Another in my occasional series on the usability of toilets! It's hard wandering around seeing the mistakes which are made by designers. Perhaps it's poor keming on fonts, or a hotel room light switch which makes no sense, or - in my case - bogs. Lots of toilets incorporate a "dual flush." Press one button to unleash a deluge sufficient to sink all but the hardiest of bowel-movements, press a…
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I'm incredibly disappointed with "Doctor" Emmett Brown. His forays into time-travel could have extremely profound consequences for the space/time continuum. Worse than that, his time machine has a crap user interface. In this clip from "Back To The Future" we get a brief glimpse at the controls for setting the destination date: Ok, we can forgive Brown for not sticking to ISO-8601 - that is…
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As I get older, I begin to lose neuroplaciticy. I get angry and confused when I don't understand things. I get frustrated when I have to change my behaviour. It happens to all of us, to some extent, and it's one of the major reasons you should design your apps in a clear and consistent manner. I've been using Android - Google's mobile OS - it since before it was launched. I now love and…
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My good friend Dan Appelquist recent wrote a fascinating blog post on solipsism as a design decision. He has a set of Lifx Internet Controlled Lightbulbs. They're great fun, but have some seriously screwy ideas about how people live. One key design of the app is to allow you to automatically switch off all your lights when you exit your house. That's pretty nifty, right? I am still…
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I'm currently test-driving a BMW's all-electric i3 REX. One of the options the demonstrator model has is a web browser! Yes, for just £95 per year, you can get a slow and painful browsing experience IN YOUR CAR! (Only to be used when fully stopped - or in autonomous drive mode.) Here's a quick run-down of its features. HTML5 A fairly miserable score of 268 out of 555 points on …
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This is a quick review of the ZeleSouris Vertical Mouse and a guide to setting it up on Linux. Four years ago, I got the latest Evoluent Vertical Mouse. It's a great device, but it's starting to show its age a bit. So, time for a new model. I'm doing a lot of travelling, so a wireless mouse is a must. Sadly, the Evoluent Wireless Mouse is £75. As good as their mice are, I wanted something …
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(An adaptation of my earlier blog post on the same topic.) This is a case study focusing on the usability of encryption systems as used by political dissidents in Apartheid era South Africa. Background - South Africa Between 1948 and 1994, the nation of South Africa was ruled by an ethnically white minority. They set in place a system of government – known as Apartheid - which suppressed, b…
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I've nothing against the Swedes. Lovely people. Sweden is the third-largest country in the European Union by area. But I'm not from there. Neither, as far as I am aware, is Facebook. But Twitter seems to think so. When I share a link to Twitter on Facebook, this (sometimes) happens. And sometimes, I get this delightfully mangled Unicode atrocity! So, what's going on? When Facebook wants…
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tl;dr - If a mobile web browser recognises an Emoji, it should display it natively. If not, it should fall back to a supplied web font. Is this possible? When Android and iOS find Emoji in text, rather than display them as black-and-white fonts, they show them off in gorgeous colour. For example, the unicode smilie is ☺. Depending on your system, it will look something like this: From Tim W…
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I'm not a great fan of tablets. I have a phablet for day-to-day use, a TV for media, and a laptop for work. Tablets just don't fulfil any need I have. Which is why my 2012 Nexus 7 has been sat gathering dust since I bought it. Well, time to resurrect the little blighter and upgrade it to the latest and greatest OS that Google have to offer: Android 5.0 AKA Lollipop. Getting and installing the …
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Earlier this year I was playing around with DogeCoin. Try as hard as I might, I just couldn't get their API working. I delved into the settings, to see what was up. Take a look at this setting, is it obvious to you which state is active? I clicked around on it, and the state changed. Had this enabled it or disabled it? By carefully hovering my mouse over the options, I could see what I…
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I was playing one of those stupid "Which X Are You?!?!?!?" quizzes which seem to be the rage these day. I'm weak willed, I know. One of the questions had a particularly interesting UI issue. It's not a particularly subtle problem. The image on the left related to the button on the right, and vice versa. We know, from countless studies, that people don't read websites. They scan and they…
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