Posts Tagged ‘usability’
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 …
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 spammer could …
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 …
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 without …
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 …
Twitter has a gaping security hole. Changing your password won’t stop malicious users logging in as you!
I received a rather worrying email from Twitter. Apparently they thought my password had been compromised and needed to be reset.
After checking to see if it was valid, I went and changed my password. Any site which relied on …
One of the things I love about Private Eye is the columns I don’t read. Corners of the magazine dedicated to the gossip of the classical music world, the perils of modern architecture, positively incomprehensible reports about big business buying into football. I care for none of these subjects, but I’m immensely relieved that they …
I know a thing or two about mobile websites. The last 4 years of my life have been spent obsessing over them. I wouldn’t claim that the sites I run are the best in the world – but I’ve picked up a thing or two about how a successful mobile retail channel should work.
Nokia’s Ovi …
I’ve largely stayed out of the Apple sphere of influence. I’m stuck on Windows XP at work and use Ubuntu at home.
The first – and last – Apple product I owned was a blueberry iMac.
I think it may have had an early version of OS X on it. It was fun enough, but I eventually …
