One of the most influential books I have ever read is Donald Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things“.
In the book, Norman rails against the usability flaws which seek to undermine our comfort and sanity. Everything from lightswitches which never seem to have a consistent state, to to alarm clocks with impossible [...]
Google has rightly received praise for its reworked “Contacts” functionality. But there is still a rather glaring error.
One of the things I love to do is add images to my contacts. It gives me a visual cue when I’m scrolling through looking for a person, it prompts my memory when I see the [...]
I want to tell you a story about really appalling industrial design. This isn’t about a nuclear reactor melting down due to covered switches, or even lethal doses of radiation – but of a much more sinister threat….
Pair and Go’s battery pack for the Wii Fit!
Take a look at their promotional [...]
The Twitter Engineering Team have a set of text processing classes which are meant to simplify and standardise the recognition of URLs, screen names, and hashtags. Dabr makes use of them to keep in conformance with Twitter’s style.
One of the advantages of the text processing is that it will recognise that www.example.com is [...]
This morning, when I logged on to Twitter, I saw a user who I didn’t recognise tweeting away in my timeline.
I wracked my brains thinking about how they could have gotten in there before I realised it was a long-dormant friend who had changed their name and avatar.
But, in thinking about how a [...]
This is one of the longest and geekiest posts I’ve done. It’s a work in progress. All comments and abuse welcome.
#hashtag – As long has there has been a way to search Tweets* people have been adding information to make the easy to find. The #hashtag syntax has become the standard for attaching a [...]
What is “Implicit Knowledge”? Essentially it’s stuff that everyone knows, but no one has written down. Usually it’s something that people have worked out through their own experiences.
This sort of knowledge is common in life – but is fatal in computing and design. Take the following tweet I received.
The complaint was that #tfm&a [...]
There are many “rules” when it comes to User Interface / User Experience design. One that I try to stick to is “Don’t let users do things they can’t do.”
It’s one of my gripes with Linux. If you’re editing a configuration file, you are relying on yourself to sanity check your input – often [...]
Twitter have announced that all third party site will have to use OAuth. You will no longer be able to just type in your username and password to get access to Twitter via your favourite web client.
Usually, I would be a big fan of this move – especially if it forces password [...]
I’m a big fan of OAuth – despite some claims to the contrary. It’s an excellent way of teaching people not to stick their username and password into any old site which asks for it. Which is why I’m so incredibly disappointed in Twitter’s implementation of mobile OAuth.
For a service which started out [...]
Facebook has a funny idea of society. From telling you to reconnect with dead friends, to offering your partner up as a “single” in your area – Facebook has a habit of getting things wrong.
My partner and I, like many married couples, live together. We speak over breakfast, commute together and send [...]
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