The 4 most common UI mistakes
Design being a reflection of the data function rather than user goal oriented I mentioned this is a previous blog, but my example was perhaps a little too far from home for most people so I will give an example of a Microsoft Excel behaviour that has been generating support calls for a very long time, and I truly do not know why it has not been changed. For as long as I can remember when entering a purely numeric value with leading zeros into Excel the zeros the column type automatically changes to number and the zeros are removed. Now I am assuming that if the column type is number then the values in the column can be stored more efficiently (as integers represented by bits rather than a strong) and that math calculations can be performed more efficiently and accurately. If this is the case then the turning into numbers has a potential data function benefit, but for the end user it is almost always conflicting with their goal. Typing in a phone number or a barcode, whi...