It recently hit me how no two of my coworkers save their files in Flex Builder the same way. One uses Save under File, another always uses Save All, yet another hits the save disk icon. And I use the keyboard shortcut or let Flex Builder save everything for me when I run the app. There are so many different ways to save your progress, how odd that no two people seem to do it the same way.
I washed my filthy car yesterday at one of the do-it-yourself car washes. I don't know why, I always feel ripped off at these. Having control over the cleanliness of my car is a bad thing too, since I ALWAYS miss a spot, then I only have myself to blame. This was the interface given.
First things that are wrong with this:
The first time I went to this station, I started with tire cleaner and began spraying the tires. When I got to the third tire, the sprayer sputtered and started spraying green tire cleaner... I now know better and stand there with "tire cleaner" selected for 20-25 seconds until it starts working.
There may be a lot of marketing involved in how this particular station works. Things to slow the customer down slightly enough that most wouldn't notice, but enough to eek out a few more bucks a day. So, things to learn from this to take into the web.
Last week, I found that Robert Hoekman, Jr has a new book coming out, Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concept in Action. I told my manager and he immediately got me a copy. I loved Hoekman's first book, Designing the Obvious, so much, I had my manager get a copy for everyone in the group. Hoekman ranks way up there with in the field of usability experts, with Steve Krug, Alan Cooper, Jakob Nielson.... I've found Hoekman's writing style so easy to read and follow. He remains generic enough that his books won't easily become outdated, but is specific enough that you can immediately apply his points. If you're interested in some usability tips, I'd very much recommend picking up his books.
...are the lamest type of security. I tried logging into my student loan site last night and it asked me some security questions. I didn't know if it was trying to set them or if I messed up my password and was trying to verify me.
Question: What was your first job?
My attempts to remember what I typed 15+ months ago: stockboy ... (do spaces matter?) ... stock boy ... (was I specific?) ... stockboy at norman's market ... stockboy at norman's ... stock boy at normans ... professional replenishment engineer ... (oh wait, I had a paper route...) ... paper boy ... paperboy
I didn't get that far, my account is now locked and I have to call their support number. Another popular security question is "what is your pet's name?". Well it was Fluffy, but Fluffy was run over and now I have Biscuits, but when did I answer this question? I had several pets then, which did I name? Static questions (mother's maiden name, city of birth, father's middle name, etc) are so simple to find out from quick Google searches, they're not really secure.
Site of interest: Mountain, Ltd
I was asked to add a job ad for these folks to the Detroit CFUG site. Before adding the ad, I had to make sure they're really doing what they say they are, so I hit their site. And I left with some comments.
The front page isn't too bad. It has some wasted white space on the top and right. All other pages have a different size navigation than the front page.
Branding isn't strong across the site. All pages have the logo and company name, but the company name is very generic. Tossing a slogan in with the logo would help visitors immediately know what they're looking at when they are dropped into any page of the site from a search engine.
Services page has FAR TOO MUCH UPPER CASE TEXT. UPPER CASE IS HARDER TO READ, LOOKS UNPROFESSIONAL, AND IS MEANT REALLY JUST TO HAVE SMALL BITS STAND OUT. When the whole page is full of upper case text, nothing stands out.
Jobs page requires you click a type, should default to one of the three options.
The block of text at the bottom "equal opportunity" blah blah merges into the rest of the body of the page on several pages. Putting a different color background to this or an hrule would help.
I'm trying to find out who is playing the local Arts, Beats, and Eats festival this Labor Day weekend. But the AB&E site is down. So I Googled for it, hoping someone else would be mirroring the information or that Google would pick up a post on the different bands' websites. I found a post on a local news station website, saying that the B-52s and The Verve Pipe will be playing. Wait... that was a few years ago...? And actually Sponge "headlined", not the B-52s. Sponge was on last, but everyone left after Love Shack was played.
The article doesn't give a date anywhere. At the bottom, it says copyright 2004 and mentions it's the 2004 article, but at a glance you wouldn't know when the article was released and might think it's current information. Be sure that whenever you post information that will become dated, always include a date with it.
From Wikipedia: In user interface design, a modal window (often called modal dialog because the window is almost always used to display a dialog box) is a child window which requires the user to interact with it before they can return to operating the parent application. Modal windows are commonly used in GUI systems to absorb user awareness and to display emergency states.
I have been trying literally all day to get CFEclipse working again. When I open a cfm or cfc, I get an error saying it can't open the file and I get a long Java stack trace. I've uninstalled Flex Builder, put on plain Eclipse, tried different versions, nothing works.
But while installing, I got irritated and so another tip on usability: Modal windows.
Three very bad examples of modal usage. A window should only be made modal ONLY if the user MUST give that window attention before the app can continue doing anything. But certainly, one app should never be able to pull focus from another.
Another fun MS example is the "Updates were made, restarting system in 5 minutes" countdown window. You can either "Restart Now" or "Restart Later". But the second option is really "Remind Me Later" because 5, 10, however many minutes later, that restart countdown pops up over everything and you have to stop it again. The window doesn't tell me the benefits of restarting (the updates will take effect, so what? What are they?). But I do know restarting will disrupt my work for 5-10 minutes so I put up with clicking option two until lunch, or a break, or a meeting, or just click it all day until I shut down my laptop at night.
And Ray Camden is my hero even more now. I accidentally closed this tab twice while writing this entry and both times the content was still here when I came back. About time I start writing entries in Google docs I think.
Imagine you're making an app where someone needs to sign up. Easy enough to imagine, you've probably built a bunch of them. When they sign up, they supply their email, password, and a screen name. By the laws of the system, the screen name and email must be unique and the password must contain letters and numbers. I generally stop about #3, but then I'm also very lazy.
Attempt 1: Simple form, put in your screen name, email, and password (and password confirmation) and submit. If the screen name or email are in use or the password isn't valid, you get an error back saying there's a problem with that field and are asked to go back, fix it, and resubmit.
Attempt 2: Same form, but when you submit, if there is a problem, the form is displayed again with your inputs and errors.
Attempt 3: Invoke JavaScript to do some on-the-spot validation. Disable the submit button until the password is valid and matches the confirmation, the email is a valid email, and the screen name is filled out.
Attempt 4: AJAX time, include a button to check the availability of your screen name and email before hitting submit.
Attempt 5: If the email is in use, give the user a "forgot my password" form. If the screen name is in use, show a list of available screen names that are similar to choose from.
Attempt 6: After hitting the "check screen name availability" button, the screen name is put in a reserve status so someone else can't ninja it while the user fills out the rest of the form.
Attempt 7: Take out the "check availability" buttons and do it onChange or onBlur on the fields.
After reading Robert Hoekman's "Designing the Obvious", I've become very interested in the topic of usability. One of the best ways to learn usability is to examine examples of poor usability. And what better resource for that than Microsoft products?
Here's a common Windows error:
The error message says what the problem is (can't delete file/folder), what's causing it (it's in use), and how to fix it (close stuff and retry). It has the three core things an error message needs, but it's a very generic, completely useless error. "Which program should I close?" is the top question.
How to improve your error messages...
Don't include the word "or".
Don't make the user fix the problem all on their own.
In the past I have found (and lost) links to programs that will show you exactly what processes are locking a file but that's a core job of the OS; file management. Always be sure that the core functionality of your application is working flawlessly before adding on the bells and whistles.
