Entries Tagged 'usability' ↓

Apple Insider has published a detailed, enlightening and simply beautiful history of the Mac OS System Preferences panel, Road to Mac OS X Leopard: System Preferences.

The brief mention and screengrab of the NeXTSTEP Display Preferences panel almost made me reach for a Linux workstation to run WindowMaker on. Almost.

(via SwissMiss)

Lately I’ve been noticing that a big percentage of entry titles in the RSS feeds I read contain a numeral. Often these titles are of the form: “N ways of doing X” or “M best Ys.

This trend seems particularly pronounced in the del.icio.us/popular feed. As I write this, the top two popular bookmarks are Top 17 Search Innovations Outside Of Google and Top 57 Wikis By Rank.

Today I noticed Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers, one of Jakob Nielsen’s last columns. The summary of the article goes:

It’s better to use “23″ than “twenty-three” to catch users’ eyes when they scan Web pages for facts, according to eyetracking data.

Apparently writing numbers as numerals, instead of spelling them out, improves scannability of the text. Which is, of course, the exact opposite of what our language teachers taught us.

And not only numerals make your facts easier to extract from the text, Nielsen claims that numerals can also increase your credibility:

Even when users aren’t scanning for data, having your facts stand out visually by presenting them as numerals is an easy way to enhance credibility by making your page seem more useful.

This might explain the numbers-in-titles phenomenon: the “10″ in the 10 R’s to Apply if you Want to Succeed makes the title/article so credible that 668 people found fit to bookmark it. Scary stuff.

O’Reilly blogs about a hilarious Norwegian medieval helpdesk video. The video is worth a watch; it is really good. What makes it so good is that they’ve captured really well the insecurities and recurring questions that novice users of any technology have (”will this lose my text/data/work?”, “if i close it/shut it down, will i be able to get back to my data?”, etc).

I just finished reading a most excellent book: Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning… Was the Command Line.

The title might seem to indicate that this is a very nerdy book, directed at very geeky people that are interested in the history of computer interfaces. But it is no such thing. It is, in fact, a highly entertaining and thought-provoking essay about the dangerous tendency that the so-called modern western culture has to over-simplify things.

Semi-random quote here:

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself - and more than just graphical. Let’s call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces and embracing graphical or sensorial ones - a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney?

Of course, in this book Stephenson talks also about the history of OSes so far (well, that far, because the book was written in 1999, so according to this book Apple is still on the brink of bankruptcy), the fickle nature of users and their irrational behaviour, and why selling OSes is a bad business idea. But that is not what really caught my attention.

What interested me most were the bits about how we (i.e. citizens of the ‘civilized western world’) are increasingly giving up our ability to make choices and judgements in favor of easier-to-digest, simplified versions of life, the universe and everything. It almost made me feel guilty not only for owning an Apple machine, but also for actually *using* the sexy OS it came with. Luckily, in my old age I am becoming less and less dogmatic about OSes, life, the universe and everything, and even editors (!), so I am now using whatever system suits best my current mood and needs (in that order).

But I am babbling. I just meant to say that it is a cool book, and you should read it if (a) you are interested in computers, or (b) you are interested in modern culture, or (c) you enjoy easy-flowing, witty writing. (NOTE: the ORs in the previous sentence are inclusive ORs, not XORs.)

Via Alt1040 I see that Jakob Nielsen has published his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 . Here is a summary:

1. Legibility problems: small fonts, low contrast.
2. Non-standard links: not underlined links, no difference between visited and not visited links, JavaScript, links opening in new windows.
3. Flash.
4. Content that’s not written for the Web: not short and ’scannable’ enough.
5. Bad search.
6. Browser incompatibility.
7. Cumbersome forms.
8. No contact information.
9. Frozen layouts with fixed page widths.
10. Inadequate photo enlargement.

Let’s see how does this blog do against this list.

1. The fonts look big enough to me, but they could be perhaps a bit bigger. The contrast is ok.
2. My links are not underlined, and I don’t differentiate between visited and not visited links.
3. There is no Flash here.
4. Hopefully the posts are short and readable enough. I am constantly working on this.
5. The Search box is the one that comes with Wordpress seems to work ok. No one is using it, though, according to my logs.
6. I tested this site with IE and Firefox. Hopefully it looks ok in Safari and other browsers as well.
7. No forms to fill here.
8. My e-mail and some info about me can be found in the About me page.
9. All the column widths are fixed.
10. There are no photo enlargement options.

It seems that I should work a bit on the CSS and make the links more usable, and perhaps enlarge the font. Changing the layout to liquid will be more complicated, because of the large header image. Perhaps I should skip the header image altogether.