Back when I used to help people design mobile phone apps, I would talk about the platonic ideal of an app. It's quite simple and effective. You press the button in the middle of your screen - and it makes everything better! You push that button and a taxi arrives, or a pizza is delivered, or your photos are backed up, or you fall in love, or you learn a language. Life is rarely that simple - and apps are rarely that smart. But let's look at what comes next. Anticipatory User Interfaces …
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Twenty One. I have 21 accounts which use Two-Factor Authentication. I use the Authy app to manage them all, but it is still a pain to scroll through and find the exact 2FA token I need. Encouraged by my friend Tom Morris's blog post, I picked up a YubiKey NEO for £50. It implements the FIDO U2F standard. Sadly, the YubiKey is substandard and frustrating to use. Here's what I found. First impressions count for a lot - and it is pretty disappointing. What you see in my fingers is literally …
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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 the eminently sensible Year-Month-Day-Hours-Minutes-Seconds format - the standard was finalised in…
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I don't get Google. I really don't. Some of my smartest friends work there - and yet, as an organisation, Google continually demonstrates an imbecilic attitude to quality. I've already shared some of my thoughts on Android 5.0 Lollipop - it's slow, buggy, and shows that Google either doesn't bother with testing, or simply doesn't care about quality. Let's take a look at a few examples - all taken from 5.0.2 (the latest release at time of writing) on the Nexus 7. Widgets The "Power control" …
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Having recently moved house, I have become very aware of which companies have modern back end systems. The most top-notch ones let me log on to their website, fill in a form, and all the address changes are made. A few required me to ring up and speak to a human being, which was a little annoying, but not the end of the world. Only one company insisted that I write them a letter. Co-Op Business Banking. Despite having a moderately competent website, they couldn't process a change of…
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For the last few months, I've been curating a Tumblr of a very specific annoyance. I'll let Aral Balkan take credit for inspiring me. Any modal message—full-screen or alert—that interrupts user flow to ask them to download your app suffers from #doorslam #ux antipattern. @aral First, a quick definition: In software engineering, an anti-pattern (or antipattern) is a pattern used in social or business operations or software engineering that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or co…
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I've been a big fan of Ovo Energy since switching to them last year. They email me a PDF statement, pay me 3% interest on any overpayments, and have their call centre waiting times displayed prominently on their homepage. So, when they announced their new app, I was expecting something a little bit special. And that's exactly what I've got. An automatic torch to help you when you're rooting around in dark cupboards trying to read your meter. Brilliant. So, not only does the app fulfil its …
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I'm not the biggest fan of Microsoft. Both my original Xboxes now run Linux, I've converted my laptop and computers to Ubuntu, and I generally laugh in the face of Microsoft's increasingly desperate attempts to stay relevant. So it was with great mirth that I went along to a BizSpark event a few weeks ago. Microsoft were going to be showing off their latest "innovation" - Windows Phone 7. I went along expecting to hate it and, instead, found myself curiously drawn to it. Take a look at the …
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I am greatly enjoying playing Zynga's Mafia Wars on the Cadbury's iPhone. There are two fairly interesting UI flaws which I'd like to point out... The first is the screen which allows you to alter your stats - this is what it looks like. However, this is what most people will see. Can you spot the subtle but important distinction? Proximity implies relation. The word "Energy" is nearer to the number "102" than health. Therefore, one would assume that they are related. In this case they …
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