After experiencing numerous problems with a certain media player, it got me thinking is it really acceptable to prompt the user to launch a debugger or terminate an application without any relevant information in this day and age? ...
When a list becomes very large, presenting it in a UI raises a design issue. Should the user get pages of items or should the user get a list control that pages items implicitly as it is scrolled? In google search, paging of results is explicit. You get a set of results and hit a link to get the next set. On the iPhone the applicatio...
How would the following scenario best be implemented: There is a standardized user interface for an application in version 1.0, e.g. an order form. This application gets customized to fit the needs of different customers. This could be an extra field "desired delivery time" for customer A, the omittance of the field "phone number" for c...
I'm a full time web developer but I have my roots as a desktop programmer and there seams to be a lot of talk about Web Operating System these days. Is it practical yet to incorporate your web applications into a Web OS to make it more user friendly or just do a traditional HTML layout? I found one that looks very interesting which is ...
Hi there It's very common for business applications in .net world to use third party control sets like devxpress, componentOne etc. They give possibility to apply skinning, use controls with rich functionality etc. The problem arises when we want to port such application to other platforms - are there any controls that have their eg. l...
On a web contact form, is the reset button really required? Is it really used by anyone? If I don't put it in a page, is there an usability fail? 10x! ...
I was wondering what the general consensus on error messages was. How detailed should they be? I've worked on projects where there was a different error message for entering a number that was too big, too small, had a decimal, was a string, etc. That was quite nice for the user as they knew exactly where things went wrong, but the error...
Hello Everyone, What is the WinSplit Revolution -like application for Linux (KDE)? Or maybe there is a functionality in KDE I am missing? Thanks and Happy New Year! ...
This is inspired by the question OK-Cancel or Cancel-OK?. I remember reading somewhere about the concept of switching OK-Cancel/Cancel-OK in certain situations to prevent the user from clicking through information popups or dialog boxes without reading their content. As far as I remember, this also included moving the location of the OK...
While the subject could sound like I'm looking to do something shifty, I'm not; I maintain an internal web site used by several hundred phone operators, and would like to add the following functionality: I would like to add a control in the header of all of the web pages that would capture an image of the entire desktop and save the im...
I am crafting an application and cannot decide whether to use the terms Login/out or Logon/off. Is there a more correct option between these two? Should I use something else entirely (like "Sign on/off"). In terms of usability, as long as I am consistent it probably doesn't matter which terms I choose, but I did wonder about the origins...
Can someone suggest a good UI framework for WinForms development? What I'm looking for is something that is fairly mature (=bug-free), renders well and quickly, and does not bloat my program with 10Mb assemblies. ...
I recently participated a project that replaced a mainframe system with a web (asp.net 2.0, VS2005) system. The 3270-terminals are still much used and I respect the IMS/CICS/Cobol application designers for their work. Users like the web application, but one thing they keep ask for is: Functionkeys and shortcuts that navigates directly t...
Can anyone give me a scenario where they think busy cursors are justified? I feel like they're always a bad idea from a user's perspective. Clarification: by busy cursors, I mean when the user can no longer interact with the application, they can only move their hourglass mouse pointer around and whistle a tune. ...
Speed and learnability do not directly fight each other, but it seems easy enough to design such a GUI that lacks either (or both) of them. GUI designers seem to prefer 'easy to learn' most of the time even when 'fast to apply' would be wiser. There's only few UI concepts or programs that are weighted towards maximizing the peak efficie...
Hey, every time i code a gui (in my case with GWT, never touched gui programming before), i notice that my code becomes a big mess, when the applications becomes more complex. It's really frustrating to look over my code and get a headache of all these setters in object constructors and this messy throwing together of these. I am usin...
Hi, I'm the developer of the trash-cli project. The trash-cli project is a opensource implementation of the FreeDesktop.org Trash Specification that provides a command line interface to manage the trashcan. Ideally trash-cli provides these commands: trash (trashes files and directories) trash-empty (empty the trash...
I've built it now how do I create a half decent design? I need some techniques, resources, examples, books etc. for an information intensive web application. P.S. - I just bought Web Design for Developers from Pragmatic Programmers and its not very good! ...
Looking for a general purpose WPF toolset. Currently looking at Telerik and Infragistics. Are there better options out there? Of those two, which is better? ...
When designing a good Web GUI what expectations can we expect from an end user? I've come up with the following, but I wonder if there are any others which can suggest.. If I click on a hyperlink it will take me to another page/part of this page If I tick/untick a checkbox it might alter the page state (enable/disable elements) If I ...