Tesmond's Useful Design

Photo credit: Flickr user FORMALFALLACY via Creative Commons Paul Lewis wrote an article attempting to reduce friction on password fields . He even referenced the wonderful xkcd cartoon on the subject, but I feel concentrating on ways of helping users to see how they can enter a valid password misses the main point of the friction. The friction is primarily caused by the requirements, be they minimum requirements symbols numbers etc. or maximum requirements like no more than 16 characters, or even worse the password must be between 8-12 characters! Being forced to modify a password to add extra features is likely to cause you to forget it, in the same way that preventing a user from certain length passwords or use of specific symbols will also annoy and lead to forgotten passwords. These restrictions add friction to the password entry screen and anything that can be done to remove these restrictions will reduce friction more than attempting to improve the clarity of the restri...

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...

From my experience the number one enemy to good UI and UX is when the interface becomes a reflection of the underlying data rather than the users perceptions and goals. I once had to test a piece of software that was meant to be an emergency application for when server access failed.  It was designed to run standalone and then the data could be uploaded to the server when it was back online so that network outages would have a temporary method to allow work to continue. Now the single biggest problem with this software is that the user interface was developed based on the steps the database required rather than the steps that the user should perform. Uploading the offline data should have been a relatively easy process but instead it was an extremely painful process demonstrating a huge lack of user empath throughout. Stage 1 was a form to define the offline data outage.  Then there was a second form where you imported the data files.  Then you had a third form to...

I recently read an article by Bret Victor titled Magic Ink Information Software and the Graphical Interface .  It further reinforced to me several very important aspects of software design. It is vital to focus on the user's goals when designing UI interactions Failure to empathise with a user leads to significant design flaws Team contribution can lead to a design which is greater than any one designer can achieve A few pages into his article there is a critique on Amazons results design.  There are several salient points that can be taken away from the criticism, however, I feel there are a couple of incorrect design decisions, and perhaps not a coherent focus on the most important point. The main criticism was the inappropriate use of space and not providing the correct information at the correct point in time.  While this is a reasonable point to make, I feel a more advanced criticism would be to look at the user goals of someone viewing that informatio...

Lou Rosenfeld presented a fascinating talk at the London UX 2011 conference  titled Redesign Must Die.  Obviously this is quite a contentious heading for a talk presented to people who make their living from redesign.  He primarily presented the University of Michigan's website and its extremely regular redesign strategy.  Essentially asserting that the redesigns seemed limitless and a waste of money... Now one element that has always generally irked me when design projects for customers is that I have always felt they do not understand the potential for the software.  Actually more precisely it is not the customer's narrow vision, but more the sales/management idea that this should be so rigidly adhered to.  Essentially the customer will ask for exactly what they have already only incrementally improved, the famous quote attributed to Ford sums it up "If I had asked the consumers they would have told me they wanted faster horse...".  So when Lou tal...