The Ecological and Economical Traffic Light Concept [relogik.com] by Damjan Stankovic
Comments [0]
In my casual scavenging of trademark applications at the USPTO, a new trademark filed this week has revealed an interesting new project from Microsoft that aims to help people familiarize themselves with the Ribbon user interface with a game inspired by the “Hero” franchise. No, I’m not kidding.
Comments [0]
A roach motel is a design antipattern that makes it easy for users to "get in" (sign up & divulge their details) but hard for them to "get out" (e.g. pause, turn off or delete their account).
Ad.ly, the twitter-based ad network that injects ads into your twitter stream, does just that. If ad.ly does provide a way of pausing, turning off or deleting your account, they don't make it clear - as shown in the screencast below. The only way I could work it out was to set my weekly price to $0, or to revoke access from my twitter account connections page.
Comments [0]
Comments [0]
You can't just design individual features; they have to fit together into a coherent whole — a whole that must be designed as well. Bottom-up user interface design equals a confused total user experience (the Linux syndrome).
Comments [0]
Interface consistency is one of those things that, if done correctly, should go unnoticed. [...] To ensure harmony I’ll arrange my elements on a single canvas and show the different levels of interaction. By doing this I can easily spot inconstancies. This also helps build a style guide for future elements and interaction. This is not groundbreaking by any means. Just thought I’d share and help promote the practice. - Nathan Borror
Comments [0]
In a recent case study, Usabilla compared the sign up on the homepages of 10 different web services. Approx 80 users were tested on each site (graph below). Interestingly, the users found the sign up button on the Twitter homepage in 1.8 seconds, while some sites faired some far worse, such as Paypal, weighing in at 6 seconds. The rule seems to be "The smaller the button and the more competing elements you have on the page, the slower users will be at locating it." However, it's important to remember that home-pages typically have to cater for multiple purposes - not just new user registration.
Twitter - best performer (1.8 seconds)
PayPal - worst performer (6 seconds)
Note that the heatmaps are based on user clicks and generated using Usabilla. They are NOT eyetracking heatmaps.
Comments [2]
Comments [0]
This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.
Comments [0]
In this recent article on Ars Technica, Jason Holtman of Valve (the games development company known for the highly successful Half-Life, Counter-Strike and Left 4 Dead) heavily advocates a customer-centred design process:
"Steam [Valve's app store for games] is allowing developers to get a lot closer (to customers) and iterate more quickly,"
"We've definitely learned a fair amount about people being connected,"
"Part of what we've learned about that is you have to keep listening to your customers and you have to keep listening to developers, because we're in both businesses: making games for customers and making services for developers."
"It really pays to listen."
"Customers will tell us what they like," he explained. "And they're actually usually far better predictors of success than we ever could be."
Comments [0]
90poe.com is a User Experience Link Blog, curated by Harry Brignull.
90poe.com is the baby brother of 90percentofeverything.com.
