles. I'd like to see an easily-browsed list, perhaps categorized by desktop vs. on-line (or maybe not; that might be too limiting). Any examples out there? The List (so far) A List Apart Designing Web Interfaces Jakob Nielsen's useit.com Quince Smashing Magazine ...
I am designing a blog and I am trying to decide if I should have a sidebar or if I should just move that content to the header/footer. What is your opinion on this? Do you have any opinion on the header/footer total height? ...
For dialog applications traditional behavior has been to close the application when "Escape" is pressed. However some users complain about this as they often press the key by mistake. What's your approach? 1) Close the application 2) Do nothing 3) Pop an "Are you sure you want to quit?" message (possibly with a "Don't show this again" ...
We are hiring a UX consultant, had a broadstrokes session with the company, liked their work, think the candidates are ok and now want a more concentrated interview with the specific UX consultant that will be embedded into the scrum team. What questions should be asking that could weed out any dead weight candidates. Thanks. ...
So I've got a web app that is for all intents and purposes a photo viewer. When a thumbnail is clicked, the app requests the image asset, injects it into the DOM as an IMG tag and disposes the other (MooTools Asset.image, inject and dispose). If they click on an image that has already been loaded I just inject it again since dis...
I often use applications and electronic devices for which I think: "Why on earth did they engineer that thing as it is? They must have known that it is a pain in the neck to work with". On the other hand I often observed that I created a (G)UI that I was convinced about, that it'd delight my customers and was a breeze to work with. Alth...
I’ve chosen to take this as a question in its own right since it was generating so much debate in the comments of the original post. It’s interesting to see that a lot of people on SO (who are developer's) just don't get localization. Here’s my take on how it should work: In all browsers that I've looked at (and for the .NET developers...
Bear with me because this question doesn't pertain to an algorithm or any block of code. Rather, it deals with designing forms and applications. I'm working on a project where the user is able to save their work (most likely to the HDD but also possibly any other media, including floppy disks). Sure, the popular File > Save option is th...
I'm looking for some good/proven examples of UI designs for a time entry system that allow input in a week view. Are there good design examples that come to mind? ...
I'm working on a Cocoa app targeting Leopard and above, and I'm thinking about adding a crash reporter to it (I'd like to think my app won't crash, but let's get real here). I have some mostly conceptual questions before I really get started. 1) How does this work conceptually, knowing when there's a crash and bringing up a reporter? Do...
I've noticed that many Microsoft applications will name some buttons with "..." at the end. These buttons always seem to open up a new dialog. There are some buttons, however, that don't have "...", but do open up new dialog. For example, in Windows XP, when I open a folder's "Properties" dialog from Windows Explorer, there is an "Adv...
I'm creating a social site for teachers (non-programmers) on which teachers can add events, links, exercises, tips, lesson plans, books, etc. Each of these items I want them to be able to add tags to as we do at StackOverflow. However, because they are non-programming users, I thought that space-separated, nonspace tags and camelCase t...
I have some basic code to determine errors in my MVC application. Currently In the project I have a controller called Error with action methods "HTTPError404", "HTTPError500", and "General". They all accept a string "error." Using or modifying the code I am working on below, what is the best/proper way to pass the data to the Error co...
Any key to become a user experience design and Rich Internet Application design? What should I learn to reach it? ...
Hi, I'd like to use some MIT-licensed xml-parsing code in my iPhone game. This seems to require that I package the MIT license with the application. However, my iPhone app does not include extensive documentation and my demographic will not want legal notices shoved in their faces. My boss is afraid of using this code because our compa...
Today my co-worker noticed that when adding a decimal place to a progress indicator leads to the impression that the program is running faster than without. (i.e. instead of 1,2,3... it shows 1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, ...) I checked it and I was surprised that I got the same impression even though I knew it was faked. That makes me wonder: What...
Since I have never used openID befor I have no idea about it. I want to know when someone want to log into my website using openID do I have to register his information (is there any registration process efen if the user don't fill the information). should I provide an alternative classical user registration beside openID. ...
Can someone please help me to formally define the difference between User Interface and User Experience? I need to come up with a definition so that if ideally two different people were to be assigned to UI and UX on the same project it would be clear which responsibility each of them would have. ...
When the users of this app make changes to the fields a large amount of changes need to happen across other fields. Typically even with optimized scripts the browser will block user input for upwards of 1 second in IE. To stop with from occurring I do this: var i = 100; GetTextInputs().filter('[' + name + ']').each(function() { ...