I previously gushed about how fun was better then function. I believe it’s true, but you if you trade functionality for emotional impact, you had damn well better know what you are doing. Here is an example of dong things wrong.
I use a cheap pre-paid cellphone because … well it’s cheap. Unfortunately [...]
I’ve been kicking an idea around in my head recently.
Designers could exploit Banner Blindness by putting instructions inside of “banner adds”. Normally users will completely ignore them. But if they get “stuck” and start searching the screen for help, they’ll find it in the banners. This lets designers put a lot of [...]
From fraudwatchonline.com:
Research initially aimed at helping partially sighted customers use chip and PIN keypads has led to the creation of a device which can protect customers from “shoulder surfing”.
This is the term used for the practice whereby a “criminally motivated” bystander casually observes the PIN when paying for goods or services or getting money from [...]
An interesting new paper Reducing Shoulder-surfing by Using Gaze-based Password Entry
Abstract:
Shoulder-surfing — using direct observation techniques, such as looking over someone’s shoulder, to get passwords, PINs and other sensitive personal information is a problem that has been difficult to overcome. When a user enters information using a keyboard, mouse, touch screen or any traditional input [...]
EDITED TO ADD: I have been told Windows already does this. Oops. This is one of the few places Windows has a better UI then a Mac. For shame, Apple.
Finder lets you copy and paste files, but it does not let you cut them. Presumably, this is to make it hard [...]
For anyone who has ever doubted the power of emotional appeal over technological appeal
“… consider the self-winding Rolex, which sports 1/10th the accuracy of a Timex at 1000 times the price.” — Tog.
Don Norman’s book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things is about just this. It’s definitely worth reading.
People do [...]
Little details matter because they prevent big disasters. This might seem counter-intuative at first; logically it seems like big disasters should have big causes. In reality, they have a series of little causes that add up into a big problem:
Disasters Don’t “Just Happen”
One of the first things I learned in flying was that [...]
From Cabel Maxfield Sasser
Aside for Mac Devs: Yes, I decided to go with a .zip archive for this release, instead of a tried and true .dmg. Here’s why: 1) It “safe opens” exactly the same as a .dmg would, extracting the application and thoughtfully trashing the .zip. 2) If people have “safe open” turned [...]
Accessibility is mostly good design. Good design is generally accessible with minimal extra work, while bad design creates new inaccessibilities. I witnessed a vivid example of this not 30 minutes ago when I saw a blind man struggle to get inside the building where I’m working. If the doors had been designed [...]
To make sure there is only one instance of your application running, you can use the function WeAreAlreadyRunning() from SingletonApplication.zip
WeAreAlreadyRunning() walks the list of running processes, using the Process Manager. Each process’s bundle identifier (if it exists) is compared to the bundle identifier of the calling process’s main bundle.
If you are writing a [...]
