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 loath it in equal measure. Consider the simple act of sharing a piece of content. A fairly common…
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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 chuckling at the mental image of all the lightbulbs in my house shutting down when I leave the house leaving …
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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, brutalised and discriminated against other races. The African National Congress (ANC) was formed in 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 thought was the active state. Although, of course, I could have been wrong. I don't know of any…
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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 click. People are used to large target areas and are quite accustomed to assuming that an image…
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Hanlon's Razor states, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." It would be nice to think that all mistakes and errors we encounter are just the result of bone-headedness. Sadly, that's not the case. Quite often malicious people deliberately try to trick you into taking actions you would normally have ignored. In usability, we call this a "Dark Pattern". A Dark Pattern is a type of user interface that appears to have been carefully crafted to trick users …
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We're all changing our passwords in the light of Heartbleed, right? Good! If you are a developer or designer, I want to explain to you exactly how not to create a password dialogue box for your users. We're all used to seeing this: Input password: Change Password This is incorrect! Why? Because it leads to this? Input password: Change Password ERROR! Your password must be longer than 7 characters! Ok! Ok! I'll enter in a longer password. Input password: Change Password ERROR! …
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What does the design of cables tell us about the men who invented them? Computer designers often strictly gender the components they create. The most obvious example is the motherboard - the central hub of the computer from which all electronic life descends. As well as circuit boards (often called daughter-boards) - cables are also subject to strict gender rules. The convention is that the part with the most obvious protrusion is assigned as "male" - it then slots tightly into the "female"…
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I'm really late to the party on this one - so this blog post is mostly an aide-mémoire. The web is built on three fundamental components: HTML - the structure of the page. CSS - how the page is styled. JavaScript - the interactivity. Typically, the website owner sets up the CSS to say links are blue, headlines are big, images have borders etc. etc. Users, however, can over-ride these styles using their own CSS. For example, a person with poor vision may decided to pump up all …
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In app design, we often talk about designing for the user in context. For example, a taxi app can't rely on a perfect GPS signal in a crowded city, a user in the countryside may not have brilliant bandwidth, battery life is not infinite so we should limit certain features when power levels are low. The common theme in those examples is that we are designing for the phone's context, not the user's context. We rarely say "let's introduce a left-handed option" or "do we need a night reading…
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It rather sounds like the title of a Doctor Who story from the late 1970s, doesn't it? But it's a term that I think we're going to be hearing a lot of in the future. Jake Levine recently wrote an excellent post on apps which don't require any interaction. It's not quite as crazy as it sounds - the interfaceless application - but refers to a class of program where the only interaction is in the act of being notified. The examples given are fairly obvious in retrospect - an app whose only…
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Update 2013-07-13 I've just received this email from Nate Tyler at Google. Hope you're enjoying the weekend. I work on the Google Maps team and just saw your post on Google Maps navigation. Thank you very much for the concern. Wanted to be sure you and your readers are aware that we have pushed an update to the latest release of Maps for Mobile to fix this issue. If there's any chance to update your story with this information we would very much appreciate that. And if you have any questions…
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