We’ll see if anything useful comes of this… I wasn’t too happy with the rep’s cluefulness at 2:55, I must admit. 2:50 PM Connecting to Rescue Gateway: control.app51.logmeinrescue.com… 2:50 PM Connected to Rescue Gateway. A support representative will be with you shortly. 2:51 PM Support session established with Kade. 2:51 PM Kade: Hello. 2:51 PM [...]
Tag Archives: UX
A webOS 1.2 Upgrade Experience That Couldn’t Be Much Worse
The following is a copy of what I just posted on the Palm Prē forums: I woke up this morning to find that the webOS 1.2 upgrade had been pushed to my Prē automatically. I was happy, until the reboot finished and I saw: Signed Out You are no longer signed in to your Palm [...]
A World Where People Regularly Discard Knowledge After 9 Years
In his latest entry on Coding Horror, “Windows 7: The Best Vista Service Pack Ever”, Jeff Atwood says: I want the world to get the hell off Windows XP. A world where people regularly use 9 year old operating systems is not a healthy computing ecosystem. I find this terribly, painfully wrong. The unintended consequence [...]
Thoughts on the Palm Prē: Category Catastrophe
Note, Added A Few Days Later: This post does not tell the whole story. This is a wail of anguish, and is not intended to be balanced. For a more balanced look at the Palm Prē, read my later, and broader, evaluation of it as well as this post. There are a lot of good [...]
Cruel Rollover Trickery
I found an interesting UI problem today, on a site that I will be kind enough not to actually link to. Instead, I’ll just reproduce the general concept and problem here: alpha beta gamma delta The links all just link straight to the nav bar itself, so if you scroll your browser view so that [...]
Don’t Waste My Time With Email Confirmation Fields
I just ran into yet another form on a web page that looked like this: First Name Last Name Email Address Confirm Email Address Address Line 1 … and so on These things drive me nuts. Once I’ve typed my email address in the first time, I just type Shift-Home to highlight the entire field, [...]
If I Leave the Tutorial, Can I Get Back In?
While reading c|Net’s preview of the upcoming Palm Prē, I came across: “When you fire up the smartphone for the first time, there’s a brief animated tutorial to familiarize you with the various gestures” the Prē uses. And having a first-time orientation is a pretty common UX decision, especially for products that are trying to [...]
Making a Field Required Doesn’t Make It Truthful
Today’s lesson for people who make fields “required” on their web forms: You can make it “required”, but you can’t force people to tell you the truth. I recently filled out a form for a service that will eventually ship a book to me. I understand why they needed my street address, my credit card [...]
Bad UI Discourages Cops in Queensland
How important can good (or bad) user interface design be? If the system you’re building is the Queensland Police’s record-management system, the interface can apparently be so bad that police would rather let petty criminals go free than try to enter an arrest report on the thing. In one case, the police found data-entry so [...]
A Tale of Two Web Sites
I just finished applying (online) for unemployment, and then followed the EDD‘s link to CalJobs. The difference in understanding of UI/UX principles between the two sites is shocking. The EDD’s “Eapply4UI” site, aside from having a name that looks like it’s trying to fit onto a vanity license plate, is surprisingly good at what it [...]