I love the London Transport Museum shop, especially the classic posters. I love how they provide a preview pane with an everyday object so you can imagine how the poster might look in your home. However, I don’t love this ridiculous default size when you first arrive on the page – makes me think I’m […]
Continue reading →This is a web version of the common problem you see in subtitled films – white text on a white background is going to be very hard to read (see Gaîté lyrique). I always prefer automatically overlaid text to have a dark mask behind it to guarantee sufficient contrast. The consumerist website tries to avoid […]
Continue reading →A quick reminder of severity ratings – these ones are adapted from ‘Usability severity codes’ in Usability & Technical Documentation, Xerox Corporation, July 1995. One point to remember – if you are developing applications for internal use in an organisation, you can often downgrade the severity of issues as there is no competition if users […]
Continue reading →It’s easy to spot UI design bloopers in Hollywood films, like big red beeping “ACCESS DENIED” messages or cheesy 3D database fly-throughs. Well, the other day I was watching the film Friends with Benefits when a scene came on that had me throwing imaginary bricks at the screen – not because I saw some silly […]
Continue reading →“I’ll have it cold” – a video testament to the importance of user testing and usability.
Continue reading →I saw this nice use of Flash while taking part in the BBC’s Big Risk Test. This question asks you to place various everyday activities in order of risk. The designers save you time here by automatically inserting the items in a tidy way while indicating exactly where you originally placed them (a line is […]
Continue reading →I recently carried out some remote user testing using my firm’s video conferencing facilities. Usually when I do remote testing, I phone the test participant and proxy on to their screen to see what they are doing. That’s easy to do, but of course you can’t see their facial expressions. This time we’d thought we’d […]
Continue reading →Now, I’m quite sceptical when it come to Apple computers. Fans of Apple usually claim that they are easier to use than Windows PCs, and some people I know who’ve never even used one also repeat these same received truths (Kudos to the Apple marketing department!). However, I’m not aware of any serious peer-reviewed research […]
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