An idea is probably a good one if it makes things…
An idea is probably a good one if it makes things simpler.
Time passed.
One of the most useful information in a progress dialog is the estimated time until the process completes. If you can’t provide this information, simply remove the field. Do not replace it by “time passed”. This information is useless. Even worse, users might misinterpret it as estimated time.
Customer Satisfaction
On June, 23th, I ordered my first iPhone. The woman at the hotline was very friendly and – considering the fact that Deutsche Telekom had to pay for the call – very patient. However, after the call ended, it came to my mind that I did not mention that neither my billing address nor my delivery address is the address where the “home zone” should be centered around. I had asked for the home zone conditions but I did not tell her the address and she did not ask. So I called again.
A word about receivers.
Apple’s iPhone 4 has a antenna problem. I’m not a radio expert but when I read about the external antenna design of the iPhone 4, my first thought was that they must have a somehow adaptive antenna. Touching and even moving something close to an antenna changes several factors important for both, sending and reception:
Hello Helvetica!
If you’re a font nerd, you already noticed, if you’re a developer, you have heard it: Apple uses a new system font on iPhone 4. All older iPhones (even when updated to iOS 4!) and the iPad use “Helvetica” as system font but on iPhone 4 you get “.HelveticaNeueUI”. Since both fonts are variants of Helvetica, they differ in details only. However, these details can be of harm.
Full Throttle
Most video players on the web have a volume slider. I do understand that you sometimes want to mute the playback. Do you really need to adjust the volume of a video by dragging the slider on a video? There is a system wide volume control. Why not use this?
The reports of my death are greatly…
The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated
Next!
I’m reading blogs. Lots of blogs. Every now and then I search for new blogs. To see wether they are good, I read many of the posts on the blog. Usually, after some posts, the blog is split into pages. The pages are connected by a link. This link is usually called “more posts”, “next page”, or “older entries”. On the subsequent pages, the first two options face me with a problem:
Open in new window.
Quite a long time ago, I stopped clicking on links with the left mouse button. Too often, this resulted in a new browser window. Sure, Firefox has the option to open a new tab instead of a new window but still it is not obvious to me, what a left click on a link does. Will it open a new window/tab or will it change the page?
Plop—Click—Gone
Let’s assume you have to develop a user interface. Clicking on a button in the interface starts a lengthy task. As you know that this task takes some time (e.g. 30s), you decided to run it in the background. To inform the user that there is a task running, you display a small progress bar in the status area of your window. You even thought of a cancel button next to the progress bar that actually works. So far, your decisions were wise.