It’s the little things that please me. PayPal have (recently?) added a “go to” dropdown list to their login form:
For sites that offer a range of services or post-login destinations, this seems like a delightful no-brainer. It may not save the user any clicks when used for the first time, but will everytime thereafter.
Birthday breakfast for Jane
Includes:
Yesterday, as part of an OU course I’m doing, I conducted a few quick usability sessions on a UI prototype for a bug tracking application. I held four sessions with four developer colleagues, each one more enlightening than the last.
It was fun. The prototype was build in Axure RP and the sessions were recorded using Morae recorder. I can’t wait to sit down and sift through them for insights like a California gold rusher scouring for precious nuggets of usability wisdom.
But it also left me a bit empty. If only I had the time and resources to test more iterations of my design! To get a more diverse user pool: a few project managers, a few QA testers. To see if this or that bit of copy, this or that colour is more effective. How perfect the resulting UI would be. Dropout rates would fall, task completion times reduced by precious milliseconds.
What IF I had nearly unlimited time and resources to collect and analyze this precious feedback? Well, I’d be Google. And with that data I’d be slowly driving my talented designers insane.
The key thing in Douglas’ post about his reasons for leaving Google is this: obsession with data-driven design can ultimately stagnate an organization’s creativity and keep it from taking creative risks. So far this certainly doesn’t seem to be the case but in the meantime Google is down one brilliant chap.
I love little glimpses into the evolution of interfaces - and here is a great one showing how the Photoshop toolbar changed over time.
Interesting to see how quickly the lasso tool ceased to be the first one to be featured. Wonder what sort of usability testing Adobe conducted after buying PS from Thomas Knoll?
Picture found via Lysergrid
It was Mark’s last day at Madgex on Friday and since no proper sendoff seems complete without a cake, I baked.
The recipe for the chocolate orange mousse cake came from a rather unlikely source: a big unwieldyMary Berry cookbook I won a couple years ago at a Brighton Geek Christmas dinner. The hefty book has proven unexpectedly full of good tips and recipes. The cake itself is one of those seemingly sophisticated but actually effortless numbers: a quick, delicate sponge, sliced in two and sandwiched with a rich mousse. Throw a bit of ganache on top and voila!
I couldn’t find an online version of the recipe but this one approximates it pretty well. It went down a treat and is definitely a keeper.
Following Jon Tan’s excellent talk at Brighton’s Skillswap, I picked up and re-read my copy of fantastic 1980’s book - “The Mac is Not a Typewriter” by Robin Williams (no, not that Robin Williams).
What a lovely little tome, quite simple in its premise:
Among its many useful tips, the book points out that professionally set type is very rarely underlined - italics and bolds are much more highly favoured for emphasis. In the rare cases where underline is used, it is generally lowered gracefully below the glyphs.
When it comes to underlining links, our browsers are very much like typewriters. They wedge the underline right up to the font’s baseline, slicing off decenders. How old fashioned! Yet this oldest of web design patterns - underlined links - still has its place.
Anyway, bottom line is: traditionally underlined text is hideous. Let’s use bottom borders! They look fabulous - especially on Jon’s site. Just remember to take the box model into account when setting line heights and margin.
Alex and the Web is getting a facelift! So lovely to have a fresh new blog.
